Archive

Archive for March, 2010

Editorial – Mar 2010

March 31st, 2010
No comments

Hi there,

Welcome to the Mar 2010 edition of BI Insight newsletter!

Identify the relevance of integrating data in today’s customer centric market!

Good decision-making requires a complete and accurate view of data. And integration of all data sources is the start to getting the complete picture. To understand the source that feeds data and a design that supports your analytics is the key to successful data integration. The strategy used for data Integration and its design affects scalability and cost. In addition to these it affects the ability to support real time data integration, master data management and SOA. It also determines interoperability with other BI tools.

“According to the latest research at Aberdeen Group, issues with customer data greatly affect sales and marketing efforts in an organization. The lack of trusted customer data and an inability to target customers through data were the top two issues. 60% of Aberdeen’s survey named customer data integration and other customer data initiatives among their top priorities for 2010.”

This reveals the extent of the need for customer data integration at many organizations. The number of mergers in 2009 might have expanded the need for data integration. Our intent is to help you deploy architectures that are self-sufficient, future-facing, effective, scalable, and interoperable. This edition of our newsletter focuses on the importance of DI and its architecture. We hope that our articles make a good case for your architecture and design.

This month’s highlights:

  1. Systech’s project success in Data mart development & reporting for Falken Tire Corporation, worldwide distributers of Ultra High Performance passenger vehicle products.
  2. A conversational article by Srini Ramaswamy, COO, Systech Solutions, Inc., exploring the need for integrated data views of the customer in gaming and hospitality industry.
  3. And, of course, my compilations of the best of recent BI publications

We hope that you find the newsletter to be a valuable resource and we encourage you to share it with your peers.

Cheers,
Vaishnavi Gollapudi
The Editor

Editor's Note

Data Mart Development and Reporting

March 31st, 2010
No comments

Background

Falken Tire is a brand of tires by Japanese Sumitomo Rubber Industries with branches across Asia, America and Europe. Their first tire was produced in 1983 and it wasn’t until two years later that they began exporting their tires outside Japan and entered the US market only in 1990.

As the organization grew, so did the need for accurate and immediate information. The company lacked an effective way to consolidate, manage and distribute business data. Data resided in many different sources and in different formats, limiting its ability to analyze and deliver it within a single platform. To evaluate performance in the market, Falken Tire compared their Sales data with the Market data. Falken Tire wanted to perform Market Share Analysis and also forecast demand. However, they were faced with complications involving multi-source data analysis.

These issues needed to be addressed by Systech Solutions, Inc.

Challenges

Diversity of sources:

The fundamental problem that Falken Tire faced was that their data was stored in different places. The Sales data was in the Operation System, Objective data was in a flat file and Market data was in an SQL database. It was not only time consuming to create a report but also not flexible to do further analysis.

Tracking and forecasting:

Traditionally, Falken Tire could not track or forecast actual sales. Therefore, it was essential to configure a reporting tool to access information in the data mart with ease. They needed to get a deeper insight into their key sales performance to better forecast the market.

Solution

After studying the data from different sources, Systech came up with a model of how the information fit together. To enable this, the development team needed to understand the existing information and find the correlated pieces. Systech’s development team then created a common format for the data mart in a SQL Server 2005 database. Later, Informatica was decided on as the most appropriate ETL platform for this BI implementation at Falken Tire. The ETL platform was configured to support reporting and complex data analysis with maximum efficiency. It was also structured to provide enough flexibility to accommodate future trade volume and business growth.
Subsequently, MicroStrategy was configured to access information in the data mart to deliver customer friendly reports, templates and dashboards.

Result

Centralized data in BI data mart:

  • Users could easily access the data. Also allowed them to compare Falken Tire sales with their competitor and do market analysis.
  • The robust architecture of the new ETL platform provided flexibility and scalability.
  • The new ETL process fetched data to reports based on real time which was impossible earlier.

