Genzyme Therapeutics, a pioneer in the development and delivery of transformative therapies for patients affected by rare and debilitating diseases, was facing challenges in accessing and extracting data from multiple sources. The company lacked a comprehensive view of productivity, efficiencies, and revenue, and had inaccurate performance reporting for its business units. Genzyme services customers in both the clinical and the commercial operations areas of the business. In both areas, timely, accurate data helps inform decision-making that leads to increased revenue and better information for patients. In 2009, the company was looking for a reporting solution that would bring data together from across platforms and make it available in a dashboard that would allow users to easily gain insight and make decisions.

Gestamp Automoción, an international group dealing in the development and manufacture of components and metal assemblies for motor vehicles, was facing a challenge with its data management. The company had a large amount of information, a large number of users, and disparate, international information coming from eight different enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) across its production plants. The information wasn’t unified and there was no way to achieve this automatically with the legacy system. Reports were prepared using macros and in presentations or spreadsheets. Gestamp Automoción needed a complete, efficient reporting system. The company was looking for an application to complete its FULLSTEP GS purchasing platform and integrate information from that platform with data from the company’s various ERPs.

The Global Retail Bank was facing a challenge of high cost per question due to the chaotic use of spreadsheets and unmanageable processes. The bank had spent hundreds of millions on legacy reporting, analysis, and modeling, which created too many barriers for decision-maker access to key information. The chairman of the bank had publicly stated that the bank would excel through innovation, and thus, there was a need for a solution that could lower the cost per question and manage the processes more efficiently.

Rewards arvato services, a subsidiary of arvato AG, is a leading supplier worldwide of consultation, sourcing, and logistics for awards and customer loyalty programs. The company serves 30 national and international companies, supplying consumers in 62 countries with around 1,500 different articles. To offer optimum service and operate economically, arvato must continuously evaluate customer, product, and supplier data from some three million data records. Previously, standard reports were prepared within the retail system, with data from two systems and a SQL sales application exported, then imported into table calculation lists, and compiled. However, as the number of customers increased, it became increasingly difficult to compile the information. The old system would run into limits due to the high load from the various analytical requirements.

Atlas Copco Construction Tools, a leading manufacturer of hydraulic, pneumatic, and gasoline-powered breakers and drills, was facing a challenge in extending its product leadership with continuous improvements in product innovation and quality. The company was struggling to consolidate data from a suite of disparate systems and improve the availability, speed, and accuracy of business data. The disparate systems were causing inefficiencies and inaccuracies in data analysis, which was affecting the company's ability to make informed business decisions and improve product quality and delivery performance.

Austin Fire Department (AFD) was facing tough economic times and needed to identify ways to increase efficiency and effectiveness of operations in order to streamline spending and improve services. The department collected high-level annual performance measures, but daily operational data was spread across multiple divisions in different data sources. AFD lacked a useful tool for extracting or integrating it efficiently. The department began the search for a Business Intelligence (BI) solution.

Autodesk, a world leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software, faced the challenge of consolidating over 25 years of customer and product data from multiple sources. The company wanted to remove IT from the process of creating dashboards while still allowing for some control and governance of data. With other BI tools, it took too long for users to get the answers they needed to make informed business decisions. The company needed a solution that could provide speed and intuitive ease of use for a broad roll out to every organization and business process across the company.

Avnet Technology Solutions, a global technology sales and marketing organisation, was struggling with the aggregation of transactional data from their ERP system. They needed greater insight into customer, sales, channel, inventory, supplier and delivery performance data. The IT department was overwhelmed with numerous sales report requests each week, which were time-consuming and resulted in duplication of effort. The company needed a management and sales focus on profitability and accountability of the numbers to operate dynamically.

Bakkavör, a leading provider of fresh prepared foods and produce, was facing challenges with its sales data analysis due to the presence of more than 20 business units in the UK, each having a different Enterprise Resource Planning system and a different process for the analysis of their sales data. This resulted in too many bespoke applications or manual processes and not enough simplicity and consistency. The complexity of the system made it difficult and time-consuming to provide data accurately, leaving little time for actual analysis.

The B. Braun Group, a leading healthcare supplier, was facing issues with reporting and analyzing data due to the slow speed of their SAP warehouse. Not every team member had access to the SAP warehouse, leading to a loss of time for managers who were busy putting together reports in Excel, instead of actually spending time analyzing the data. The building of reports to analyze a combination of both internal and external figures was a problem, resulting in incomplete reports that could not be analyzed properly. Reporting took too much time from both the business managers and the IT department. The reports were slow to access and not in all cases complete as the capabilities to combine external data were missing. This was affecting the competitive position of B.Braun in the Belgian market, since managers were not able to get immediate insight into their customers’ sales figures, the results of the different product ranges and the net profit margins.

