Category: Computer & Electronics

U.S. Transportation Command Saves Lives with BI Technology from Information Builders

Global Logistics System Orchestrates Critical Patient Movement Activities for U.S. Department of Defense

NEW YORK, NY (April 13, 2009) –

A critical function of the United States Transportation Command (US TRANSCOM) is patient evacuation, a complex, logistical challenge where speed is essential. As a leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, Information Builders is helping TRANSCOM devise optimal patient movement plans based on urgent medical needs, available facilities, in-transit visibility, and enterprise-wide cost and performance analytics. Thanks to the successful deployment of a pervasive operational BI system, the military’s evacuation and care activities are more efficient, minimizing suffering and improving care. Authorized users can generate detailed reports to monitor the status of patients from the beginning of transport to the outcome of treatment, potentially saving the lives of thousands of soldiers.

“When soldiers are wounded in battle, the military needs to provide efficient medical transport in conjunction with real-time information and pinpoint accuracy,” said Lieutenant Colonel Keith Lostroh, TRAC2ES functional program manager. TRAC2ES helps us provide advanced care for our troops.”

TRAC2ES, an acronym for the TRANSCOM Regulating and Command and Control (C2) Evacuation System, is a decision-support, reporting, and analysis tool that helps the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and other federal agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), coordinate patient movement on a global basis. Built on Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform, it supports patient movement from the battlefield to definitive care and, when necessary, to rehabilitative care in hospitals such as Walter Reed. The system also tracks and coordinates patient information throughout the U.S. military’s worldwide network of healthcare facilities.

According to Lieutenant Colonel Lostroh, the operational decision-support system provides critical data that helps military personnel minimize the severity of injuries and improve treatment. “TRANSCOM’s goal is to provide good medical care, not simply move people around,” he said. “Our utmost concern is for patient safety, quality of care, and efficient use of resources. Business intelligence technology is helping us meet these objectives.”

TRAC2ES supported the troops during operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom by providing 100 percent patient in-transit visibility for more than 73,000 patient movements. During these crucial operations it generated standards reports about the number of patients and movements, the number of missions, and the associated costs. From the clerk who arranges a patient’s transfer to the doctors and nurses who determine his or her eligibility and fitness for movement to the supporting agency personnel who arrange the aircraft and determine when the flight will leave and where it is going, the BI system helps the military track a patient’s welfare and whereabouts as each mission unfolds.

Today, approximately 2,500 users have access to the system, which provides three different domains to access personal, medical, and movement data. WebFOCUS enables data-level and role-based security to partition the data based on each user’s needs and requirements. TRANSCOM used WebFOCUS Reporting Server, WebFOCUS User Administration Services, WebFOCUS Analytical Reporter, and WebFOCUS ReportCaster to create the BI environment.

TRAC2ES not only orchestrates patient movement operations, but also provides critical metrics related to patient safety. The pervasive BI technology is providing one unified system for the entire DoD, enabling complete in-transit visibility of patient movements and treatments.

“TRAC2ES has transformed the DoD’s distribution network with an extensive information technology backbone,” said Gerald Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders. “TRANSCOM now has a patient movement system that helps to assure positive outcomes for sick and wounded soldiers anywhere in the world.”
About USTRANSCOM

The United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), working under the Department of Defense (DoD), is a joint command responsible for creating and implementing world-class global asset deployment and distribution solutions in support of the United States President, Secretary of Defense, and Combatant Commander-assigned missions. Around the globe, USTRANSCOM’s superb force of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, DOD civilians, and commercial partners accomplishes a wide array of joint mobility missions. With its people, trucks, trains, aircraft, ships, information systems, and infrastructure, USTRANSCOM provides the U.S. with the most responsive strategic mobility capability the world has ever seen.
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 customer 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. Together, these products 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

Tags: Information Builders

Information Builders Offers MLB Fantasy Active Report

Visualization Combined With Industry Statistics Provides Insight on 2009 Baseball Season

NEW YORK, NY (March 31, 2009) –

Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) and integration solutions, today announced that it has a new MLB Fantasy League Active Report to provide baseball enthusiasts and fantasy players with a free, easy way to quickly access MLB statistics. With opening day less than two weeks away, fantasy participants are under pressure to make their final picks and are looking for ways to gain statistical insight on players and teams to make more educated decisions.