 Empowered to report and analyze data to make improved decisions:

  • The new and improved dashboard consisted of multiple parameters/metrics that helped track all Key Performance Indicators in Sales and Inventory.
  • The dashboard enabled Falken Tire to view the performance of the company based on their objectives.
  • It helped create a Daily Sales Report for the previous working day and also helped to view Sales by drilling down to the zip level of the state.
  • The solution enabled business users to drill into the key trends to do an online analysis with just a click without coming back to the developer asking for a separate report.
  • The reporting tool automated the comparative market share analysis of the Sales. This process which was a multi-step process earlier was now an automated process.
  • They could report sales figures, forecast projection, estimate competitive sales and gauge the state of business.
  • Based on the forecasting demand they could manage the inventory.

 The Systech team thus helped the end users view critical performance information in a matter of seconds and quickly make decisions that seek to optimize market share.

Featured Article , , ,

Smarter Integration

March 31st, 2010
No comments

Quest to enhance customer relationships – Are you holding the right cards?

What does Data Integration mean to a successful organization in the gaming, entertainment & hospitality industry? It means everything if it’s done right! The comparison of these industries is important as the event (occupancy) is time bound and there is a cost attached to its expiry.

Every single day, the gaming & hospitality industry faces a new and growing challenge. Consumers are demanding more from businesses. They are seeking relevance and customization.

I have tried to relate, collaborate and identify the key requirements of this industry from two perspectives: as a customer and as a data integration architect. This article describes data integration as the underpinning service that can take advantage of the information embedded in the data, and play many interesting roles in predictive analytics.

Let me present few examples to delve into this:

Challenge 1 – Does your organization suffer from poor data integration?

Customer’s dilemma: I travel by air quite regularly. I do my own reservations. Every time I book the ticket, the airline prompts me to get my own seat- in spite of my traveling many times on the same airline, with a preference for a particular seat, say 1A (Even when the seat is not taken!). I would be a very happy customer if they knew their loyal customer’s (My!) preferences.  Is it too difficult for the airline to track my preferences in one place?

Architect’s perspective: This is a classic example of data integration not designed well. The answer is NO; it isn’t difficult to remember the customer’s preference. In such a scenario it is essential to architect and design a system that will capture the relevant data; in this case, store information about the customer’s profile with preferences.  Preparing data to accommodate these analytics is essential to success.

Challenge 2 – Increasing the effectiveness of data access and analysis

Customer’s dilemma: I am a creature of habit. I know when exactly I want to take my time off to go my favorite vacation spot -Las Vegas.  What interests me the most in Vegas? Casino games, good food and some rest & recreation with my friends.  The irony is that I am invited to shows that I don’t go to, to games that I don’t ever play and least of all, asked to visit them in a season that I have never gone in. The bottom line is – my ‘favorite’ casino never understood my needs!

Architect’s perspective: This is an ideal scenario to perform customer profiling. It’s critical for the design of a data integration strategy to be governed by the reports that the casino could use for their email campaign. It is always crucial to remember how data is relevant to how it’s being used. Systems can be designed to understand ROI for these campaigns by tracking conversion ratios.

This illustrates the need to consolidate additional information to help maximize value; get data from different sources to create a total view for segmentation. Only when you construct this single view, can you analyze and profile your customer and know what you want to offer each of them.

Some of the different sources of data could be;

  • The different spend on each category at the hotel – measure, analyze and report on gaming vs. non-gaming activities (such as hotel, spa, entertainment etc.)
  • Integrate financial information and measure level of success/failure at gaming.
  • Integrate financial metrics with customer satisfaction feedback to measure likelihood of retention/loyalty.

A consolidated analysis can identify your best (most profitable) customers, their preferences, their customer satisfaction scores, their response to promotions and resultant loyalty/visits and spend.

Challenge 3 – Getting the big picture

Customer’s dilemma: My friends do not play the tables, but they hone in on the slots.  A few spend time in shopping and a few in an extravagant spread at a fancy restaurant.  I, on the other hand like to do it all.  Well, may be a little less on shopping. To be honest, I expect comps when I spend a lot of money at the table. And ‘when’ I get comped lies in the hands of people who are taking note of what I am playing, how frequently I play and of course how often I win. Case in point, on my last trip to Vegas, I had to write an unhappy note to my casino host who said I did not play enough for him to comp me, but finally had to succumb to the pressure of losing me altogether to another casino. It is pretty sad that they could not see my contributions to their revenue and profits in one single view.

