buyer’s guide Business intelligence: how to make it work for your company thinkstock CW Buyer’s guide Business intelligence, or BI, software has business intelligence steadily emerged as a hot topic in recent years. Research shows that more than 49% of companies have concrete plans to implement or expand their use of BI software in the next 24 months. But cost is a big barrier, and interest in BI software and spending money to adopt the tools and processes do not necessarily translate into successful implementations. This eight-page guide looks at some of the options companies should consider before embarking on a BI implementation. Contents How to make business intelligence tools work for your organisation page 2 BI tools can report essential, timely data but care must be taken to select the right system, writes Clive Longbottom Give your business a BI boost for less page 4 The benefits of business intelligence are clear, but cost is a major barrier to mass adoption. With this in mind, Arif Mohammed reviews two different BI models – one open source, one commercial – to see how they compare How agility will shape the future of business intelligence in your firm page 6 Choose the right BI tool for the job thinkstock How agility will shape the future of business intelligence in your firm page 7 Cliff Saran analyses how to find the right approach for your company in a changing business intelligence landscape These articles were originally published in the Computer Weekly ezine. CW+ a whitepaper from 1 Computer Weekly buyer’s guide enterprise software How to make business intelligence tools work for your organisation BI tools can report essential, timely data but care must be taken to select the right system, writes Clive Longbottom CW Buyer’s guide business intelligence T he last few years have seen a flurry of activity in the business intelligence (BI) market. Firstly, the old-style approach of reporting against data in a relatively static manner was put under pressure by users demanding something a lot more flexible, where they did not need to approach the IT department every time they needed to create a report. Then, the big suppliers decided they needed BI tools they could control, rather than embedding suppliers such as Information Builders, Panorama Software and Tableau Software have all let users know there are alternatives available to whatever they may be using to date. The largest remaining independent supplier, SAS Institute, continues to dominate as a specialist BI supplier. Cloud-based computing is giving greater reach to many of these suppliers. Spotfire has provided a hosted a copy of a standard engine (generally Crystal Reports) into their systems. IBM acquired Cognos and SPSS, Oracle bought Hyperion and SAP took over Business Objects. Some smaller suppliers got in on the act – relative newcomer Spotfire went to Tibco, the middleware supplier. This flurry of activity presented issues to many users – if they were running a heterogeneous environment, how rich would the functionality of one supplier’s BI engine be against another, competitive supplier’s systems? Would bringing Cognos into an Oracle environment be a foot in the door for IBM to try and move the organisation over to DB2? The market for independent BI providers soon began to fill up – version of its software for many years and Panorama – through a partnership with Google – offers its capabilities as a BI software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. Open source BI tools But the biggest problem remains the cost of BI. If a business’s main asset is its information – its intellectual property – BI needs to be widespread » JasperSoft and Pentaho both have community editions of their BI software free to download and implement 2 buyer’s guide across its employee base, so everyone can add value to the data at their disposal. By providing BI tools only to those deemed at a sufficiently high level, BI ceases to deliver what it promises – and becomes a niche tool. Open source could provide the answer here. There is a broad open source BI project, known as BIRT, the business intelligence and reporting tools project. Actuate has the best known distribution of this, but others provide alternatives under open source banners that may offer greater overall functionality. The main players here are JasperSoft and Pentaho, both of which have “community editions” of their software that are free to download and implement, with support being community-based. Their commercial editions are enterprise subscription licences based on the number of CPUs, so broad adoption can be made without the need to deal with per-user issues. Others not using open source but having low-cost approaches (and often a free usage version or at least free evaluation version) include QlikTech and Panopticon. Buyers must understand there is a cost to everything. Free, open source software is not free – even when you take the community version. It is free of licence, but has implementation and support costs. Subscription software has on-going, predictable costs, Business intelligence case study: Cheyne Capital Cheyne Capital, a hedge fund management company, has replaced SAS with Tableau business intelligence, to speed up reports for its traders, writes Cliff Saran. Over the last three years the IT team