Limitless Business Intelligence Sessions at IBIS 2014

Doing Less and Getting More Done

IT departments want to help their constituents. Counter-intuitively, the best help may come from doing less. When we revised our underwriting process we discovered that we could create the most efficient process by enabling our underwriters to create their reports using Business Objects. Live Office allowed our team to access Business Objects data directly from Excel, and then manipulate the data in a way that was familiar and intuitive to them. Instead of IT supporting the underwriting process, the process became the responsibility of the line of business vendor who built the Universe.

Although traditional reports work well for retrieving and analyzing data, there is a gap between retrieval and analysis, and synthesizing new activities or directions based on the data. Tools such as Microsoft Excel offer us opportunities to use packages such as Solver to synthesize answers, transcending mere data interpretation.

GraneRx creates a Customer Facing Portal using the BusinessObjects SDK

Tammy Datri, PMP and Fred Bauer, Bauer Computing

GraneRx has created a Customer Facility Portal to provide their internal and external customers with access to Miscellaneous Content, Document Libraries and the ability to refresh Web Intelligence reports. Launchworks has developed a series of products that leverage the BusinessObjects SDK and platform to allow its customers to develop custom applications which provide BusinessObjects content and secured by BusinessObjects security. See how GraneRx is using the Launchworks product in Phase I of this pilot project and what their plans are for subsequent phases and portals.

This session will cover the various pieces of the portal as well as discuss the underlying platform(s) that were used to bring it together. There will be a brief overview of the hardware/software architecture, BusinessObjects security and system administration required to support the portal. In addition, we will discuss how GraneRx plans to expand the features offered through the portal.

How a BI Dashboard Helped Improve Market Share for a Retail Business

Rajesh Ponnurangam, InfoSol

Retail companies have the inevitable need to stay on the top of all the information pertaining to their business in order to survive the competitive market. Dashboarding data pertaining to logistics, customers and sales information would greatly reduce the time spent by the C-level executives in analyzing complicated business reports. This case study demonstrates how a simple, yet visually appealing dashboard with custom components helped the CEO of a retail company to gain business insights and improve the market share in E-commerce space. Real life examples and use-cases for the dashboard design will be demonstrated in the presentation.

How an Animal Rescue Adopted BI

Adam Lange, Lake Tahoe Community College

How can we efficiently monitor the performance of our organization? How can we utilize our data to make well-informed, timely decisions? These are questions that business intelligence practitioners confront every day, but they are not limited to for-profit businesses and governmental agencies. Nonprofit organizations must also find creative solutions to these same problems. [expand title=”continue reading…” alt=”continue reading…”]

Furever Friends Rescue is a nonprofit animal rescue which serves the eastern region of the Phoenix metropolitan area. Since opening its doors in 2012, Furever Friends Rescue has grown rapidly and has made a significant impact on the East Valley community. It processed over 300 animal adoptions in 2013 and it currently manages over 100 volunteers. In this rapidly growing and fast-paced environment, the organization’s leaders must have easy access to the critical information they need to make strategic and operational decisions.

This session will provide an in-depth look at the homegrown business intelligence solution created for Furever Friends Rescue. The presenter will share information on a data warehouse that was created to merge information from multiple sources: volunteer tracking system, animal and adopter tracking system, and website and social media traffic logs. Attendees will see how reports and dashboards were created to highlight trends and monitor key performance indicators. Finally, although this project did not rely on SAP BusinessObjects, the presenter will briefly outline a model of how the solution may have been approached within a BusinessObjects environment.

Full Disclosure: The presenter’s wife is the vice-president of Furever Friends Rescue.[/expand]

How BI Unlocked the Black Box at Diverse Brands

Jason Dodo, Diverse Brands

One thing we have is data. One thing we were lacking was information and user adoption. In this session, I will discuss how our company turned our data dump into information gold with the help of InfoBurst and Dashboards to create something users loved. A piece of coal takes tens of thousands of years to turn in to diamonds; we did it in just a matter of months!

How BusinessObjects is helping with Medication Management for Long Term Care Patients at Grane Healthcare

Tammy Datri, PMP

This session will review the journey that GraneRx has taken to date to develop tools to aid with Medication Management for its members using BusinessObjects. See how this project has evolved as various technologies have been applied to produce information for reporting and management of patient information. Learn about the obstacles that have come up and how they were overcome.

Now that GraneRx has been able to establish a foundation for this reporting, see how they intend to build on it and what other BusinessObjects tools they plan to utilize to meet additional requirements. This session will review the process that the team went through to establish what they have so far as well as which BusinessObjects products they are currently using and plan to use in the future. In addition to the reporting, this session will also discuss how GraneRx has developed a Portal using BusinessObjects technology to provide their customers with direct access to Web Intelligence reports and more.

