Latest Business Intelligence News
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MicroStrategy Teams with Netezza to Provide Enterprise-wide Reporting and Analytics
McLean, Va., (September 10, 2009) –
MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that 99¢ Only Stores® has selected MicroStrategy for enterprise-wide reporting and analytics. Operating more than 270 retail stores, 99¢ Only Stores emphasizes quality name-brand consumables, priced at an excellent value.
A new MicroStrategy customer, 99¢ Only Stores chose MicroStrategy’s Business Intelligence Platform as its business intelligence standard. 99¢ Only Stores plans to use MicroStrategy-based reports and information dashboards for greater insights into product sales, store operations, inventory management, and merchandising. MicroStrategy’s at-a-glance dashboards will provide actionable information, enabling 99¢ Only Stores’ personnel to monitor key business metrics, quickly identify trends, and enhance decision-making.
“MicroStrategy’s proven experience in retail business intelligence and seamless integration with Netezza were important to us as we selected our new BI partner,” said Terry Rountree, Director of Application Development at 99¢ Only Stores. “With MicroStrategy’s user-friendly dashboards, our employees will be able to view large volumes of data in a highly interactive way to make timely, data-driven decisions.”
“We are delighted that 99¢ Only Stores selected MicroStrategy to support their BI applications,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO. “MicroStrategy’s BI platform has the scalability and flexibility to analyze large volumes of transactional data and provide retailers with valuable insights on essential areas such as sales trends, inventory management, store operations, and customer loyalty.”
About 99¢ Only Stores®
Founded over 25 years ago, 99¢ Only Stores® operates 271 extreme value retail stores with 202 in California, 32 in Texas, 25 in Arizona and 12 in Nevada. 99¢ Only Stores® emphasizes quality name-brand consumables, priced at an excellent value, in convenient, attractively merchandised stores. Over 50% of the company’s product mix consists of food and beverage including produce, dairy, deli and frozen foods, along with fresh baked goods and gourmet foods. The Company’s New York Stock Exchange symbol is NDN.
99¢ Only Stores® news releases and information available on the Company’s website at http://www.99only.com.
About MicroStrategy
Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology. MicroStrategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations worldwide make better business decisions every day. Companies choose MicroStrategy for its advanced technical capabilities, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability. More information about MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is available at www.microstrategy.com.
MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform are either trademarks or registered trademarks of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Wende Cover
MicroStrategy, Incorporated
1-703-770-1646
wcover@microstrategy.com
Source: MicroStrategy
Information Builders Offers New Insurance Performance Foundation
Provides More Dynamic Single View Into Property and Casualty Business
NEW YORK, NY (September 09, 2009) –
Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced an upgrade of its Insurance Performance Foundation (IPF), previously known as Insurance Reporting Foundation (IRF). IPF provides performance management, collaboration, and role and dashboard management capabilities requested by many property and casualty CEOs. With new structured ad hoc reporting, the newly modularized IPF provides insurance companies such as the Mid-Continent Group with access to the full breadth of insurance business information, from summary to the lowest level of detail, required to give a single, accurate view of the business.
“Our CEO took a hands-on approach with IPF because it was key to helping him realize his vision to have a dashboard allowing him to drill down into finer details of results, confidently mine data looking at sub-classes of business and pockets of geographic locations to enable us to improve the results of our book,” said Gregg Jones, chief financial officer at Mid-Continent Group. “The IPF will enable us to provide a consistent, confident, single view to our business results that was previously missing.”
Insurance executives now receive pre-packaged dashboards showing performance against goals and can readily personalize content to identify concerns with a few clicks. Online collaboration on metrics and performance provides users with the ability to enhance company-wide information, including sharing of judgments, actions, and accountability for more informed decision-making across the business. Reports can be brought to the user based on a schedule or user thresholds, allowing executives to be proactive in looking at only the most relevant business information.