at Cheyne Capital needed to provide reporting across multiple systems to provide traders with greater business insight. However, due to the nature of its business, producing reports needs to be done quickly and efficiently. Jan Uygur, CTO of Cheyne Capital, said the company wanted to hand over reporting to the business, rather than leaving reporting as a purely IT function. “Since the downturn we have strived to be more efficient. We were using SAS previously, but it is a big heavy tool.” This meant the company had to use the SAS environment and extract data into a SQL Server database. “We wanted to make reporting much lighter,” says Uygur. SAS needed a lot of developers, with three to five people involved in developing reports. The downturn led to a reduced IT team, forcing the department to rethink how to produce reports more cost-effectively. Faster reports were necessary as the trading desk and commercial, off-the-shelf software may have up-front licence costs along with on-going maintenance charges. The final choice comes down to other issues – as detailed above – and applying suitable business wisdom in the search for meaningful intelligence. asked IT for applications. As an interim step, Uygur says: “We gave traders reports. When traders need something, we have to give them a solution quickly.” Cheyne Capital has realised portfolio managers need to interact with instant data and up to date analysis, rather than being presented with static reports that can’t answer questions. The hedge fund company is using Tableau Software to deliver reports in a way that it can work with the numbers, delve deeper and see the information in the way staff want – grids, graphs and in the form of an infographic illustration. Sheel Bhatiani, deputy head of IT at Cheyne Capital, said the department had previously used wireframes to develop reports, which were then presented to users. Tableau is more interactive. It provides a graphical designer, allowing an IT person to sit on the trading desk and collaborate with a trader to build the report, making changes on the fly. Cheyne Capital plans to adopt Tableau Software’s 6.1 version with potential use on tablet devices, making the data accessible for portfolio managers on the go. Quocirca recommends the following as basic pointers: l Is a single supplier solution important to you? If so, look to the tools from the incumbent (e.g. IBM, Oracle, SAP), but negotiate hard around existing contracts. On the whole, this will tend to restrict you to a smaller number of active BI users, with the capability to distribute the reports from the analysis. l Do you want an independent BI system that can work across a more heterogeneous system? Look to the remaining independents or semiindependents such as SAS Institute and Tibco Spotfire. These may still be expensive at a per-seat level, but will often come with tools to manage deep domain expertise areas, such as oil and gas, pharmaceutical and finance data analysis. l Can you provide your own systems support, and are you in a position to enable a suitable number of support staff to build up their own knowledge of the chosen system? If so, then community editions of BI tools may meet your requirements. This would provide the most scalable BI system – but you need to watch out for any lack of functionality that may be in some community editions. l Do you want a fully supported system, but also want broad adoption capabilities? Then look for supported versions of open source tools, or for commercial systems that do not charge on a per-user basis. For many, it will come down to a hybrid solution – but certain key areas must be borne in mind: l Everyone must be analysing the same information. Different BI tools looking at different information silos Choose the right BI system When it comes to choosing the right BI direction for your organisation, 3 Buyers must understand that free, open source software is not free. It is free of licence, but has implementation and support costs do not provide business intelligence – it gives chaos. l One person’s great BI tool is another’s incapability to see the results. Bar and pie charts may be pretty easy for everyone to understand, but not all data is well suited to bar or pie charts. Heat maps, spider charts, geodata representations, bubble charts and all other media may have meanings for certain people, but do not assume that any one way of viewing data will suit everyone. Look for tools that enable the user to change the visualisation method to one that suits them best. If multiple BI tools are chosen to give different viewing capabilities – see the point above regarding information silos. l “Live” reports have pros and cons. Web-based output which allows users to see the analysis of the live data is great, unless what was required was a snapshot in time. Make sure that the differences are understood, and the right reports can be run against the right data. ■ » thinkstock buyer’s guide Give your business a BI boost for less The benefits of business intelligence are clear, but cost is a major barrier to mass adoption. With this in mind, Arif Mohammed reviews two different BI models – one open source, one commercial – to see how they compare CW Buyer’s guide business intelligence T here is a school of thought which stipulates deploying