Hello everyone,

Welcome to the June 2010 edition of “BI Insight” – our newsletter focused on the thoughts, events and products shaping our industry.

In this technology driven environment, businesses are looking to improve momentum of change in their business. They are looking for upgrades to their systems and are seeking new and improved business processes. In thinking through the change process, it is important to be aware of all the potential hazards to avoid in the process of implementing “change”. But even after the change is implemented successfully, it could face resistance to adoption of the new system. In some cases, it may fail to deliver in the promised benefits or fail due to difficulty in training the end users. In short, change management can be a challenge!

In this edition of BI Insight, we explore how this change can be managed efficiently for any technology or system implementation. We have tapped into our experiences from various BI & DW implementations to provide a consolidated view of our knowledge and best practices in Change Management.

This month’s highlights:

1. Systech’s project success in a seamless migration to Netezza for Nationwide Financial Services
2. A white paper by Venkat Reddy Pagydyala, Manager and Principal Architect of Systech Solutions, Inc., taking us through a powerful list of things to remember for an Effective Change Management.
3. And, of course, my compilations of news and 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

Nationwide Financial Services, Inc., (NFS) together with its subsidiaries, provides long-term savings and retirement products in the United States. The company operates in three segments: Individual Investments, Retirement Plans, and Individual Protection offering a variety of investment products including annuity products, income products, and investment advisory services and investment life insurance products. All three segments were run on the Teradata platform.

NFS seeked a solution that helped them compete in a shifting global market, and to ensure that the IT infrastructure was as cost effective and as operationally efficient as possible on a long run.

Systech was selected for the conversion project to migrate the Data Warehouse platform from the existing Teradata platform to the newly acquired Netezza Data Warehouse appliance, to leverage a proven, functionally rich technology. The project involved moving the data itself as well as “re-wiring” all Data integration, reporting, application interfaces and any other systems which touched the existing data warehouse.

Challenges

• The complexity of multiple data source systems and identifying all components of an alternate solution that require design change due to conversion and identifying the impact of those changes
• Incomplete documentation in existing processes such as data load, reporting and interface processes
• In-flight project management (Keeping development going on existing infrastructure while converting and managing the integration process)
• Database “re-modeling” and having to isolate and confirm data Model re-usability and potential issues
• Confirm Re-usability of existing approach and/or alternate strategy
• Ability to generate a balanced test plan that meets critical test criteria in allotted budget and service hours available
• Testing in this project represents a major and complex element as the end result of the project interconnects so many technologies, addresses a significant amount of data across the organization and impacts a wide group of end users

Solution

Systech executed a managed conversion scope of the entire Nationwide Financial Data Warehouse environment. The financial data is now stored in a staging area and in various data marts. The migration of “ETL” which constitutes the application code and processes moves the data on an ongoing basis into the data warehouse and various data marts. The migration of the connected reporting environments and applications interfaces to the data warehouse.

The change of database platform from Teradata and Netezza has impacts on the physical structures of the database schema, ranging from naming standards, column data types and object functionality such as writing into a table through a view. The design took into account all such factors in arriving at an alternate schema design that would be completely supported by Netezza and at the same time provide the exact same functionality as the current Teradata environment.

The processes that perform data movement across the systems use Teradata specific functionality to perform bulk loads, faster exports or some specific data transformations. A host of such functions and functionalities were identified as part of design phase and an alternate solution was designed to provide the exact same functionality in the new Netezza environment.

The reporting applications interact with the Teradata environment through a series of reporting tools and technology. The interaction of these tools with the Teradata environment happens in a number of ways, some tools offer semantic layers to mask the underlying database schema with a business definition, As far as reporting applications are concerned the two major design factors that were implemented are Netezza specific functions used and Connectivity mechanism.

Results & Benefits

Systech’s Success at NFS was implementing cost savings and performance improvement. Reporting performance improvement in Business Objects was substantially a 65% reduction in processing time. Systech completed a seamless database backup to the Netezza DR database. Systech went in with a very complete approach and methodology around conversion that managed a very complex scope. The attitude and teamwork displayed contributed to the team’s accomplishment to enhance the current reporting capabilities and greatly enhances NFS’s ability to achieve competitive advantage through actionable data analytics going forward.

Despite disruptions for many reasons, the Systech dedication and project management really was apparent. The teams worked incredible hours to make deadlines and complete the project. Systech’s assistance with organizing the numerous technical challenges and helping NFS keep track of backup copy of data for comparison. We accomplished an amazing amount of tedious testing through teamwork.

“This was a very challenging project which required an enormous amount of collaboration across business units, technical disciplines and our vendor partners. The attitude and teamwork displayed by Systech was awesome. Their accomplishment not only enhances our current reporting capabilities, but even more importantly, greatly enhances Nationwide Finance’s ability to achieve competitive advantage through actionable data analytics going forward.” -Tim Lyons, Vice President, NF – Business Solution Services, Nationwide Financial Services

Controlled Change Management goes through multiple steps. It adheres to each step in close detail each time a change is made and forms the critical success factor for effective Change Management. A Change can be anything from renaming a report to upgrade of all the involved systems to the next reliable version of software and hardware.

An effective Change management is to create a solid process that reduces an overhead while still gives you the results you need to meet your compliance and business goals versus a cumbersome, inefficient process that weighs heavily on your resources.

This report educates management and IT on the best practices to Plan, Design and Develop, Quality check, Implement and Close the “change”.

Register here to request the white paper.

New York, NY – Month, Day, 2010 – Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, today reiterated that it has partnered with Systech Solutions, Inc. to strengthen the ability to help customers extend their overall BI and Analytics capabilities on the Information Builders platform.