With a more engaging user interface, IPF’s new property and casualty reporting families are designed to empower even the most non-technical user to answer questions and perform real-time segmentation across underwriting, actuary, and claims areas with:
* Visual effects where drop-down lists in information requests better reflect the insurers’ business relationships and hierarchies
* Preferred defaults, so users see the best context for that information
* Enhanced search capabilities to provide easier filtering of large drop-down lists like agent, provider, or county
* Ability to recall previous requests and evolve in real time
* Off-line analytics capabilities, enabling brokers, and traveling staff to perform property and casualty analytics without connecting to the server
Heightened competition brought on by the challenging economy is driving insurers to save money now, while improving strategic use of information to reduce loss ratios over time. To accommodate this market trend, IPF is offered as four components that can be acquired one at a time or all together. As a modular solution IPF can complement existing insurance data warehouse efforts or deliver a complete data warehouse and BI solution. This flexibility differs from traditional insurance frameworks, because it means IPF can be implemented in months, not years. The four components of IPF include:
* Executive performance-oriented key performance indicators
* Management reporting frameworks
* Insurance data model (detail to summary full dimensional model)
* Prebuilt insurance data movement services (ETL) to load data model
“It’s our goal to help users be more self-sufficient to not only take the burden off IT and keep costs low, but also give each user the ability to be a more active and valuable contributor to the organization,” said Information Builders founder and CEO Gerald Cohen. “Our deep property and casualty expertise continues to provide insurers with rapid options and powerful segmentation to lower expense ratios.”
IPF now supports workers compensation and surety insurers in addition to personal, commercial, and excess and surplus lines. The solution is available immediately with flexible pricing options, which range from as low as $250K for just the data model to $500K for the full package solution.
About Information Builders
Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders’ iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets.
Information Builders’ customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners.
Source: Information Builders
Kronos Retail Labor Index(TM) Indicates Signs of Recovery in U.S. Retail Hiring
New Index Shows Retail Hiring Up 9 Percent from Three-Year Low in January 2009
CHELMSFORD, Mass. (September 08, 2009) –
Kronos® Incorporated today unveiled the first installment of the Kronos Retail Labor Index(TM), a family of metrics and indices that analyze the relationship between the demand and supply sides of the labor market within the U.S. retail sector. The Kronos Retail Labor Index provides a distinct and early indicator of the overall state of the retail sector. The report will be available on a monthly basis. The September report, a schedule of upcoming Index release dates, the methodology, and downloadable graphics are available on the Kronos Retail Labor Index website.
News Facts
* There are four related measures of interest in the report:
* The Kronos Retail Labor Index: This metric is defined as the percentage of job applications that result in a hiring, normalized within a scale of 0 to 100. For example, a rate of 2.75 percent means that per 100 job applications received, 2.75 of them resulted in a hire.
o The Kronos Retail Labor Index decreased fairly steadily from 7.1 percent in October 2006 to a three-year low of 2.75 percent in January 2009.
o Between January and July 2009, the Kronos Retail Labor Index increased slightly to 2.99 percent, a relative improvement of 4 percent from 2.88 percent in June.
o The figure of 2.99 percent represents a 9-percent increase in the job application to hiring ratio relative to the lowest recorded level of 2.75 percent in January 2009. While showing a small but steady improvement over the last six months, the July number is significantly below the three-year high of 7.1 percent recorded in October 2006.
* Retail Applications Level: During the first seven months of 2009, the 68 retailers who make up the Kronos sample received 8.9 million job applications, a 12 percent increase over the same period in 2008 and a 33 percent increase over the same period in 2007.
* Retail Hiring Level: Of the 15 million applications received by these retailers during the last 12 months (August 2008 through July 2009), 529,000 resulted in hires. This represents a 28 percent reduction in hirings compared to the prior 12 months (August 2007 through July 2008).
* Retail Employee Retention Rate: Consistently declining rates of retention on a year-over-year basis between late-2006 and mid-2007 have been followed by a steady and much larger increase in retention in 2008 and 2009.