business intelligence (BI) tools to as many people as possible in the organisation. Rolling out BI to the masses empowers staff to make business decisions themselves, rather than rely on managers. The cost of rolling out enterprise business intelligence tools across an organisation can be prohibitive, but CIOs can reduce this cost by opting for low-cost or open source alternatives. Jaspersoft BI Enterprise Jaspersoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) Suite Enterprise Edition is a strong competitor in the commercial open source BI market, with its main rivals being Actuate BIRT, SpagoBI, and Pentaho Enterprise. But due to its wide toolset, analysts also view Jaspersoft worth considering alongside commercial BI platforms from Microsoft, IBM, Information Builders, Oracle, SAP and SAS. Jaspersoft provides a broad BI suite covering reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), data visualisation and data integration. It also features interactive, web-based reports, dashboards and analysis, and comes at a fraction of the licence cost of offerings from commercial suppliers. BI Enterprise also supports a range of implementation options such as on-premise, multi-tenant softwareas-a-service (SaaS), and cloud-based deployment, and Jaspersoft offers similar technical support packages to most commercial BI suppliers. The supplier owns and controls its JasperReports and iReport tools – for core reporting – and JasperServer – which provides repository, security and dashboarding functions, plus ad hoc and in-memory data analysis capabilities. But the suite’s open source codebase also enables it to support thirdparty commercial and open source BI tools, which gives its broad range of capabilities. These components include Talend’s open source extract, transform and load (ETL) tool and activity monitoring console; R, an advanced analytics development envi- 4 ronment; and JasperAnalysis, an OLAP tool based on the open source Mondrian engine. One disadvantage of this approach is that while these tools extend the suite’s functionality, Jaspersoft does not own or control these key BI components, or their roadmap or integration. Nevertheless, Mike Boyarski, director of product marketing at Jaspersoft, argues that the relatively low cost of BI Enterprise is a big attraction for many IT managers. “In some cases, the cost of expanding the use of an existing commercial tool is prohibitively high due to perseat licence fees and associated services expenses. For core BI requirements, Jaspersoft often equals or betters the [price of the] incumbent solution,” he says. » buyer’s guide Analyst view of Jaspersoft Forrester Research principal analyst Boris Evelson says there is a clear distinction between Jaspersoft’s community and commercial enterprise suites, with the latter able to compete with the commercial market leaders on features and functionality. In terms of open source, enterpriseclass BI suites, he says Actuate BIRT “leads the pack because of richness of reporting functionality”. But he adds: “Jaspersoft Enterprise, SpagoBI, Pentaho Enterprise, and Pentaho Community are close behind, and offer a much fuller and broader BI stack than Actuate BIRT, including ETL and advanced analytics.” Evelson argues that while Jaspersoft does not match, feature for feature, the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, BI users should consider whether they really need all of the “bells and whistles” of the larger suites. “If your IT culture calls for an 80/20 rule – where 80% of requested functionality is mostly good enough – and your budget is limited, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, and SpagoBI offer very respectable options,” he says. » QlikTech QlikView QlikTech’s QlikView is a commercial BI platform that has achieved rapid success over the past few years, particularly since the company had its Nasdaq IPO in July 2010, making it the first BI flotation for many years. Analysts have remarked on QlikView’s user-driven approach to BI, which focuses on ease-of-use for both IT professionals and non-technical users. The suite also differentiates itself from other BI platforms by being wholly based on an in-memory data store. By utilising in-memory, as opposed to traditional disk storage, the BI application can refresh data in real time to support operational BI environments, such as monitoring financial transactions. QlikTech’s main in-memory BI competes with Microsoft SQL Server, Case study: RelayWare/Jaspersoft PowerPivot, IBM Cognos Express and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. QlikView, which is currently on version 10, comes with a set of integrated BI tools designed to create highly interactive applications, dashboards and reports. One of its strengths is that it can combine data from disparate sources, including Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, SQL Server and Excel. It then provides associative search facilities, which the supplier likens to Google’s Instant Search, with the interface highlighting significant relationships in the data. The product also offers extensive data visualisation via expandable 2D and 3D charts, tables and graphs. According to analysts, data visualisation is one of the main features of the platform. During the MP expenses scandal, QlikTech developed a