Instant Cost-Savings with Data Consolidation and Report Distribution

Scott Wilks, USPI

USPI is made up of over 200 surgery centers, all operating independently but managed by a Corporate office. Each facility has its own CEO, CFO and Board of Directors – as well as a unique instance of a Patient Accounting Software (PAS). Traditionally, each facility did it’s purchasing within this PAS system – therefore Corporate had no visibility into these transactions until month-end close was completed.
This session will highlight and demonstrate how United Surgical Partners International purchased a cloud based procurement software which forced all facilities to order items using a master item table. The Data Warehouse team then built out a procurement “purchasing” data mart which allowed the BI team to start building reports and analytics around a consolidated data set – ultimately bursting reports to facilities that showed what other facilities were paying for similar items. This data has equipped the facilities, as well as the corporate office, with the necessary information to negotiate better contracts for heavily purchased items, and it has let to instant savings across the company.

Performing Impact Analysis in Business Objects to Identify Changes for Medical Diagnostic Codes

Bruce Alexander, Presbyterian Healthcare Service and Julien Drouvin, GB & SMITH

When Presbyterian Healthcare needed to identify all occurrences of the use of disease classification codes (ICD-9) in its BusinessObjects deployment in order to make changes for a new standard (ICD-10), they were looking at a daunting task. The codes were used throughout multiple universes, queries and reports and they saw no easy way to quickly identify the impact of this change. Then they were introduced to the 360Eyes tool that performs both auditing and impact analysis on BusinessObjects content which enabled them to quickly identify the impact saving them an enormous amount of valuable labor and cost.
This session, presented by the customer themselves, will show you how they did it.

Self-Service Spend Analytics

Sakthikumar Rangarajan and Paul Santaniello, Newmont Mining Corporation

This presentation will showcase how one of the business intelligence solutions at Newmont Mining Corporation has had a significant impact on the global supply chain business. We will highlight the challenges faced by the business, the need for a self-service solution and how we built the solution using Teradata, Business Objects Explorer and Web Intelligence. We will also share the challenges we faced in this solution delivery along with some of the success stories that came out of this. There will be a demo of the solution and will also touch upon the best practices we learnt on the way.

Starting a New BI Implementation

David Behr, USPI

Traditionally, to get Business Intelligence up and running within an organization was a very costly and timely endeavor involving building out a Data Warehouse and purchasing a BI Software suite to deliver the data. While this still may be the case today, there are ways to build out valuable Business Intelligence applications at a fraction of the traditional cost and time.

This session will highlight and demonstrate how United Surgical Partners International built out Business Intelligence capabilities along with a Data Warehouse from scratch, and delivered reporting, dashboards and self-service analytics corporate-wide in under 6 months, at a quarter of the expected cost. By bundling Business Objects with InfoBurst, USPI has been able to fast-track Business Intelligence and have attained an instant ROI.

Top 3 case studies for location analytics and BI

Ryan Goodman – Centigon Solutions

How are other organizations using geo data to drive business decisions? Join us for a session where Ryan Goodman, creator of CMaps Analytics location intelligence suite, will answer this question and highlight 3 exciting customer use cases. Learn how location analytics tools of today are adding incremental value to business intelligence and the opportunities that lie ahead to revolutionize analytics.

Using Limitless BI to Provide Customer Service Excellence

Don Woods, ARI

ARI’s service excellence commitment to its fleet management customers includes matching them with a vendor that is best suited for their vehicle and repair type, negotiating the best prices on the parts and labor costs that get passed through to them, and keeping vehicle downtime to a minimum. The ability to identify the highest performing vendors and improve operational efficiency for customers are key business drivers for ARI and among the criteria the company uses to determine success. [expand title=”continue reading…” alt=”continue reading…”]

This session will highlight ARI’s use of limitless business intelligence to combine data from existing vendors, customer vehicles, and financial records to produce spatial context for all client vehicles in a given proximity that could equate to business growth, driving volume and value up for ARI’s vendors while ultimately reducing costs for ARI’s customers.[/expand]

BI 4.1 Upgrade Case Study

Mel Sheppard, InfoSol Ltd.

Based on a case study this session tells the story of a recent XI3.1 to BI4.1 upgrade.

This particular case study is for a side by side installation of BI4.1 sp1 Edge on Windows Server 2012, but the experiences and lessons learned are invaluable for anyone starting to think about, and plan for, their upgrade. [expand title=”continue reading…” alt=”continue reading…” swaptitle=”collapse”]

We will have a look at the upgrade approach, the steps involved, the problems encountered and how they were overcome, including tips and tricks for a smoother upgrade process. This session would prove useful for anyone wanting to know more about upgrade and migration to BI4.1.

Specific topics covered:

Installation and pre-requisites
Configuration
Content Migration using the upgrade management tool
Client tool upgrade
Deski conversion (and the Deski Compatability Pack)
Dashboards (Xcelsius) conversion[/expand]

Back to Tracks and Agenda

Limitless Business Intelligence Sessions