Supporting Quotes
* Dr. Robert Yerex, Ph.D., chief economist, Kronos
“It was encouraging to see the Kronos Retail Labor Index increase to 2.99 percent in July – up 4 percent from June. We believe this stabilization and tentative recovery in the Index signals the beginning of stabilization in the overall U.S. economy and will be reflected in other measures of the economy in the coming months.”
* Aron Ain, chief executive officer, Kronos
“In the past, bits and pieces of information about the hiring climate were available from various sources, but never in a comprehensive way. The Kronos Retail Labor Index is derived from one unified data set and is based on actual hiring transactions, as opposed to surveys about transactions. Our hiring solution processed more than 23 million applications in 2008. This volume of data combined with our expertise in analytics and economics enables Kronos to analyze hiring-related trends in the retail sector in a way that no one else can.”
* Dr. John Gallup, assistant professor of economics, Portland State University
“Economists, among many other groups of people, are always looking for new leading economic indicators. Analysis of the past several years has shown that the Kronos Retail Labor Index has consistently foreshadowed changes that revealed themselves in other indicators weeks or months later. Given this history, I believe the Kronos Retail Labor Index could be an important leading economic indicator for the retail sector moving forward.”
* Lisa Rowan, program director, HR, learning and talent strategies, IDC
“The time is right for a seasoned entity in retail hiring to launch an index like the Kronos Retail Labor Index, given the current state of the economy and the increasing interest in trying to find better predictors of what will happen. This is a very interesting way to use data in its aggregate form to provide the public-at-large with a useful and meaningful new measure of the economy.”
Supporting Resources
* Organizations that use Kronos hiring solutions employ approximately 15 percent of the U.S. consumer retail labor market, providing Kronos with a unique set of data on employee job applications, hirings, and length of service.
* The Kronos Retail Labor Index will be released on a monthly basis. Go to www.kronos.com/retail-labor-index to access: the full report; a schedule of upcoming Index release dates; the Index methodology; and downloadable graphics.
* To listen to an Audio News Release about the Kronos Retail Labor Index go to: http://www.kronos.com/Audio/KRONOS-W2.mp3
* Note to reporters: cite Index findings as “Kronos Retail Labor Index”.
About the Kronos Retail Labor Index
The Kronos Retail Labor Index is a family of metrics and indices that analyze the relationship between the demand and the supply sides of the labor market within the U.S. retail sector. It is derived from a single, unified data set, allowing for statistically appropriate comparisons and time series-based trending analysis. Firms that use Kronos hiring solutions employ approximately 15 percent of the U.S. consumer retail labor market, providing Kronos with a unique set of data on employee job applications, hirings, and length of service. The Kronos Retail Labor Index provides a distinct and early indicator of the health of the retail sector.
About Kronos Incorporated
Kronos is the global leader in workforce management solutions that enable organizations to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity. Tens of thousands of organizations in 60 countries — including more than half of the Fortune 1000® — use Kronos time and attendance, scheduling, absence management, HR and payroll, hiring, and labor analytics applications. To learn how Kronos uniquely delivers complete automation and high-quality information in an easy-to-use solution, visit www.kronos.com.
© 2009 Kronos Incorporated. Kronos is a registered trademark and Kronos Retail Labor Index is a trademark of Kronos Incorporated or a related company. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
Source: Kronos
iDashboards Encourages ‘Health Check’ for Healthcare Organizations
Healthcare organizations can use this time of reform and change to improve operations and boost efficiency
Troy, MI (September 06, 2009) –
The debate surrounding the current state of US healthcare and its impending reform should not detract healthcare organizations from their ultimate goal of providing superior care to their patients. According to iDashboards, the leader in Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard software, healthcare organizations and providers can leverage this “time of change” to ensure that their Information Technology (IT) systems are not only capable of measuring and supporting their current needs – but also well equipped to provide long term support.
iDashboards asserts that all organizations may benefit from a routine check-up aimed at measuring the overall health of their organization to determine what current systems and processes are working well, and those that are feeling “under the weather.” Shadan Malik, CEO of iDashboards, works with some of the top healthcare organizations in the US and has the following list of five tips for providers looking to get their business in good health:
1) Set clear objectives and measure against them: With the influx of new regulatory and compliance issues affecting healthcare, it is important to have a clear understanding of your company’s objectives and establish a set of key performance indicators (KPIs).