Architect’s perspective: To understand what the consumer’s interests and activities are, it is important to build a comprehensive method for rating the consumer across gaming and hospitality. It would add a tremendous value to design a system that provided the host with the details of the customer’s expense and ratings, both past and current. With such a system in place, the host can address what it takes to retain the right customer.

For this, we as data integration architects need to understand and identify the KPIs that could impact the business.

Smarter Integration- Holy Grail of Business Intelligence

Data Integration gives you access to a unified view of each customer of your organization. It enables a “360-degree view”. This is the key to unlocking the potential value stored across the numerous data sets and reports floating around the organization. Customer analytics enables a business analyst to gain greater insight into historical customer activity and enhance ongoing customer interactions. Assessing customer profiles can drive decisions based on predictions of customer behavior. Clearly, data integration is critical to this process since you must have access to all the information about a customer along with the customer’s history to build customer analytics.

The design of a good data integration process often may not seem economical at first, but a bad solution having the upfront savings are often quickly lost as demands on resources increase. A well-designed data integration strategy ensures consistency and unanimity of the enterprise data architecture. It ensures that there is common business language and uses the same semantic definitions.  It includes capabilities such as metadata integration, ongoing updates and maintenance, access to a wider variety of data sources, and design and debugging options.

I see this as both an art and a science to design effective data integration architecture.  And to provide this information real time would empower even the line employees and supervisors with the information necessary to impact business.

In this era of cloud computing when there is potential data prevailing in reservations, point of sale, gaming floor data, slots data, sports booking data, financial data, customer service, customer loyalty, campaign data, web logs, mail, email, media and social networking, it is a good gamble to bet on service oriented data integration strategy to keep the momentum going. Turn all the glitter into gold!

Srinivasan Ramaswamy

Srini Ramaswamy is the COO & Co-Founder of Systech Solutions Inc., a LA based Business Intelligence firm specializing in date warehousing & analytics solutions for gaming, entertainment & hospitality industry. He can be reached at srini@systechusa.com or 818-827-5646

Systech Corner , , , , ,

Industry News – Mar 2010

March 31st, 2010
No comments

IT Spending Expected to Rise in 2010

Global IT expenditure is expected to rise slightly this year for the first time since the onset of the global economic downturn, according to industry analyst Ovum. A survey of IT decision makers revealed that one third expect their budgets will increase in 2010. Despite this cautious optimism, there are signs that CIOs do not yet view IT as an engine for growth and that 2010 will mostly be a year of reckoning.

CIO attitudes towards IT spending vary by country and vertical industry, yet some important commonalities have emerged.

  • The rising sentiment that the global economy is starting to show signs of recovery is having a positive impact on planned IT budgets in 2010.
  • The perception gap between forecast and actual changes in IT expenditure has widened.
  • IT spending trends vary wildly by region, yet all vertical industries have suffered from lower IT spending compared to pre-recessionary levels.

The vast majority of enterprises will continue to experience flat (0%) budget growth in 2010.

Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst at Ovum, said: “The survey data, while promising, does not translate into an IT spending recovery. “Realistically, the numbers more likely reflect the effect of previously deep budget cuts, during 2008 and the first half of 2009, which left many IT departments operating at ‘bare-bones’ capacity.”

Furthermore, the survey data shows that the proportion of CIOs that forecast slight decreases and significant increases in IT budgets remained unchanged last year.

Combined with the high percentage of respondents that will leave their IT budgets unchanged in 2010, which is rising slightly to 42%, it shows that many enterprises remain vulnerable and are uncertain about near-term business prospects.

The perception gap between forecast and actual changes in IT expenditure has widened

Decision makers are typically adept at forecasting IT spending trends: their predictions usually deviate 5% or less from actual IT budget expenditure.