demo application that allowed people to visualise and analyse their local MP’s expenses. Steve Dark, an independent QlikView consultant, says: “At the time the scandal was unfolding, the data was being rolled out via QlikView on the web. In the intervening time there has been a huge surge in interest in, and use of, QlikView in the UK.” RelayWare, a supplier of partner relationship management (PRM) software to the likes of Sony, Lexmark and Trend Micro, chose Jaspersoft BI Enterprise and JasperReports Server after “extensive evaluation”. The firm rolled out the latest version of its PRM software, RelayWare Version 8.3, in August, incorporating JasperReports Server. It chose Jaspersoft mainly because its reporting capabilities allow RelayWare to enable its clients, many of whom have non-technical sales and marketing users, to share reports dynamically with their partners across the world via web portals and dashboards. RelayWare operates globally, and therefore chose to implement Jaspersoft in the cloud. “We were struck by JasperReports Server’s ease of integration, functionality, feature set and ease of use, says RelayWare CEO Mike Morgan. He adds that the firm chose an open source platform partly because of its “lack of expense” compared with commercial platforms, and partly because of its “ongoing development and support”. Case study: The NHS/QlikView According to QlikTech, more than 85 NHS trusts are using QlikView, including Cambridge University Hospitals, Newham University Hospital and Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital. Gareth Goodier, CEO of Cambridge University Hospitals, says the NHS trust chose QlikView after tendering for a front-end system that could present all its management information. Managers and clinical professionals across the organisation use QlikView to detect operational inefficiencies, “from the board to the ward”. Goodier describes the software as fast, simple and easy to use. “We have invested less than £1m over four years in terms of the software. It has required very little staff time and has facilitated very significant improvements in patient care, the efficiency at which we deliver that patient care and our general productivity,” he says. Another NHS organisation, the North West NHS Collaborative Procurement Hub, deployed QlikView to consolidate data from 45 financial and purchasing systems – in a 12-week implementation. The Hub claims QlikView has delivered procurement savings of £42m and freed up hundreds of hours previously spent on manual reporting and analysis. Analyst view of QlikView QlikView’s strengths lie in its userdriven approach to BI, its ease of use, its intuitive interface and how “likable” the product is to use, says Rita Sallam, research director at Gartner. But Gartner has a number of concerns about the platform. “QlikTech has no expansive product strategy beyond its current offering. While it has a roadmap for incremental improvements to its current product, QlikTech has not laid out a clear vision elucidating how it will maintain a sustainable competitive advantage,” says Sallam. “QlikView is increasingly seen as expensive – almost a third of customers surveyed see this as its main barrier to wider use. Its pricing model often does not sit well with larger de- ployments to more users, nor does the investment in RAM required to support the increasing numbers of concurrent users,” she adds. And while QlikView has a reputation for “blistering speed”, Sallam says 11.6% of its customers reported poor performance as a problem they had encountered. Despite this, she adds: “The general perception of its customers is that QlikView still delivers among the best performance on the market.” Product information Jaspersoft BI Enterprise Company: Jaspersoft founded in San Francisco, US, in 2004 Product: Jaspersoft BI Enterprise Features: Reporting, OLAP, data visualisation, dashboards, data integration Production deployments: 175,000 in 100 countries; over 14,000 commercial customers Website: www.jaspersoft.com QlikTech QlikView Company: QlikTech founded in Lund, Sweden, in 1993 Product: QlikTech QlikView Features: Data integration and analysis, searching, visualisation, dashboards Production deployments: 19,000 customers in more than 100 countries Website: www.qlikview.com Jaspersoft versus QlikView Gartner’s January 2011 Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms featured both Jaspersoft and QlikView – with Jaspersoft meeting the criteria for the first time. Gartner considers Jaspersoft more of a “niche player”, but among the challengers, while 5 QlikTech operates in the “leaders and visionaries” quadrant, alongside SAP, SAS and Information Builders. Gartner’s Sallam says: “Cost [and total cost of ownership are] by far the most compelling part of the Jaspersoft value proposition and the major ingredient driving its success.” In comparison, QlikTech implementations can be significantly more expensive. In terms of functionality, both platforms offer sophisticated data visualisation and dashboards and a full range of BI tools, albeit through third parties for Jaspersoft. In conclusion, QlikTech is a better option for larger enterprise implementations with deep pockets, while Jaspersoft is ideal for smaller companies that are happy to work with a commercial open source platform. ■ buyer’s guide business intelligence How agility will shape the future of business intelligence in your firm Agility can help close the gap earlier business intelligence processes and technologies create, writes Boris Evelson well-intentioned efforts of the past decade to streamline previously siloed BI environments via centralisation often had unfortunate negative side effects. Centralisation and consolidation cut costs and reduce duplication. But consolidated environments, managed by a shared services organisation, create more processes that are often bureaucratic. Getting anything done means multiple sign-offs and “building permit” approval processes. Centralised BI environments are anything but agile. Indeed, the number of organisations planning to consolidate their BI environment is decreasing, from 40% in 2009 to 38% in 2010. It’s a slight decrease, but a decrease nonetheless. CW Buyer’s guide business intelligence B usiness intelligence software has steadily emerged as a hot topic in recent years. In 2011, most companies will again focus their software investment plans on business intelligence (BI). More than 49% of the companies that responded to Forrester’s recent software survey have concrete plans to implement or expand their use of BI software in the next 24 months. But interest in BI software and spending money to adopt BI tools and processes do not necessarily translate into successful implementations: Forrester’s most recent BI maturity survey indicated that enterprise BI maturity levels are still below average – 2.75 on a scale of 5, a modest 6% increase over 2009. Why earlier BI initiatives fail BI technologies and processes have not kept pace with business realities. In the past 10 years, enterprises pretty much solved the problems that plagued typical BI implementations in the 1990s: data and information silos and unstable, poorly scalable BI technologies. But while earlier-generation BI technologies have matured into industrial-strength solutions - function-rich, scalable, and robust - they have largely failed to address Business intelligence must be able to adapt to ever-increasing rates of change agile enough to react and adapt to information requirements that seem to change with ever-increasing speed. The second reason for BI not meeting expectations is that centralisation has not led to agile, streamlined BI implementations. All of the one simple, pragmatic business reality: the need for flexibility and agility. Furthermore, businesses have begun to realise that their enterprise standard BI approaches, while suited to addressing most current business requirements, are neither flexible nor The future of agile business intelligence BI vendors and developers now need to concentrate on next-generation technologies, and four subcategories of agility: automated, pervasive, unified and limitless. Firms need to automate BI processes and steps, from data sourcing to delivering reports, dashboards and alerts, as fully as possible to eliminate manual work and free-up valuable human resources for analysis and other value-added tasks. Even as BI attempts to bridge data and information silos, BI technology itself is not unified. Different BI tools address various BI use cases, such as historical and predictive or batch-based and real-time BI applications. Next-generation BI brings all of them together in a unified platform. After automation and unification, companies should address pervasiveness. Make enterprise BI applications available wherever and whenever strategic, tactical and operational decision-makers need to analyse information, make decisions and act. This category includes technologies such as mobile, cloud and embedded BI. Finally, for next-generation BI to face the challenges of the modern business world, it must operate on information without borders or restrictions. 6 Agility to the rescue BI implementations need to be more successful to support untamed business processes. While agility will not cure all BI’s ills, it provides the most important best practices and leverages a key capability of the underlying BI technology to help close the gap that earlier-generation BI processes and technologies create. It’s not just about the agile software development methodology. Agile business intelligence is an approach that combines processes, methodologies, organisational structure and technologies to enable strategic, tactical and operational decision-makers to be more flexible and more responsive to change. But agile development by itself is not enough, so it is wise to adopt multiple best practices and next-generation technologies to make BI more flexible. Start by adapting your organisational structures and enterprise culture for agility. No technology or processes can address BI challenges if a company’s organisational structure and enterprise culture are not already on firm, agile ground. Once the organisation is aligned for agility, the next step is to consider and implement agile BI processes. ■ This is an edited extract from the Forrester report Trends 2011 And Beyond: Business Intelligence (March 2011) by vice-president and principal analyst Boris Evelson. thinkstock buyer’s guide Choose the right BI tool for the job Cliff Saran analyses how to find the right approach for your company in a changing business