2) You can’t fix what you can’t see: It is critical that every healthcare organization have the insight and ability to track the KPIs that matter most. Implementing BI tools that are specifically designed to track and measure progress against preset metrics will ensure complete visibility into all data, enabling organizations to gain access to real-time analysis of the metrics that affect their business.
3) Keep your employees engaged: Organizations that clearly identify and articulate their strategic goals to employees, and track if and when these goals are being met are positioned well to compete and succeed in today’s highly volatile marketplace. Additionally, when employees know that their performance is tracked and measured they are more inclined to be productive.
4) Make it intuitive visually appealing: No one wants to comb through a load of spreadsheets – if your data is impossible to decipher, what good is it to your company? While these tools are generally set up by IT workers, it is often the line of business users, who are less technically adept, who will be reading reports and making decisions based on the results. Make sure data presentation is intuitive and visually interactive.
5) Real-time reporting is critical: It doesn’t do your company any good if you are reporting on data that was impacting your organization last year, last month, or even last week. Organizations need access to real-time information to ensure prompt corrective action and timely feedback.
“iDashboards works with healthcare organizations across the country to provide the business intelligence dashboard solutions they need to gain access to more detailed, actionable data that facilitates quick, easy and well-informed decision-making,” said Shadan Malik, CEO, iDashboards. “Healthcare organizations are responsible for their patients’ health, but in order to be effective, their organization needs to be running as efficiently as possible. The tips above highlight just a few steps healthcare organizations can take to ensure they are running as efficiently as possible.”
Organizations can perform a quick “healthcare IT check-up” and see how they stack up against their peers by filling out a brief survey at: iDashboards Health Meter.
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About iDashboards
Through its award-winning engineering and patented software, iDashboards helps companies leverage information assets through visually rich, real-time and personalized business intelligence dashboards to analyze, track, and drill-down through a wealth of information. iDashboards’ global customer base consists of organizations ranging from large, fortune 500 companies to small and medium-sized businesses, all of which are making quicker, well-informed business decisions with the help of iDashboards. The company is privately held and headquartered in Troy, Michigan. To find out more about iDashboards’ solutions, please call (248) 952-0840 or visit www.idashboards.com.
Press Contacts:
Lauren Grassetti
LEWIS PR
617.226.8843
idashboards@lewispr.com
Source: iDashboards
MicroStrategy Chosen as Enterprise Business Intelligence Platform for Soci
One of the Largest BI Deployments in France with More Than 20,000 BI Users
McLean, Va., (September 03, 2009) –
MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that the French retail bank, Société Générale, has chosen MicroStrategy 9 as its BI platform to replace its existing reporting tools.
In 2008, Société Générale initiated a review of its decision support systems, including sales, financial, marketing, and risk analysis, and decided to replace its existing reporting tools with a new BI platform. The BI platform will be used to provide consistent business data and a common view for all users, provide timely and actionable insights to respond to business requirements, and reduce operational costs.
Société Générale conducted a “Proof-of-Concept” (POC) evaluation, which allowed it to assess numerous BI solutions over a seven-month period. “The different activities that were involved in our POC approach included functional workshops and report and dashboard prototypes,” explained Jean-Louis Tribut, manager of the decision support division of Société Générale’s IS department. “MicroStrategy provided a solution that addressed our functional, technical, and global cost requirements,” he added.
The first BI applications were delivered to users in June 2009, and Société Générale expects that 20,000 employees will benefit from the MicroStrategy platform, making this one of the largest BI projects in France. Société Générale uses the BI platform to access diverse data sources for enterprise reporting, detailed analytics, dashboards, and ad hoc queries.
“We are delighted to welcome Société Générale as a new MicroStrategy customer,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy COO. “The thorough POC evaluation process allowed us to demonstrate MicroStrategy’s fast time-to-value and low total cost of ownership, which is essential in today’s challenging economic climate.”