However, Ovum’s survey shows that the perception gap between forecast and actual IT budget changes widened considerably last year, following the financial crisis of 2008.

“Clearly, the negative effects of the economic downturn were greater than expected and businesses were not prepared”, said Ms Ascierto.

“Many businesses made short-term cost savings by reducing their operational costs.

“The extent to which IT budgetary expectations were miscued in 2009 is likely to mar the collective psyche of IT decision makers today. The confidence of CIOs in their ability to predict IT spending with a reasonable level of accuracy has been splintered, if not shattered.

“Consequently, Ovum believes that 2010 will be a year of reckoning for IT expenditure.”

IT projects that are most likely to be readily green-lighted are those that do not require a forklift upgrade of existing IT systems and business processes, but rather those that make modifications within existing and proven boundaries in an incremental manner and in response to business changes.

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech helps clients to look for Business Intelligence solutions depending upon where they are in a BI deployment lifecycle. They are fashioned to ensure solutions that provide a roadway to success.

View Systech’s services that span across collaborative methodologies, knowledge transfer and technical services.

http://systechusa.com/services-and-products/

Oracle Announces Enterprise Healthcare Analytics to Improve the Quality of Patient Care

Oracle recently introduced an enterprise healthcare analytics solution that helps providers create a detailed, holistic and integrated view of their enterprise. The solution integrates data from electronic medical records, clinical departmental systems, patient accounting, ERP, research, and other source systems to help providers rapidly and cost effectively unlock value from their clinical and operational data. Oracle’s enterprise healthcare analytics solution provides a foundation upon which providers can use pre-built business intelligence, analytic, data mining, and performance management applications from Oracle and its partners. Oracle Healthcare Data Warehouse Foundation is a comprehensive, detailed data model specifically engineered for provider enterprise data warehousing that includes an expanding list of more than 1,000 entities and 12,000 attributes spanning the clinical, financial, operational, and research domains. The Oracle Healthcare Data Warehouse Foundation is designed for ease of use for analytic application developers and can be easily extended to accommodate a provider’s unique environment.
Oracle Operating Room Analytics is an analytic and performance management application that gives surgical services directors and surgical, anesthesia, and nursing leaders an enterprise view of operating room efficiency. This includes analysis of the case volumes, utilization rates, turnover times, as well as more than 200 pre-built operational efficiency measures, all of which can be easily customized and extended as new metrics are created.

An ecosystem of healthcare partners is already emerging that is expected to provide analytic applications built on Oracle’s enterprise healthcare analytics foundation. This includes:

  • Anthem Healthcare Intelligence for revenue cycle, service line, cost allocation, and productivity
  • Outcome Sciences for quality reporting and patient registries
  • Quantros for quality reporting, accreditation & compliance, and safety and risk management
  • VigiLanz for infection control, pharmacovigilance and practice guidance
  • Oracle’s Rapidly Expanding Suite of Business Intelligence Solutions Offers Healthcare Providers Key Benefits

A product approach — maturing healthcare sector moving away from customized, one-off solutions to more cost effective packaged options

Provider-specific data model — stable foundation for enterprise data warehouse allows providers to benefit from third-party data integration tools and analytic applications that help reduce time-to-value and overall cost

Optimized for ease of use — intuitive, well documented model lowers the cost, time and risk associated with custom development

Greater flexibility — model is able to accommodate customization if needed to meet providers’ individual needs

“Data aggregation infrastructure capabilities as outlined by Oracle are pivotal to advancing access to actionable knowledge for improving patient safety, quality of care, compliance and for furthering ARRA goals for meaningful use of data in these domains,” said Sanjaya Kumar, M.D., President and CEO, Quantros. “We see the relationship with Oracle and its new enterprise healthcare analytics infrastructure as key for rapidly integrating and empowering healthcare providers with the decision support tools and clinical business intelligence analytics required to identify, enact and continuously monitor the impact of interventions.”

