Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence & CPM

NHS Wakefield District/Advanced Business Solutions

NHS Wakefield District is one step ahead of the NHS transformation, thanks to a comprehensive business intelligence solution from Advanced Business Solutions. Against a backdrop of severe austerity measures and transformative changes to the way healthcare services are commissioned, Primary Care Trusts are under greater pressure than ever to reduce spending and improve efficiency. NHS Wakefield District is the main NHS body responsible for healthcare and health promotion for Wakefield in West Yorkshire, which has a population of over 323,000. The Primary Care Trust (PCT) commissions a broad range of health services, including hospitals, ambulances, mental health and other specialist services, as well as agreeing contracts with local GPs, dentists, pharmacists and optometrists.

Dana Petroleum/Rinedata

Dana Petroleum plc is an independent, FTSE 250 oil and gas exploration and production company. Its principal geographic focus is on the UK, Egypt and Norway where Dana’s offices are located. As part of its growth strategy Dana Petroleum had completed two acquisitions in a short period of time, extending its business into Egypt and Norway. However, this success came at a cost. The problem was that these operations had reporting and budgeting systems that were significantly different to those of its head office. Similarly, the old planning system was unable to support the new size of the company. The finance team at Dana carried out a review of the corporate performance management (CPM) marketplace and selected Infor’s BPA platform as their new budgeting and reporting tool. Once the product had been selected, Dana engaged Rinedata as its implementation partner.

Forum Energy Technologies Inc/Oracle – exclusive interview

In August 2010 the Triton Group merged with four other companies to form Forum Energy Technologies Inc, with the Triton Group being the latest component of the Subsea division within Forum Energy Technologies Inc. The corporate office of the Subsea division of Forum Energy Technologies Inc is based in Aberdeen, and has 430 employees across all its divisions and a turnover of $176 million. The Subsea division offers subsea technologies and related services to the oil & gas and other underwater industries. Through its Perry-Slingsby and Sub-Atlantic brands, it manufactures a wide range of hydraulic and electric subsea remotely operating vehicles (ROVs) for inspection, survey and light intervention duties, through to deepwater heavy construction applications. The company needed a common financial reporting system across the whole group and chose Oracle Hyperion Financial Management.

Bay Restaurant Group/IBM

Bay Restaurant Group is the fourth-largest casual dining operator in the UK, with three industry-leading restaurant brands – La Tasca, Slug and Lettuce and Ha Ha Bar & Grill. A second company, the Town and City Pub Company, operates 161 high street bars, mostly branded as Yates’. The Bay Restaurant Group needed to introduce technology that would analyse the performance of individual outlets and assess sales trends throughout the group. The company also wanted to use the data to manage staffing levels and analyse the success of promotions to continue to drive the business forward. The group worked with the consultancy company, change++, to find a suitable solution for its business needs. After evaluating technology from several vendors, the bar and restaurant group opted for IBM Cognos 8 BI technology.

Hallmark/Teradata

In January 2010, Hallmark celebrated its 100th anniversary as probably the oldest, but in any case largest, producer of greeting cards in the world. The company has been privately held and family owned for three generations and generates $4.3 billion annual revenue with a variety of products sold in more than 100 countries. In the US, Hallmark can be found in 40,000 locations of Walmart and other non-food trade organisations, as well as in 3,500 specialty stores under the Gold Crown banner that meet special requirements. Most of them are operated independently but 450 are owned by the Hallmark company itself. In the year 2000 a general programme for local store marketing was started based on greeting cards for specific events such as birthday, holiday (Christmas) or New Year. Emails were added in 2004. The individual retailers enroll and order a defined quantity of greeting cards and Hallmark runs the campaigns via TCRM (Teradata Customer Relationship Management) under the stores’ names and addresses.

The Co-operative/Teradata – exclusive interview

The Co-operative Group is a family of businesses run democratically by over two-and-a-half-million members to meet their common needs and aspirations. Each member has an equal right to a say in how the business is run and how its social goals are achieved. So instead of pursuing profits like businesses controlled by shareholders, Co-op members are able to steer the business in a more responsible direction. In 2007, the Co-op Group had an annual turnover of £9.4 billion, with 87,000 employees serving around 10 million customers a week in over 4,000 high-street branches and through online shopping. The group has over 3,000 food stores and supermarkets around the UK. The Co-operative’s own-brand food range aims to combine quality with honest and ethically sourced products. The Co-op is the only retailer to sell food grown on its own farms, and is the biggest supporter of Fairtrade with over 200 lines, which is why the group is the top ethical supermarket in the UK. It has been a Teradata user for about 15 years.

SEOS/PROPHIX Software

SEOS is a leading global supplier of immersive visual display solutions, offering a complete design, development, production, installation and support service. Its products are used worldwide in simulators for military and commercial flight, air traffic control, marine and surface transportation, as well as for planetariums, science centres and digital immersive theatre applications. SEOS was facing too many problems with its budgeting process. For example, when end users changed the formatting of the spreadsheets, numbers didn’t summarise correctly. Facing lengthy budgeting cycles, SEOS implemented PROPHIX, creating a centralised profit planning, forecasting and reporting solution.