About MicroStrategy
Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology. MicroStrategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations worldwide make better business decisions every day. Companies choose MicroStrategy for its advanced technical capabilities, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability. More information about MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is available at www.microstrategy.com. MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy 9, and MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform are either trademarks or registered trademarks of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform, MicroStrategy 9 are either trademarks or registered trademarks of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Wende Cover
MicroStrategy, Incorporated
1-703-770-1646
wcover@microstrategy.com
Source: MicroStrategy
Information Builders Named Business Intelligence Leader in 2009 CRM Market Leader Awards
Independent BI Leader Recognized for Innovative Products and Excellence in Customer Satisfaction
NEW YORK, NY (September 03, 2009) –
Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced that CRM magazine, the industry’s leading customer relationship management (CRM) publication, named the company a Market Leader in the Business Intelligence category for the 2009 CRM Market Leader Awards. Companies were recently recognized at the publication’s CRM Evolution 2009 conference.
With its eighth annual CRM Market Awards, CRM magazine honors the vendors, consultants, and end-user companies that focus on customer relationships and the customer experience through the sophisticated integration of people, processes, and technologies. In each of 10 categories, the magazine named one Market Winner, denoting the highest score compared to its peers. Each category also produced four Market Leader awards and “One to Watch.”
“To stay competitive in a challenging economy, companies must come up with innovative ways to improve their customer relationship efforts. This is exactly what the recipients of the 2009 CRM Market Awards have done,” said David Myron, CRM magazine’s editorial director. “We congratulate Information Builders as one of this year’s award recipients for their achievements over the last year. May their CRM efforts continue to succeed.”
“We are proud that for the past several years, Information Builders has been recognized by CRM magazineas a market leader in business intelligence,” said Gerald Cohen, Information Builders’ founder and CEO. “Customer satisfaction and building strong customer relationships are core components of our business. This award marks a significant achievement in our CRM efforts. Looking forward, we will continue our commitment to delivering innovative, highly scalable and accessible business intelligence solutions to our customers throughout the world.”
About CRM magazine
CRM magazine is the leading publication of the customer relationship management industry, covering sales, marketing, customer service, and strategy. The magazine also administers and hosts the annual CRM Evolution conference. Each of these properties is designed to serve customer-centric business initiatives, and leaders who recognize CRM as a key strategy for creating enhanced customer value in any industry. For more information about the magazine, its editorial calendar, or CRM in general, please visit us on the Web at http://www.destinationCRM.com, or on Twitter at @CRM (http://twitter.com/CRM) and @destinationCRM (http://twitter.com/destinationCRM). The destinationCRM Web site (which is updated daily) and the monthly magazine are properties of CRM Media, a division of Information Today, Inc.
About Information Builders
Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence (BI) and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders’ iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets. The company’s comprehensive enterprise product offerings give Information Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.
Information Builders’ customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners.
Source: Information Builders
Information Builders Helps Reform Healthcare by Enabling a Performance-Oriented Culture at Maasstad Hospital
KPIs and Dashboards Provide Actionable Healthcare Metrics to Managers, Physicians, and Administrators at Leading Dutch Hospital
NEW YORK, NY (September 02, 2009) –
national healthcare reform initiatives grab headlines throughout the U.S., Maasstad Hospital in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, is quietly demonstrating how physicians, nurses, and administrators can be held accountable to national performance standards. Using business intelligence (BI) and performance management solutions from Information Builders, an independent leader in BI solutions, the 600-bed primary care facility is delivering current clinical and administrative data to help managers steer the hospital on a daily basis. Each department adheres to a set of daily metrics, encouraging a culture of performance and establishing best practices for common procedures, so doctors can be consistently compared to their peers.
The Netherlands has increased accountability and reduced healthcare costs over the last four decades. The ultimate goal is to introduce incentives for efficiency to guarantee sustainable health care expenditures over the long term – a familiar rallying cry for today’s U.S. politicians.