Beckett Associates, a large North American distributor of trading cards and related supplies, was struggling with managing its inventory effectively. The company was operating without a reporting or analytical tool, pulling data from multiple sources and creating reporting silos. The reports were compiled in Excel, a static and inflexible tool, which led to an increasing dependence on IT to maintain the reports, slowing down business operations. The company's limited Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities, coupled with the need to be trend-based, resulted in its inability to effectively manage inventory. This often led to overbuying products, resulting in unused inventory sitting in the warehouse for too long, leading to lost revenue.

Berenberg Bank, a Swiss bank specializing in investment advice and asset management, was seeking to improve its customer relations management. The bank wanted to provide its staff with a toolset that would optimize their consultancy services through classic ABC customer analyses and individual reviews of customer data. The bank's management wanted an improved overview of the entire customer situation, including the composition of the customer portfolio, the number of new customers won, and the income produced with various products in different market segments. The bank also wanted each consultant to be able to access the appropriate figures for the profit margin account to monitor yields and losses on the portfolio. The data required for these analyses came from various sources, and the only way to analyze this data was via a laborious, error-prone, and rather protracted journey with Excel spreadsheet software.

Berlin Recycling, a subsidiary of BSR Berliner Stadtreinigungsbetriebe, was facing several challenges in its operations. The parent company's SAP system was not providing the necessary reports for corporate management. The company needed a solution that could automate the preparation of its own analyses and reports. With the vast amount of data that the company was dealing with, it was crucial to have a system that could process and analyze this data efficiently. Furthermore, the company was looking for a way to manage and optimize its processes intelligently.

Bianchi - Cycleurope was in need of a tool that could generate reports integrating the entire group to ensure consistency in data and presentation across groups. The company wanted to provide management with a tool capable of improving the decision-making process. They were also looking to resolve criticalities in certain corporate sectors such as sales, procurement, and warehousing.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, a non-profit organization, was facing challenges in managing its database of children and volunteers involved in the program. The organization's impact on children's lives is directly related to how effectively it pairs 'Littles' and 'Bigs'. Each match is carefully selected based on a number of factors, including age, interests, and geography, among others. However, with the growing number of children and mentors involved in the program, it was essential for the organization to manage its database efficiently and successfully. Furthermore, as a non-profit organization, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America relies heavily on private and government funding from various donors from all over the country. Therefore, it was crucial for the organization to prove to its donors through hard numbers and data that its method of delivering one-to-one mentoring is both effective and achieving statistically-proven outcomes.

Bike Totaal B.V., a two-wheeler specialist group with 165 affiliated stores, faced a challenge in analyzing and reporting key performance indicators (KPIs) from its various stores. With half of the stores managed centrally and the other half decentralized, it was crucial to have a clear overview of the performance of all the stores. The company needed to know how many products each store sold, for which brands, the revenue per square meter, and so on. It was also important to provide entrepreneurs and suppliers with insight into the lead times of products and their results, so they could optimize their business operations. Prior to implementing a Business Intelligence solution, Bike Totaal collected information from various databases and Excel sheets as well as its Point of Sales system. This data was compiled and processed manually in Excel, which was time-consuming and inefficient.

Blekinge County Council, a leading healthcare provider in Sweden, was facing several challenges. They needed to decrease expenditures for prescribed medical products by increasing prescriptions for lower cost medicine. They also aimed to improve the availability of services to reduce patient waiting times. Furthermore, they wanted to increase the capacity of the hospital to meet increasing medical demands with existing resources. The council was also looking for a way to review operational data easily and improve the quality of information by making each person that enters data into the system responsible for the data they publish.

Bliss, a leading body and skincare retailer and spa services provider, was facing challenges with data reconciliation across its three disparate ERP systems. These systems were spread across three lines of business, making it difficult to maintain accuracy and speed in reporting. The company needed a solution that could improve these aspects and provide a more streamlined approach to data management.

Bouman GGZ, the largest mental health organization in the Netherlands, was faced with a very compartmentalized information system at the end of 2005. The Planning & Control and Finance departments provided managers with information from their financial system, HR delivered data from their HRM system, and the Clinical group delivered data from their healthcare system. Each department did this in its own way, with its own tools: Excel, Cognos or Oracle. After a few days, the managers received a print-out or an Excel sheet with the information they had requested. This was not a model of efficiency and customer-friendliness. At the same time, a need was emerging to combine the data from the three systems. Personnel, financial and clinical data is often interconnected and that’s how the management wanted to see it. But it wasn’t possible: everything was compartmentalized.