Anyone with Web access can crunch the numbers with the MLB Fantasy League Active Report to analyze the results and gain real insight into the 2009 baseball season. The report can be accessed at: http://www.informationbuilders.com/mlb/. Almost instantaneously, users can answers questions such as who are the fastest base stealers in the West? Who are the hottest power hitters in the American League? Are National League pitchers at a disadvantage because they have to bat? The report allows filtering on many criteria – lefty, righty, position, players, team, league, etc. It allows users to generate comparative charts, reports and calculations with the ability to easily e-mail results to anyone. Data will be available for the duration of the 2009 MLB season.

As the industry’s first portable BI platform for delivering interactive analytic applications, WebFOCUS Active Reports has its own API, components, security, and analytic engine, enabling users to create active dashboards and receive Active Reports on mobile devices. They enable anyone with access to a Web browser to retrieve information and centralized data available online. Additional benefits of WebFOCUS Active Reports include: improved user experience and decision-making, guaranteed single version of the truth, scalability that reaches unlimited numbers of users, and it requires no specialized software or Web connection.

Information Builders recently shared how leading organizations around the globe including Dealer Services Corporation (DSC) and Israeli Credit Insurance Company (ICIC) are rapidly adopting WebFOCUS Active Reports for portable sorting, filtering, and analysis to better understand customer needs in real time, greatly improve decision-making, and operate more cost effectively.
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. Together, these products 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

Tags: Information Builders

U.S. Department of Education Uses WebFOCUS to Accurately Allocate Billions of Dollars of Student Aid

Information Builders’ Business Intelligence Technology Helps Colleges Award Nearly Two Billion Dollars of Federal Pell Grants During the 2007-08 Year

NEW YORK, NY (March 25, 2009) –

Information Builders, the independent leader in operational business intelligence (BI) and integration solutions, today announced that its customer, Federal Student Aid (FSA), a division of the United States Department of Education, has successfully rolled out the Institutional Student Information Record (ISIR) Analysis Tool to 200 colleges and universities across the country. The tool helps these educational institutions assess the accuracy of student aid applications and determine eligibility for need-based aid such as grants, subsidized loans, and work-study programs.

FSA oversees the distribution of massive amounts of federal money to students. The 150 schools participating in the Quality Assurance Program are required to use the BI tool to monitor the accuracy of these awards. These schools deliver approximately $2 billion in Pell Grants each year. Billions more in federally subsidized loans as well as state and institutional grant aid are awarded based on the financial information students provide on aid applications. Previously, schools would collect the students’ financial aid data on their own, and then attempt to analyze it using a variety of distinct systems at each campus. Now FSA personnel, and all of the participating colleges and universities, use the tool to analyze their data under one highly effective system.

“We can now analyze real-time data using common reports in spite of the schools’ disparate systems,” said Anne B. Tuccillo, senior management/program analyst at FSA. “By using the ISIR Analysis Tool, schools can ensure that the right aid is being distributed to the right students. The tool also helps schools to prevent hundreds of millions of dollars in potential improper payments within the Federal Pell Grant Program.”

These substantial savings stem from better procedures for verifying the accuracy of students’ Free Applications for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), a form that millions of students fill out each year. The reports generated by the ISIR tool allow schools to identify which FAFSA items are most likely to be misreported, which groups of students are most likely to make errors on the form, and which errors are most likely to affect eligibility for need-based aid. A recent FSA study determined that if Pell Grants were awarded with no verification at all, they would have awarded nine percent of grant recipients too much aid and six percent of grant recipients too little aid – a potential discrepancy of more than $600 million among the 150 schools participating in the Quality Assurance Program. The ISIR Analysis Tool allowed schools to prevent most of the potential 15 percent error rate by verifying the students most likely to make mistakes on their initial applications.

“With an increasing emphasis on online communication in government offices, FSA looked to increase the effectiveness of its interactions with both students and colleges, while simultaneously decreasing the cost of that enhanced communication,” said David Rhodes, senior management/program analyst at FSA. “BI technology is at the heart of these efforts.” FSA selected Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform because it combines intuitive dashboards and drillable reports with complex analytic capabilities that casual business users can quickly comprehend. “WebFOCUS is powerful enough to handle hundreds of thousands of records from schools across the nation and process all of that information through standard Web browsers,” he added.