“No matter how healthcare is regulated, we must perform within our strategy to provide the best care at the lowest cost,” said Henri de Wit, manager of finance and business intelligence at Maasstad Hospital. “Strategic tools like Information Builders’ WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework help us meet our goals. We want to have satisfied patients as well as satisfied employees, so we are using this software to benchmark our critical processes and create quality of care standards.”
With help from Information Builders Professional Services department, Maasstad used WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework (PMF) to capture more than 100 key performance indicators (KPIs) and present them to authorized personnel via secure, customizable dashboards. Built on top of Information Builders popular WebFOCUS BI platform, PMF includes pre-set roles for analysts, administrators, and information consumers. It also features more than 100 reports and graphs, hundreds of pre-built metric rules, and a variety of dashboards, which made it easy to deploy quickly. Users can personalize the dashboard environment by deciding which reports they wish to see and how they want them to be displayed.
“WebFOCUS PMF was easy to get up and running quickly,” de Wit said. “It is designed to quickly capture metrics and deploy dashboards.”
Maasstad’s performance information comes from a diverse set of sources. A ChipSoft transaction system gathers information from radiology, dialysis, administration, pharmacy, salary, financials, and other business domains. This information is loaded into a Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse, which serves as a staging point for delivering current information to the performance management system. Armed with this information, Maasstad uses a dual-management system, which places responsibility on the shoulders of both administrators and clinicians. WebFOCUS PMF enforces this management strategy with targeted dashboards that help each administrator, nurse, and doctor monitor the hospital’s cost and quality of care.
“Maasstad Hospital is proving that there is truth in the old adage: ‘You can’t improve what you can’t measure,'” said Gerald Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders. “This innovative institution is making hospital performance information easier to access, analyze, and comprehend in an effort to provide the best healthcare at the lowest possible cost.”
Watch Henri de Wit discuss how Maasstad Hospital leveraged WebFOCUS PMF to provide the best care at a lower cost:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWLoRGRmJHA
About Maasstad Hospital
Maasstad Hospital is a leading healthcare facility in Rotterdam, Holland. The hospital has 600 beds and grosses EUR230 million annually.
About Information Builders
Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders’ iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets. The company’s comprehensive enterprise product offerings give Information Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.
Information Builders’ customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners.
Source: Information Builders
Farmer Brothers Selects MicroStrategy for Greater Insights into Operational Performance
Integration of MicroStrategy and RapidDecisionâ??s Data Marts Enables Farmer Brothers to Accelerate BI Deployment
McLean, Va., (September 01, 2009) –
MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that Farmer Brothers Co. (Nasdaq: FARM) has selected MicroStrategy for operational reporting and analytics. Farmer Brothers is the nation’s largest direct-store delivery business for coffee and allied products.
MicroStrategy reports and information dashboards will provide Farmer Brothers employees with detailed insights into financials, sales order processing, manufacturing, procurement, inventory, and human resources. MicroStrategy will be used by Farmer Brothers personnel across the organization, including the CEO, COO, CFO, Controller, VP Finance, VP Sales, Sales staff, as well as by manufacturing, financial, HR, and operations users.
Farmer Brothers has acquired multiple companies over the last several years and is leveraging MicroStrategy along with RapidDecision’s pre-built data marts to rapidly deploy its business intelligence applications and to ensure that its acquired companies have consistent enterprise reporting across all operational constituencies. With Farmer Brothers recent acquisition of the direct-store delivery service from Sara Lee, MicroStrategy and RapidDecision will be used to optimize sales routes and identify operational inefficiencies and redundancies from the acquisition.
“We selected MicroStrategy because it offers us a low total cost of ownership,” said Bob Ing, IT Director of Farmer Brothers. “We were excited to find a BI provider that delivered dashboards, reports, alerting, and advanced analytics all from one platform. In addition, MicroStrategy integrated easily with RapidDecision’s data marts, which enabled us to deploy our BI applications very quickly and provided fast time-to-value.”