Brdr. Dahl A/S, Denmark’s leading distributor within plumbing, contracting, water supply, industry tools, and technical commodities, was facing challenges with their existing Business Intelligence (BI) solution. The development and design of new applications were time-consuming, and the company was dealing with a large volume of data. The company was also experiencing growing information needs due to increasing web-based trading. The logistics department at the head office of Brdr. Dahl in Brøndby, near Copenhagen, had used a traditional BI solution for a couple of years. They were actually content with their solution, but the development and design of new applications were time-consuming.

CABLOG, a leading distributor offering warehousing, storage, outsourcing, and distribution logistics services, was seeking technological innovations to improve corporate performance and the quality of its customer service. The management expressed the need to be able to quickly make and verify in-depth analyses of summary performance and detailed indicators in various corporate areas. The delivery management in the logistics, goods transportation, and distribution sectors is complex and requires considerable space where the entire logistics-distribution process can be organized and assembled. CABLOG has large indoor and outdoor areas and 15 regional transit points located throughout Italy, so the location of the shipments can be constantly monitored.

California Casualty, a leading provider of auto and home insurance programs, was struggling with disparate business system processes. The company was operating with a variety of systems for leads management, policy management, call center management, claims management, code debugging, and IT project management. The company was stuck in an environment of mainframe static reporting, information silos, multiple reporting tools, and constantly reconciling data because of all the different algorithms used in the various downstream systems. Their goal was to reorganize and streamline reporting with a 'one version of the truth' philosophy.

Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, one of the largest and best known hospital Trusts in the UK, was facing challenging times due to budget constraints. The trust needed to find efficiency savings of three to four per cent a year through increased productivity and better management information. They wanted a web-based business intelligence tool that could capture all the information a manager would need to know in one place. The trust decided to start by making patient level costing available across the organisation but also needed to include its Oracle financial systems, HR metrics, and above all patient information for example lengths of stay in the hospital and waiting time in the emergency department.

Canon India, a leader in the digital imaging industry, was seeking a tool that could provide real-time information on product, category, and dealer metrics to help them become the number one digital imaging company. The company had a centralized data center at the corporate office, connected to all locations through a Virtual Private Network. However, the process of generating reports from Oracle applications, extracting them into Excel, and cleaning the data was proving to be time-consuming and not user-friendly. The company needed a solution that could provide relevant and right information easily to the decision-makers of the organization.

Canopius Managing Agents Limited, a division of the international Canopius Group, is a leading specialist underwriting business and the largest privately owned insurer operating at Lloyd’s. The company manages Lloyd’s syndicates 4444, 260 and 839. The company faced challenges in improving visibility of syndicate performance, supporting Solvency II regulatory requirements with upgraded reporting and transparency, and integrating and rationalizing information from disparate sources to improve decision making. The company needed a solution that could bring together information from different sources and present them as the “one version of the truth” with data at the right levels of granularity with the ability to drill down to an individual policy or claim.

Cendris Customer Contact, a service provider, was facing challenges with their existing reporting system. The company relied on static reports from different source systems and monthly reports based on Excel. This resulted in problems due to the use of different types of data from various source systems. The slow speed and lack of flexibility in reporting left much to be desired. Furthermore, they wanted to provide their clients with uniform, up-to-date and consistent reports all with a comprehensive look and feel. The company's first step towards a full Business Intelligence solution was unlocking the different source systems, including Synergy, an Exact business process management solution for time registration, leave, absenteeism and payroll management; and Globe also from Exact, for the financial administration and different systems for calling, planning and email handling.

Centerstone Research Institute (CRI) faced increasing economic pressure as the global economic crisis affected state and local budgets. Funding cuts were proposed at a time when demand for the services Centerstone provides was rising – a “perfect storm” with serious business and clinical implications. To weather the financial pressures without severely cutting services, CRI sought a Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing (BI/DW) solution that would simultaneously improve the quality of care for patients while reducing revenue leaks. CRI’s strategy behind the BI/DW solution was to empower management and staff with easy access to actionable information related to business and clinical practices.

Cheshire and Wirral Partnership, a provider of services for people with mental health, learning disability, and drug/alcohol problems in the Northern UK, was facing a challenge with their Business Intelligence. They needed to make it more flexible, easier to understand, and intuitive. The existing system was not providing the necessary insights and was not user-friendly for the clinicians and managers who needed to use it.

Children’s Healthcare Services, a leading non-profit organization caring for children in Nebraska, was facing challenges in gaining visibility into its operations to improve the quality of care. The organization was struggling to access, integrate, and analyze data across disparate systems including clinical, financial, and administrative systems. The organization supports a 142-bed facility and roughly 50,000 patients per year, making it crucial to have a streamlined and efficient system for data management and analysis.

Before adopting a BI platform, Chongqing Shanshui was putting together data from a complicated list of sources, including a financial system with ERP functions, as well as disparate Excel files. Report development was rigid and they were not able to maximize the use of existing data. Due to the nature of its industry, Chongqing Shanshui needed to get the latest insights into its business quickly.