BI Insight

Welcome to the February 2009 edition of our newsletter – BI Insight! In this month’s newsletter we feature “Guitar Center – MicroStrategy Implementation” case study. This case study describes how Guitar Center benefitted from Systech’s MicroStrategy implementation. The Microstrategy implementation supports business users to analyze sales and inventory to identify key trends and opportunities. And apart from this we also have included BI news articles from reputed sources. We hope you find the newsletter interesting and informative. Please invite your peers to visit us and subscribe to us.

Warm regards,

The Editor

MicroStrategy Introduces MicroStrategy 9

MicroStrategy Incorporated introduced MicroStrategy 9 at its annual user conference in Las Vegas. MicroStrategy 9, the company’s most significant release in nearly a decade, is expected to be generally available in the first quarter of 2009 and will include significant new products and enhancements to its BI software platform.

“Organizations have a mix of enterprise-grade and departmental BI applications. Enterprise BI applications continue to advance in data scale, user scale, and analytical requirements and MicroStrategy 9 includes new, advanced features to improve the performance, scale, and efficiency of large-scale enterprise BI applications,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO. “In addition, MicroStrategy 9 also includes innovative features to enable the rapid development of departmental BI applications by business users rather than IT professionals. To support consolidation and standardization, MicroStrategy 9 eases the migration of departmental BI application data and metadata into a unified, enterprise BI environment.”

As BI systems grow to thousands of users and hundreds of terabytes of data, maintaining fast query performance can be a tremendous challenge. MicroStrategy 9 includes new adaptive caching technology called In-memory ROLAP and improvements in SQL generation to enhance query performance.

MicroStrategy 9 introduces a major new architectural component called “In-memory ROLAP” to dramatically improve query performance. In-memory ROLAP takes advantage of the large addressable memory now available on 64-bit Unix, Linux, and Windows computer servers, and provides a performance-optimized middle-tier database that can respond directly to data requests from reports, dashboards, and OLAP analyses. Since the new middle-tier database is stored in computer memory, it avoids disk access delays. In-memory ROLAP can serve the data needed for the most complex and time-consuming queries, dramatically improving the average query response times. In-memory ROLAP can also offload work from database servers, freeing up database capacity and allowing enterprises potentially to delay purchasing additional database capacity.

MicroStrategy 9 introduces SQL generation algorithm optimizations for handling sophisticated analyses involving complex metrics. The new optimization algorithm can reduce the number of SQL passes by 66% and reduce database query time by as much as 75%. This new capability works transparently with reports, dashboards, and analyses, providing an immediate performance improvement to many existing MicroStrategy applications.

Successful BI systems often experience dramatic growth in user populations. It is increasingly common for a single enterprise BI installation to support thousands and even tens of thousands of business users.

MicroStrategy 9 includes significant architectural components and features that allow it to efficiently support the specific needs of smaller-scale BI systems for departments and workgroups.

Healthcare Providers Building a Smarter Healthcare System with IBM

IBM recently announced several hospitals and healthcare providers that are collaborating with IBM to help build a smarter healthcare system for ensuring patient safety, improving efficiency and reducing medical errors through electronic medical records (EMR).

Reducing healthcare costs and improving patient care through innovative systems for handling patient records is a major priority in The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, calling for $19 billion in grants and incentives for practices to invest in health IT. IBM is helping more than 1,000 hospitals worldwide integrate and access new intelligence, making EMR become smarter with open technology. The healthcare systems are built on IBM open technology for integrating and managing medical data, as well as business intelligence tools for gaining new insight. The technology can also be used for medical personnel that can now have instant access to pertinent information to respond more quickly to patient requirements.

“Now is an important time for industry leaders to step up and contribute to healthcare reform and transformation. To accelerate achievement of such goals, IBM is teaming with our many business partners, alliances and key clients to drive the creation of integrated delivery systems, including electronic medical records, that help the worldwide healthcare system become more interconnected, instrumented and intelligent,” said Dan Pelino, general manager, IBM Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry. “In this regard, the enablement of EMRs as envisioned by the Obama Administration will help to link diagnosis, drug discovery and healthcare delivery systems to insurers, employers, communities and patients themselves.”

The recently announced healthcare providers collaborating with IBM include:

• Memorial Hermann Hospital System
• Capella Healthcare
• Trillium Health Centre
• Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Oracle BI Upgrade Focuses On Public Sector

The new functionality within Oracle BI Applications 7.9.5.1 provides public sector agencies with more operational details for better funds management and spending controls.

Oracle has added new capabilities for public sector agencies in the financial analytics component of the vendor’s business intelligence suite.

The new functionality is within Oracle BI Applications 7.9.5.1, which was introduced Monday. The features provide public sector agencies with more operational details for better funds management and spending controls.