“We are delighted that Farmer Brothers selected MicroStrategy to support its enterprise BI applications,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO. “MicroStrategy’s BI platform has the scalability and flexibility to analyze large volumes of data and provide valuable insights on essential business areas, such as financial management, supply chain monitoring, inventory management, sales forecasting, and customer loyalty.”
About Farmer Brothers Co.
Farmer Bros. Co. is the nation’s largest direct-store delivery business for coffee and allied products such as cappuccino, cocoa mixes and spices. It roasts and packages coffee for more than 10 brands; it processes and packages allied products; it directly delivers its products and services to food service operators and retailers in all 48 mainland states. It also provides private-label coffee programs to retailers through Coffee Bean Intl., one of the nation’s leading specialty coffee roasters. Farmer Bros. has paid a dividend in every year since 1953, and its stock price has risen on a split-adjusted basis from $1.80 a share in 1980. For more information, go to: www.farmerbroscousa.com.
About MicroStrategy
Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology. MicroStrategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations worldwide make better business decisions every day. Companies choose MicroStrategy for its advanced technical capabilities, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability. More information about MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is available at www.microstrategy.com.
MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform are either trademarks or registered trademarks of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Wende Cover
MicroStrategy, Incorporated
1-703-770-1646
wcover@microstrategy.com
Source: MicroStrategy
“Productivity Drain” Survey Finds That Many Employees Feel Productivity was a Casualty of the Recession
A new survey commissioned by The Workforce Institute� at Kronos® Incorporated and conducted by Harris Interactive reveals that 40 percent of respondents whose workplaces experienced layoffs in the past year feel that the overall productivity of their organization has been negatively impacted
CHELMSFORD, Mass. (August 26, 2009) –
A new survey commissioned by The Workforce Institute(TM) at Kronos® Incorporated and conducted by Harris Interactive reveals that 40 percent of respondents whose workplaces experienced layoffs in the past year feel that the overall productivity of their organization has been negatively impacted. The “Productivity Drain” survey examines what this means for employees and what they think their employers should be doing to be positioned for success as the economy rebounds.
News Facts
* 38 percent of respondents employed full or part-time said there had been layoffs in the past year at their primary place of employment.
* Of those respondents who said that productivity had been negatively impacted by layoffs:
o 66 percent said that morale has suffered and people are less motivated;
o 64 percent said that there is too much work and not enough people to do it;
o 37 percent said the wrong people or departments were laid off, leaving inefficient systems and workflows; and
o 36 percent said they are concerned that as the economy picks up, they won’t have the right resources to meet demand.
* Despite feeling overworked, a surprising majority — 53 percent — of respondents said they felt the right number of people were laid off at their organization. Thirty-two percent said they felt too many were laid off and seven percent said not enough were laid off.
* Employees also have some advice for employers on how to improve productivity in their workplace:
o 50 percent said employers should look for ways to improve morale;
o 46 percent said their employers have processes that should be automated to be more efficient;
o 36 percent said their organizations should invest in new technology to help manage productivity — interestingly enough, more men (42 percent) than women (30 percent) believe this would help; and
o 36 percent of employees believe that organizations need to take a fresh look at how to redistribute the workload among those employees who are left.
Supporting Quotes
* Joyce Maroney, director of The Workforce Institute, Kronos
“In the midst of a downturn like the one we are experiencing, the time is right for employers to re-examine existing practices: from how work is distributed among the organization; to whether or not new hires need to be made; to what kinds of technology might enable the workforce to become more productive. In this survey, we hear loud and clear from employees that these issues need to be addressed now, so that businesses are positioned for success when the economy kicks back into high gear.”
* Andy Brantley, president and chief executive officer of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources
“No one would argue that the last several months have been incredibly difficult for most organizations. Employees who ‘survive’ layoffs are left with more work and fewer resources. Employers should look for ways to keep employees focused on contributing to the success of the organization while providing them with rewards and recognition for the exceptional work being done under difficult circumstances.”