intelligence landscape CW Buyer’s guide business intelligence T here can be little doubt business intelligence is recognised as an important IT investment. Business analytics has been effective in decision-making for three of four enterprises, according to a Bloomberg survey. And Forrester principal analyst Boris Evelson says: “More than 49% of the companies that responded to our most recent Foresights Software Survey have concrete plans to implement or expand their use of BI software within the next 24 months.” Business intelligence (BI) is supposed to provide decision-makers found that the more time deployment teams took to build data cubes or manage metadata, the more building costs were eliminated. For example, report author David O’Connell discusses how a healthcare provider avoided growing its report-building staff by 20% because its IBM Cognos 8 BI deployment was integrated with more than 20 separate Oracle and SQL databases. O’Connell says: “A credit union examined by Nucleus avoided add- with the insight they need, but the definition is changing. The growth in data is making it harder for people to gain meaningful insight because they can only track data on a quarterly or yearly basis. Increasingly, business leaders want to make decisions faster and this is putting the IT department under more pressure at a time when they are being asked to do more with less. Business intelligence is expensive but a recent Nucleus Research report BI is expensive but a report found that the more time deployment teams took to build data cubes or manage metadata, the more building costs were eliminated 7 ing three report builders by combining operational information and trialbalance data in its IBM Cognos TM1 deployment and automating reporting for asset-liability management and cost-of-capital tracking.” The main BI suppliers IBM (with Cognos), Microsoft, SAP (Business Objects) and Oracle have strong BI offerings. IBM and Microsoft lack the ERP products the other two offer. But Gartner says so far it’s an open and heterogeneous position and increasing use of services in its value proposition are helping IBM to maintain par with SAP and Oracle. However, in Gartner’s report, The Changing Attitudes of Business Intelligence Users, Gartner analyst James Richardson notes that, in 2011, more than 50% of IBM Cognos users stated that SAP or Oracle is their primary ERP and these firms will form a key » buyer’s guide battleground over the next few years for Cognos. Richardson says: “The biggest loser in standardisation is Microsoft, which has neither the strength in ERP nor IBM’s service provider touch to defend its position, and as such has fallen out of parity with the other three megavendors as a BI standard.” » The limitations of BI According to Clive Longbottom, services director at Quocirca, the biggest problem remains the cost of BI. “If a business’ main asset is its information - its intellectual property - BI needs to be widespread across its employee base, so everyone can add value to the data at their disposal. By providing BI tools only to those deemed at a sufficiently high level, BI ceases to deliver what it promises and becomes a niche tool.” Worse, Forrester finds there are plenty of BI failures. The analyst firm warns that interest in BI software and spending money to adopt BI tools and processes do not necessarily translate into successful implementations. Forrester’s most recent BI maturity survey indicated that enterprise BI maturity levels are still below average (2.75 on a scale of 5, a modest 6% increase over 2009). A new approach to BI Vivek Ranadivé, CEO of Tibco and co-author of The Two-Second Advantage, believes traditional BI is hampering business. Ranadivé says it is better to have the right data a few seconds before it is needed than wait six months to analyse a report from a data warehouse. “When you get off a plane you should be told that your luggage has not arrived, rather than have to go to lost baggage.” Ranadivé adds: “With a CRM system, everything sits in a database, but no one knows something has happened. Traditional ERP and CRM are siloed.” For Ranadivé, businesses need to move away from the concept of application servers to an event server, where applications communicate events through a common bus – a service-oriented architecture. The Two-Second Advantage provides examples of how real-time decision support can grow a business. In one example, the CIO of Air France, Edouard Odier, describes a system to minimise disruption when Case study: Verna Group, healthcare manufacturer Verna Group is a healthcare manufacturing company based in Bolton, which supplies pulp paper products for infection control to organisations such as the NHS. David Foreman, group MIS manager at Verna Group, has a finance background, reporting information to the business, management accounts and decision support. He says: “We have a big tender process for the NHS, which requires plenty of information.” As well as supporting this, BI is being used to prepare financial reports and help the company compete. In the last 10 years, technology has evolved, Foreman says. “We have needed to compete. We have tried to make our information far more efficient and effective.” Verna Group has moved from yearly to rolling quarterly forecasting for its budgets. The company