Oncore IT/PROPHIX Software

Oncore IT is a supplier of managed IT services to small to medium-sized businesses in the UK and other parts of Europe. Merging hardware, software and 24/7 management, administration and problem fixing, Oncore provides a total outsourced IT solution for its clients. From its network operations centre (NOC), Oncore IT provides mission-critical IT solutions to leading firms within chambers or commerce, insurance and financial services. Initially finding it difficult to forecast long-term business based on contractual information, Oncore IT now uses PROPHIX for multi-year resource planning – ensuring the right resources are in the right places at the right time.

UNSW/CALUMO

The University of New South Wales (UNSW) is one of Australia’s leading teaching and research facilities. Based in Sydney, UNSW has expanded rapidly, and now employs 5,000 staff who support a community of 40,000 students. As the university expanded, its finance team struggled to gather sufficiently comprehensive budget data from individual faculties and schools. In February 2008, UNSW implemented the CALUMO Performance Management suite, which is built on Microsoft business intelligence (BI) technologies. The open architecture solution enabled UNSW to devise a range of Microsoft Office Excel and web-based forms that adapted to different staff skill levels. The finance team acquired more detailed information faster and was able to generate specialist, one-off reports. In addition, finance staff could easily interrogate financial data to identify exactly where individual faculty programmes were exceeding their budget.

Corus/Information Builders – exclusive interview

Corus was formed on 6 October 1999 through the merger of British Steel and Koninklijke Hoogovens of the Netherlands. It is Europe’s second largest steel producer with annual revenues of around £12 billion and a crude steel production of over 20 million tonnes, primarily in the UK and the Netherlands. Corus comprises three operating divisions – Strip Products, Long Products and Distribution & Building Systems – and has a global network of sales offices and service centres. Corus is a subsidiary of Tata Steel, the world’s sixth largest steel producer. The group includes Corus, Tata Steel Thailand and NatSteel Asia, with a combined presence across five continents and nearly 50 countries. Originally Corus was mainframe-based and all its reports were produced by the IT department for its end users. It realised that it needed a much more advanced reporting system. After reviewing the market, Focus from Information Builders was the only product that met its needs and could handle the variety of legacy databases that included Adabas, DB2, Supra and DL1.

Caffè Nero/IBM

Caffè Nero Group Ltd was founded in 1997 and is currently the largest independent coffee retailer in the UK, with over 330 stores from Brighton to Aberdeen. As a growing business, Caffè Nero currently opens on average one store a week. Having created 330 branches over the course of 10 years, the focus is on managing rapid growth and providing quality coffee to a growing customer base. However, there was a lack of appropriate technology to analyse business performance and maximise successes. It is also important to manage the Caffè Nero brand effectively as the company grows. To avoid a formulaic feel, the company needed to identify customer trends in different regions and react accordingly by catering to specific customer preferences. However, as the number of stores grew, this was becoming more difficult. Caffè Nero introduced an electronic point of sale (EPOS) system and started to look at rolling out a business intelligence system to help understand trends and predict future sales. It turned to Tahola, a Cognos partner, for support. Tahola suggested a Cognos business intelligence solution, which enabled the board to access reports showing company-wide information.

Southern Railway/COA Solutions – exclusive interview

Southern provides train services in south London and between central London and the south coast, through East and West Sussex and Surrey, and parts of Kent and Hampshire. Last year it carried 120 million passengers. Its 3,500 staff manage 160 stations and operate and maintain a fleet of 300 new and refurbished trains. The company realised that it needed to introduce a more effective management reporting structure that would allow information to be accessed centrally, rapidly and in a consistent way. It started by looking at a human resources analytics product being used by another train operator, who had the same HR and payroll system as it did. This product, now called People Analytics from COA Solutions, was of great interest as it would allow the company to measure and report on a number of key HR metrics emerging from the HR data.

Litasco/OutlookSoft – exclusive interview

Litasco is the international trading arm of Russian oil giant, LUKOIL, the second largest privately-owned oil company in the world. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, it is becoming a major player in the global oil trading market, with subsidiary offices in 10 countries in Europe, the Middle East, the US and Singapore. Litasco is a high-growth company. In the first half of 2006, its net profit rose by 55%. But it operates in a volatile marketplace and in order to sustain its performance, it needs to monitor its financial position closely. Litasco has been putting in place a best-practice corporate performance management system to ensure it complies with international reporting standards and maximises its trading opportunities. It liked OutlookSoft because it has a very strong interface with Excel and its user interface is excellent.

Chubb Insurance/Cognos – exclusive interview

Chubb Insurance Company of Europe is part of The Chubb Corporation, a worldwide organisation providing specialised insurance programmes to individuals and a range of businesses through independent brokers. Chubb focuses on commercial property and casualty insurance and in insuring high-net-worth individuals. It has over 130 offices worldwide and assets of more than $35 billion. Worldwide premiums in 2004 were over $12 billion – with Chubb Europe accounting for 10% of this – and net income was $1.5 billion. Chubb Europe has around 1,200 employees and an annual turnover of more than $1 billion. It operates in 11 European countries, with its biggest markets being the UK, Germany and France. Good management information is the lifeblood of any insurer and Chubb developed its European Management Information Repository (EMIR) to improve its management reporting. EMIR sources data from several different databases in both Europe and the US. This is restructured and consolidated using Infomatica’s extract, transform and load (ETL) tool. Information is then presented using Cognos analysis and reporting tools, and the inhouse-developed Kio tool.