Supporting Resources
* About Harris Interactive
Survey Methodology
This survey was conducted via telephone within the U.S. by Harris Interactive® on behalf of The Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated between August 13 and August 16, 2009 among a nationwide sample of 2,005 U.S. adults aged 18 and over among whom 956 were employed full-time or part-time. Data were weighted to be representative of the total U.S. adult population on the basis of age, sex, geographic region, and race.
About The Workforce Institute
The Workforce Institute was founded by Kronos Incorporated in 2006 as a think tank to provide research and education on critical workplace issues facing organizations around the globe. By bringing together thought leaders, The Workforce Institute is uniquely positioned to empower organizations with the knowledge and information they need to manage their workforce effectively and provide a voice for employees on important workplace issues. A hallmark of The Workforce Institute’s research is balancing the needs and desires of diverse employee populations with the needs of organizations. For additional information, visit www.workforceinstitute.org.
About Kronos Incorporated
Kronos is the global leader in workforce management solutions that enable organizations to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity. Tens of thousands of organizations in 60 countries — including more than half of the Fortune 1000® — use Kronos time and attendance, scheduling, absence management, HR and payroll, hiring, and labor analytics applications. To learn how Kronos uniquely delivers complete automation and high-quality information in an easy-to-use solution, visit www.kronos.com.
© 2009 Kronos Incorporated. Kronos is a registered trademark and The Workforce Institute is a trademark of Kronos Incorporated or a related company. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
Source: Kronos
Boehringer Ingelheim’s Swiss Branch Improves Sales Reporting and Efficiency with MicroStrategy Software
MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that Boehringer Ingelheim (Schweiz) GmbH (named here as Boehringer Switzerland) has selected MicroStrategy to improve its sales reporting and efficiency. Boehringer Switz
McLean, Va., (August 26, 2009) –
MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that Boehringer Ingelheim (Schweiz) GmbH (named here as Boehringer Switzerland) has selected MicroStrategy to improve its sales reporting and efficiency. Boehringer Switzerland is the Swiss branch of the international pharmaceuticals company Boehringer Ingelheim.
Boehringer Switzerland selected MicroStrategy for reporting and analysis of sales productivity data. With MicroStrategy, sales data can now be supplied more rapidly to field sales and management, which helps the company to streamline operations. With MicroStrategy’s flexible, user-friendly reports, individual users can create their own reports and work more efficiently. In addition, the reports give Boehringer Switzerland management greater insights into market data to help them plan sales activity and analyze the productivity of regional sales groups.
As part of its extensive selection process, the Boehringer Switzerland management team defined 10 Key Performance Indicators and asked selected BI providers to create several reports with this information. “MicroStrategy made an excellent impression during our evaluation process. In addition, our team in Australia has already deployed MicroStrategy for reporting and has had positive results,” said Mr. Gregor Brunner, Department Manager IT of Boehringer Switzerland.
“MicroStrategy provides greater reporting capabilities than other BI suppliers and is very user-friendly,” explained Alexander Herter, Business Analyst at Boehringer Switzerland and Project Manager for the evaluation of the new BI solution. “Data can be supplied rapidly and more clearly with MicroStrategy, and the reports serve as a basis for operational and strategic decisions.”
“We are pleased to have the Swiss branch of Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, as our new customer,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO.
About Boehringer Switzerland
The Boehringer headquarters is in Ingelheim, Germany and the enterprise Boehringer Ingelheim is one of the world’s 20 leading pharmaceutical companies. Since it was founded in 1885, the family-owned company has been committed to researching, developing, manufacturing and marketing novel products of high therapeutic value for human and veterinary medicine.
About MicroStrategy
Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology. MicroStrategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations worldwide make better business decisions every day. Companies choose MicroStrategy for its advanced technical capabilities, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability. More information about MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is available at www.microstrategy.com.
MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform are either trademarks or registered trademarks of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Wende Cover
MicroStrategy, Incorporated
1-703-770-1646
wcover@microstrategy.com
Source: MicroStrategy