has deployed Cognos Planning and Cognos Contributor to allow people to contribute to the forecast. “We developed a model to enable people to go into their division/channel area which contains previous forecasts and historical data, allowing them to tweak numbers quickly. We are aiming for fast and light forecasting,” says Foreman. Users can review the data based on what has happened in the previous quarter. The model supports trends. There is also a pipeline element which drives sales, by showing business opportunities. Foreman explains: “When a hospital buys 10 macerator machines they will also buy pulp paper products.” Verna Group uses a data warehouse to collate information across the company. He says: “In April we had got to a position where overnight we could synchronise data from all systems, with aggregation and alerts. “We wanted to get moving quite quickly, and the level of our data is relatively easy.” The company needed a cheap and quick solution. “It was difficult to get pivot table information out. Cognos needed more investment,” says Foreman. The company chose QlikView. QlikView is used to interrogate the data warehouse and supports interactive reporting. Foreman says: “We used paper-based reports. Now managers can get consolidated information quickly, slice and dice and do their own analysis.” Case Study: Elekta, medical equipment provider Elekta, a medical company which provides equipment for radiation therapy, is using forecasting software from Inform to manage spare parts in its warehouses. The company needed a way to forecast stock levels of spare parts across its global network of 20 warehouses, a task that could not be completed easily with its existing Movex M3 ERP system, explains Mark Purchase, global logistics manager at Elekta. “We run a low-volume but complex operation to install, maintain and support 2,000 sites globally. Because of the mission-critical nature of the parts-support operation, we need to ensure all of our customers maintain maximum use of their investment in patient treatment systems.” Purchase says ERP is unsuitable for the low volume of parts that needs to be managed, since ERP systems are transaction processors geared towards high-volume manufacturing. He says ERP integrates sales, finance and supply chain in one system, but spare parts replenishment is a fairly specialised area in the business. “It requires very low-volume forecast - almost random ERP is not configured for this type of forecasting. “ERP would provide you with a lot of data, with lot of fields to maintain,” he adds. If Elekta had used its ERP system to support the parts replenishment business process, it would have required an awful lot of data manipulation at item level and item location, according to Purchase. Then when something changed, he would have to reset everything to do the forecast in a different way. “At end of this year I will be running 20 locations with 2,500 SKUs per location. I don’t want to perform constant maintenance and manually go into the ERP to make forecasts.” Instead, Elekta opted for add*One Inventory Optimizer from Inform, which takes a nightly feed from the Movex M3 ERP system, to forecast demand for spare parts globally and respond to the more extreme movements as soon as they register as demand. Previously forecasting demand for spare parts was based on fixed stock levels and usage. Purchase says: “We used to look at data in the ERP and feed in parameters like maximum and minimum stock levels. We would repeat this exercise globally once every three months.” Now forecasting can be conducted daily: “We can review a wide range of forecast models and select the most appropriate automatically. We take an SQL extract from the ERP and pass onto Inform six nights per week. Since data from the ERP system is processed overnight, the team has a complete overview of current and projected stock of their whole portfolio, allowing a recalculation of the global position for the next day. hind.” The system helps decide when the flight takes off, knows who will miss their connection, and automatically e-mails them with rebooking information. While real-time analytics is about collapsing delay from weeks or months to seconds. predictive analytics allows users to predict things based on a number of events happening simultaneously. “It’s situational awareness and is being used in the financial trading and online betting sectors,” says John Sidhu, chief technology officer of Glue Reply. long-haul flights are delayed. In the book, he says: “If there are 400 people on the long haul flight and the system sees that three will miss it, it may decide it’s better to have 400 on time and three left be- “We looked at data in the ERP and fed in parameters like maximum stock levels every three months” 8 He says classic BI tools cannot cope with predictive analytics because they output. In the gaming industry some of Glue Reply’s clients are creating their own tools to manage risk. Low-cost BI tools, such as QlikView, and open source business intelligence reporting tools, such as Jaspersoft, open the use of BI in business. At the high-end, companies are moving closer to real-time analytics and linking disparate sources of information to add context to the decision-making process. ■
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