Information Builders Customers Embrace Active Reports Technology
Leading Organizations Harness Power of Visualization Via Industryâ??s First Portable Business Intelligence Solution
NEW YORK, NY (March 11, 2009) –
Information Builders, the independent leader in operational business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced that leading organizations around the globe 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. 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.
“Many vendors’ dashboards are only available to select users instead of being distributed to all employees with operational responsibilities,” said Gerald Cohen, CEO and founder of Information Builders. “Our active technology empowers everyone within the organization to give businesses the competitive edge and increased business productivity needed to thrive in today’s economy.”
Customer benefits of WebFOCUS Active Reports include:
* Improved user experience and decision-making – Multiple reports are consolidated into a single interactive view making viewing data and performing analysis easier
* Guaranteed single version of the truth – Users can receive scheduled updates to the dashboard, ensuring that they always have the latest information in their e-mail folders
* Scales to unlimited numbers of users – All interactions are self-contained and occur in the browser, meaning a virtually unlimited number of concurrent users can analyze data
* Requires no specialized software and no connection – Data and interactive capabilities are bound together in a single file that can be managed without installing additional software; users without a network connection can access reports from anywhere
Dealer Services Manages Dealer Risk and Increases Profitability
Dealer Services Corporation (DSC), a national inventory financing company for used car and power sports dealers, relies on WebFOCUS as its enterprise BI standard to provide more than 450 of the rapidly growing organization’s non-technical business users with self-service access to the information they need, when they need it, to accurately manage dealer risk and make better decisions. DSC currently uses three types of Active Report dashboards: departmental (currently five in use), one company dashboard (used company-wide), and one executive dashboard slanted toward more financial data.
New dealers enter the market and existing dealers exit the market on a regular basis. With a WebFOCUS Active Report on dealer risk, DSC can track and monitor the situations that usually occur before a dealer gets into trouble. This helps the dealer avoid default and minimizes the consequences for DSC should the situation deteriorate. DSC can also run Active Reports on loan activities to view the different risks involved with certain loans. The reports can identify anomalies or evidence of risky behavior, such as inconsistent loan repayment patterns. Active Reports allow them to take into consideration a wide number of factors that they may have previously dismissed and help reduce to amount of human error in the loan decision process.
Israeli Credit Insurance Company Gains Offline Analysis – With Zero Overhead
As the leading credit insurer in Israel, Israeli Credit Insurance Company (ICIC) protects more than $11 billion worth of credit each year in both local and foreign trade transactions. ICIC needed to quickly build a versatile reporting environment to help policyholders identify, analyze, and reduce risk via secure, controlled access to their policy information. ICIC used Information Builders WebFOCUS software because of its comprehensive application development and deployment capabilities including Active Reports and Active Dashboards. Powered by highly portable JavaScript technology, Active Reports can be downloaded and viewed within a browser, either online or offline, meaning ICIC customers did not need licensed BI software to view and analyze information. The reporting application also features automatic exports to Excel spreadsheets and interactive graphs that let users visualize the exposure data.
The ICIC online reporting system has been in production for about a year and it already has 600 registered users. ICIC customers are particularly intrigued by WebFOCUS Active Reports since it enables them to slice and dice the insurance data without having to be connected to ICIC’s information systems. In the future, developers plan to use WebFOCUS Active Dashboards to make it faster and easier to present information. This will enable customers to compile multiple tables and charts into a single customized dashboard.
“WebFOCUS gives us a competitive edge by making it easier for customers to create and manage their exposures,” said Ofer Resh, chief information officer, ICIC. “We regard BI software as one of our primary market differentiators.”
In an industry where information is the primary currency, WebFOCUS Active Reports let policyholders more thoroughly track and manage their exposures, saving time for internal developers and providing a unique set of services that gives ICIC a competitive edge.
University of North Carolina -Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, the nation’s first state university, recently established the student data warehouse (SDW), an enterprise resource planning (ERP) companion project focusing on admissions and recruiting. Eventually the SDW will contain all data pertaining to a student stored in the ERP transactional system and the data will be structured for easy retrieval, analysis, and reporting. The SDW project will incorporate the business needs of stakeholders ranging from undergraduate admissions to the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment into a new data warehouse tool. Business units and end users will then be able to access that data through WebFOCUS.
“Each year we make decisions that affect the lives of nearly 25,000 students and their families. We can’t make those decisions without reliable and up-to-date information,” said Stephen Farmer, associate provost and director of Undergraduate Admissions. “The student data warehouse will give us just this kind of information, and there’s no doubt it will help us make good decisions on admissions.”
New York Public Library Betters Public Service While Reducing Costs
The New York Public Library (NYPL) is one of the nation’s great scholarly resources, serving the citizens of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island with more than 1.86 million cardholders. Each year the NYPL processes more than 15 million borrower transactions. After struggling with outdated data management systems for decades, managers at NYPL began working with Information Builders in 2006 to gather, analyze, and deliver pertinent information to all 3,000 employees spread across 86 branches and five research facilities. The NYPL used WebFOCUS to develop a BI solution called Metrics On Demand (MOD), which delivers information about operating costs, traffic patterns, asset acquisition and inventory management via a dashboard-driven environment. In 200X, NYPL took reporting to a new level by leveraging WebFOCUS Active Reports so users can output results for additional sorting, filtering, and analysis. This permits managers to drill down into the data, visualize specific drivers of change and evaluate performance at each individual site.
“We realized that capturing and making available better metrics would have a huge positive impact on our organization’s data strategy department,” said NYPL Statistical Analysis Manager Anthony Fischetti. “Our goal was to have a tool that could pull real-time information in from all of our operations and make it available from a centralized repository and disseminate statistics instantly to managers and staff.”
The Library Branch Activity Rankings dashboard reveals the most popular programs and materials, helping branch managers ensure that the items most in demand are always available to the public.
Today, about 125 managers depend on MOD to keep track of local activities within their purview as well as share best practices about improving services to the public. By accessing operational data through interactive dashboards, NYPL managers and staff benefit from greatly improved decision-making, enabling them to maintain a more responsive and cost-effective public library system.
Scherer Brothers Lumber Company Gains Unmatched Information Access
Scherer Brothers Lumber, a leading Midwest building materials supplier and manufacturer, standardized on WebFOCUS to automate complex financial reporting and provide greater access to disparate data sources. Company executives and managers have on-demand access to critical financial data from their PeopleSoft Enterprise One ERP system. Scherer uses Active Reports to provide sales reporting and analysis to account managers. The data can be spliced into several report combinations without downloading additional data.
“WebFOCUS allows our staff to generate financial reports in minutes that previously took hours to run,” said Scherer CIO Marjorie Arnold. “With Active Reports our general managers can now get key financial information for their specific business units rather than having to wade through cumbersome hard copy report books. We anticipate similar efficiencies for our account managers using this business intelligence tool to do offline analysis of important customer data.” By using WebFOCUS and Active Reports, Scherer Brothers Lumber is defining, building, and automating metrics to track progress on a daily basis, allowing them to react to customers’ needs in real time.
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