In addition, the upgrade is better able to detect exceptions through improved monitoring of budget spending, and offers more real-time information to support trend analysis and decision-making on issues.

To make deployment of the software easier, Oracle has added pre-built integration with the financial module of version 11.5.10 of the company’s suite of business applications, called E-Business Suite. In addition, there are extensions to the Oracle BI Applications data warehouse schema and metadata layer to support public sector content.

The vendor has also added extraction, transformation and load maps to pull data from the Oracle Financials module of the E-Business Suite, and had included pre-built dashboards and reports for the public sector.

“Oracle BI Applications can be deployed quickly to enable public sector agencies to achieve rapid return on investment,” Paul Rodwick, VP of product management for Oracle, said in a statement.

Besides government agencies, Oracle BI applications are available for a variety of business operations, including sales, customer service, marketing, financials, supply chain, human resources and order management, procurement and spend. Specialized industry analytics are also available.

Oracle’s latest release followed less than a week after the introduction of an upgrade of the Hyperion Strategic Finance Fusion, a financial modeling application that helps executives understand the financial impact of alternative corporate strategies.

Edition R11 includes integration with Oracle Crystal Ball, a spreadsheet-based application for predictive modeling, forecasting and Monte Carlo simulation. “Oracle Hyperion Strategic Finance R11 allows analysts to improve their forecasts by using Crystal Ball’s simulation capabilities in their financial models and better understand the risk factors impacting their business,” Bill Guilmart, Oracle VP of product management, said in a statement.

Other new integration features allow for automated sourcing from systems like general ledgers, budgeting and consolidations. The capabilities make it possible to drill back to the source system, providing an audit trail.

The Hyperion Strategic Finance Fusion application is part of the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management system.

Statistics

Background

Guitar Center is the largest chain of musical instrument retailers in the world with 214 locations throughout the United States.

To accommodate their expanding business they were seeking a platform to support complex data analysis that is user friendly. Formerly they depended on time consuming and less efficient POS System.

After evaluating several Business Intelligence vendors, they chose Systech Solutions Inc. to meet their needs for identifying the key trends and make informed decisions. Systech Solutions, Inc. was assigned to design an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) for them in this regard.

Challenges

Guitar Center required a detailed access into a variety of business data to allow the business community to analyze their data in greater depth. To offer a simplified and integrated solution for a profitable growth Systech had to address certain challenges.

• To track trends and identify opportunities. Since the data was spread across disparate systems it was a laborious process.
• To manage overwhelming amounts of data from various sources—and turning it into reliable business intelligence that enabled better business outcomes.
• To effectively design EDW for consolidated reporting both from DRUM, JDA and PeopleSoft.
• To configure and implement a commodious tool to query the EDW and to create reports.
• To compile a system that would distribute reports with in a 24 hour window every month.
• To provide a platform that could keep up with constantly evolving user requirements.

Solution

Systech Solutions fashioned a business intelligence environment that comprised of a Netezza 4.0.2 data warehousing infrastructure, a DataStage 7.5.1 ETL environment and a MicroStrategy 8.1.1 reporting environment.

The Systech team successfully achieved the extraction, transformation and loading of the source data into a data mart schema through an ETL process. The team made sure that the information was accurate, consistent, and optimally organized for complex analysis. The EDW was effectively designed for consolidated reporting both from DRUM, JDA and PeopleSoft. Since the source data was stored in individual schemas, the transform strategy included consolidation of information which was common to all source systems. A user-friendly OLAP data model was successfully created to store pre-aggregated data for fast ad-hoc query performance.

MicroStrategy reporting tool was configured to query the EDW and to create reports. The Systech team developed dashboards that included scorecards to allow any type of key performance indicators (KPI’s) to be rolled up into a score for a particular application area, overall IT performance, or anywhere in-between. More than 32 to 40 reports were run apart from the templates during the course of the project.

The sales data (KPI’s) was analyzed to:

• Anticipate the sales margin
• Analyze the SKU to aggregate (or roll-up) metrics into single overall “score” for IT and the inventory data
• Visualize store and warehouse inventory
• Calculate profitability evaluation ratio that analyzes the firm’s ability to turn inventory into cash above the cost of the inventory
• Study purchase orders and transfers

Result

The Microstrategy implementation at Guitar Center by Systech team provided them a greater insight into Key performance and Sales metrics. Systech developed an easy to use BI application to support their data from the users. The data warehouse was architected to support production reporting, making the database more intuitive to query than the operational database.

Multiple areas of their business used the data to manage inventory, identify sales opportunity, recognize key performers and review products. Systech made it possible to provide customizable user experience to provide executive summary reports, analyze sales promotion and study products sales. The robust architecture and a flexible platform enabled the team to combine right level of access with right functionality to create a positive user experience.