In the past, many financial aid departments at post-secondary institutions focused their verification efforts on the neediest students within their school populations. This seemed like a logical strategy, until the ISIR Analysis Tool helped FSA determine that errors on these student applications typically are not significant enough to change their eligibility for aid. This meant that schools were essentially wasting their time by asking students and their families for financial information that rarely led to any meaningful change in their eligibility. The ISIR Analysis Tool helps financial aid professionals use their time more wisely as they become more selective in students they decide to verify and which data elements to confirm. For example, the Field Change Report lists items on the FAFSA that are most frequently changed after the application verification process. Tracking this information allows schools to discern which items their students are most likely to answer incorrectly, enabling financial aid staff to specifically target those items for verification. Schools can also use this information to improve their community outreach and education efforts as they help new students fill out the FAFSA correctly.

“The ISIR Analysis Tool has enabled us to do some very in-depth analysis of the students we verify, thus giving us the information we need to focus on data elements that are most error-prone,” confirmed Janet Roecker, associate director, Office of Student Financial Aid, University of Kansas. “The tool has definitely made our verification process much more efficient.”

The FSA recently launched a demo site so that interested schools could “test drive” the BI environment before they sign up to use it. Their goal is to increase the user base to at least 500 schools in the next two years and ultimately to engage 1,500 post-secondary institutions throughout the U.S.

“The ISIR Analysis Tool allows me to easily import records for analysis,” added John McPherson, associate director of Scholarships and Financial Aid at Ball State University. “Once records are loaded, the built-in reports and point-and-click menus allow me to see immediate results. We have been able to use the data to modify processes and streamline communications with our students.”
About FSA

Federal Student Aid, a performance-based organization within the U.S. Department of Education, ensures that all individuals who meet the eligibility standards of the needs analysis formula created by Congress can benefit from federally funded or federally guaranteed financial assistance for education beyond high school. FSA plays a central role in supporting postsecondary education by partnering with postsecondary schools, financial institutions and other participants in Title IV Student Financial Assistance programs to help students and their families to afford education beyond high school.
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 customer 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. Together, these products 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

Tags: Information Builders

Levy Home Entertainment Creates a Bestselling BI Environment With Information Builders’ Technology and Services

Leading Book Wholesaler Boosts Internal Efficiency, Streamlines Supply Chain With WebFOCUS

NEW YORK, NY (March 19, 2009) –

By accessing current business information and sharing it with suppliers, Levy Home Entertainment is improving operational efficiency, both internally and in its dealings with suppliers. The premier distributor of paperback and hardcover books used Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform to build a self-service reporting environment that has increased transparency, efficiency, and cost-savings throughout its national organization – and beyond.

By using WebFOCUS to directly access data in IBM AS/400-based business applications, Levy was able to avoid the expense of developing and managing an enterprise data warehouse. With intuitive dashboards and easy-to-use reports at their fingertips, managers are cutting supply-chain costs, tightening up inefficiencies and continuing to provide enhanced services to national retailers like Target, Wal-Mart, and Toys ‘R Us.

“We wanted to get to the information-production stage very quickly,” said Marty Wehrle, senior vice president and chief information officer for Levy. “Information Builders enabled us to access the data and create meaningful reports almost immediately. They showed us how we could directly access the data in our production systems and create intermediate data stores for reporting.”

Levy retained Information Builders Professional Services to help them complete the enterprise-wide business intelligence project. “I was pleased with the progress we made, especially within the first 90 to 120 days,” said Steve Carlson, senior vice president and chief financial officer for Levy. “Our time to market was greatly advanced by choosing this solution and dedicating the appropriate internal and external resources.”

The new BI environment is currently delivering information throughout Levy’s organization. For example, WebFOCUS sales reports organize information from more than 10,000 retail locations every day to provide insight into which titles are selling. Warehouse managers use WebFOCUS to analyze the performance of Levy’s distribution centers – improving the efficiency of picking and packing operations to ensure inventory reaches retailers expeditiously. Levy also created a Publisher Portal that gives more than 300 partners visibility into Levy’s sales and inventory data. The portal provides instant information about which titles are selling, along with the ability to track purchase orders and gauge inventory shortfalls.

“In a tough economic environment where every dollar counts, being able to analyze accurate information and make quick decisions is crucial to corporate growth, profitability, and sometimes even survival,” said Gerald Cohen, CEO and founder of Information Builders. “From competitive advantages with partners to enhanced visibility into sales data and increased awareness of warehouse efficiency, Levy is experiencing an information revolution throughout its organization.”
About Levy

Levy Home Entertainment is the nation’s premier distributor of paperback and hardcover books to America’s finest retailers. With over $600 million in annual sales, Levy provides books and services to Target, Meijer, BJ’s Warehouse Clubs, Wal-Mart, Toys ‘R Us, and other national retailers.
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. Together, these products 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

Tags: Information Builders