“Once considered a luxury that few hospitals could afford, real-time patient safety monitoring is making it possible to detect adverse events, optimize outcomes and automatically send warning alerts to clinicians as they occur,” said David Goldsteen, M.D., Chairman & CEO, VigiLanz. “We expect Oracle’s new enterprise healthcare analytics to play a significant role in helping us further our mission to empower clinicians with timely information that helps optimize patient care.”

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech’s Healthcare Analytics solution helps integrate patient data across the enterprise and makes it available at the point-of-service to help providers improve customer service, reduce medical errors, improve productivity and enable patient-centric processes – the prerequisite for improving the care delivery process.

View various applications and benefits of Healthcare Analytics developed at Systech.

http://www.systechusa.com/healthcare-analytics/

Systech offers a number of innovative solutions based on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Partnering with Oracle, Systech continues to help companies manage customer, workforce and financial information.

View Systech Solutions as a leader in the implementation of Oracle based Business Intelligence solutions

http://www.systechusa.com/oracle-bi/

MicroStrategy’s Free Reporting Package Provides Access to SAP BW 2010

MicroStrategy Incorporated a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, recently announced that its free reporting software package, MicroStrategy Reporting Suite, provides seamless access to SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) data. SAP BW is an online analytical processing system and data warehouse.

MicroStrategy Reporting Suite enables users to develop operational and analytical reports from SAP BW data and non-SAP data from an integrated BI interface. With MicroStrategy Reporting Suite, business users and IT professionals can quickly access SAP BW data to perform statistical and advanced analyses, run performance scorecards, and drill to investigate details, all from the same tool. MicroStrategy Reporting Suite extends SAP BW data analysis to more users, with its full-featured, intuitive interface and easy-to-use reports.

“MicroStrategy 9 brings to the table a range of methods to integrate with SAP, from supporting robust reporting, analytics, dashboards, and applications that access SAP BW to integrating BI into SAP Enterprise Portal,” said Mark Smith, CEO and EVP of Research, Ventana Research. “MicroStrategy enables the rapid integration and use of existing SAP BW InfoCubes and associated business queries that the user organization might have spent significant time to develop.”

With MicroStrategy Reporting Suite for SAP BW, business users are able to:

  • Visualize data using graphs and performance scorecards
  • Create rankings and time-based comparisons
  • Perform a complete range of business calculations and build advanced analytics against SAP BW data
  • Schedule reports to run to a personalized history list
  • View detailed information in tabular grid reports or visualize simple grid-and-graph dashboards in a single click
  • Run MDX queries against SAP BW without writing any code or scripts
    Run and personalize their own reports and analyses against SAP and non-SAP data

“We considered many BI products and found that MicroStrategy’s platform easily integrated with our SAP BW system,” said Luis Sanches, Controller, Grupo Media Capital. Roberto Costa, Director of Control Management of Grupo Media Capital, added, “The MicroStrategy platform has streamlined the management of business information for us, improving data comprehension and providing immediate access to information by month, product, and/or business unit, with a simple click of the mouse.”

“We’re currently using MicroStrategy for reporting and analysis of our sales and marketing data stored in SAP BW, and we plan to expand to supply chain monitoring and financial analysis next,” said Santiago Allande, Director of Systems and Processes, FAMIQ. “MicroStrategy’s native connections to SAP BW and flexibility to connect to a relational model, combined with the positive experience our end users have with MicroStrategy, makes this an excellent solution for us.”

MicroStrategy Reporting Suite is available via a free download and the license is perpetual, providing Web-based reporting of SAP BW data for up to 100 users at no charge. Free online training, free online support, and other free resources help to ensure rapid development and deployment.

“MicroStrategy’s BI platform is certified under the SAP Powered by NetWeaver program, which helps customers leverage their existing investments in SAP to build successful business intelligence applications,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy COO. “MicroStrategy Reporting Suite provides a user-friendly interface for business users to quickly uncover actionable insights from SAP BW data.”

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech has been weaving MicroStrategy’s award winning BI platform into its proven methodology for creating sophisticated Business Intelligence environments since 1998.

View Systech’s MicroStrategy Technology Practice

http://www.systechusa.com/microstrategy/

Industry News , , , , ,