The partnership will allow small-to-medium and mid-market businesses (SMB) in the West, Southwest and Mid west regions gain a competitive edge while getting the most value out of IT investments.

“Over the last few years, we have seen significant shifts in the expectations of end users and their relationship with enterprise software,” said Gerald Cohen, CEO, Information Builders. “We provide an integrated solution that allows customers a completely integrated solution for gaining timely and trusted information to achieve positive business outcomes.  Systech Solutions, Inc. allows the use of unified business intelligence to help companies address their biggest challenges, and make use of business opportunities.

The best-of-breed combination of Information Builders software and Systech’s expertise in custom solutions for the media and entertainment, CPG & retail, gaming, hospitality, and financial services is expected to make a powerful offering in the SMB market.

Working with Systech will not only help provide millions of Information Builders users around the world an ideal BI fit for unique business models, but will also help leverage Systech’s offshore development center for cost effective and speedy implementations.

As an Information Builders’ partner, Systech will be the go-to partner in offering consulting and implementation teams. Information Builders will train and certify technical and sales staff at Systech and provide ongoing technical support to ensure an ideal customer experience. In addition, the two companies will engage in targeted marketing activities to drive greater awareness of Information Builders in Systech’s core markets.

About Information Builders

Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 16,000 customers for the past 35 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. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets. The company’s comprehensive enterprise product offerings 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 1,350 people and has more than 250 business partners.

About Systech Solutions, Inc.

Systech Solutions, Inc. a leading Business Intelligence Services provider, delivering complete and custom solutions/implementations. Systech leverages the power of data and information to eliminate sources of inefficiency in your business process, reducing time and increasing revenue.

Founded in 1993, Los Angeles-based Systech Solutions has grown internationally with bases in the United States and in India. This incredible growth story has resulted in Systech being named one of the Fastest Growing Companies in America for two consecutive years by Inc. Magazine. To offer its clients cost-effective solutions, Systech established an Offshore Technology Center as well as Systech Academy in Chennai, India – specializing in Data Warehousing, Data Integration and Business Intelligence.

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

Wall Street steps up analytics spending

Over 90% of Wall Street firms expect to increase spending on analytics over the next year, with risk and compliance the areas most likely to see greater investment, according to a survey from IBM and Sifma.

The poll of nearly 250 business and IT Wall Street professionals shows firms are increasing their focus on systemic risk strategies as they prepare to meet the government’s increased transparency demands.

Of all regulatory activities, systemic risk was chosen by 55% of respondents to be the largest driver of IT investments. Building on that trend, risk analytics for compliance was ranked as the top analytics investment opportunity, at 37%, beating out categories such as analytics for client segmentation, on 21% and external fraud, 13%.

IBM says concerns about the economy are beginning to wane as for the first time since the 2008 financial collapse, prompting firms to revisit the use of IT to promote organisational sustainability.

Key priorities include innovating processes around trading, portfolio management and risk management but, surprisingly, client relationship management ranked last out of 17 categories with backing from only two per cent. Almost half of respondents expect 20% to 30% of their technology budget to be allocated for ‘transformational initiatives’ in 2010 and 2011.

Meanwhile, 90% of participants expect to outsource one or more of their processes this year with compliance reporting and analytics for risk the most likely fields.

Despite the positive technology investment outlook, Wall Street professionals cite lack of IT staff and high implementation costs as the biggest inhibitors for technology implementation, consistent with findings for last year. To overcome some of these challenges, the industry is showing a larger appetite for disruptive technologies such as cloud computing – 61% – to force business model change.

Shanker Ramamurthy, GM, IBM Financial Services Sector, says: “Coming out of the largest financial crisis in modern day history, there has never been a more important time for firms to capitalise on technology investments to make sense of the data and gain a more sophisticated understanding of risks. The road to recovery is built on infusing intelligence across operations, streamlining costs and getting back to basics so that firms once again focus on innovation and growth.”

Tom Price, MD, Sifma, adds: “Having the right technology in place is more essential than ever in efforts to monitor risk across firms and ensure regulators can identify and address potential problems before they escalate.”

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

MicroStrategy to Initiate High Performance Testing on Netezza Data Warehouse Appliance

McLean, Va., June 21, 2010 – MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, and Netezza Corporation (NYSE: NZ), a global leader in data warehouse, analytic, and monitoring appliances, today announced the delivery of a state-of-the-art Netezza data warehouse appliance to MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy will conduct high-volume, high-scale tests on the Netezza appliance as part of its High Performance initiative launched earlier this year.
Netezza has provided a TwinFin data warehouse and analytics appliance with more than 100 terabytes of user data capacity to MicroStrategy’s High Performance and Scalability Lab. MicroStrategy’s Performance Engineering team will use the Netezza appliance to run hundreds of large-scale tests to research, identify, and resolve potential performance obstacles for customers.

MicroStrategy’s High Performance initiative includes the formation of its High Performance and Scalability Lab, the creation of a dedicated Performance Engineering team, and specific R&D efforts solely focused on providing MicroStrategy customers with the highest levels of performance for BI applications of all sizes. With its high performance initiative, MicroStrategy plans to deliver up to 10x faster BI applications, provide faster than 3-second response times for most predictable queries and analyses, and provide faster than 5-second response times for the majority of ad hoc queries.

The combination of MicroStrategy and Netezza enables joint customers to perform advanced analytics on large volumes of data with maximum performance. Approximately one-third of Netezza’s customers use MicroStrategy for their business intelligence requirements. Mutual customers of MicroStrategy and Netezza include: Ahold, AutoTrader.com, Burlington Coat Factory, Con-way Freight, LoanPerformance, Pacific Sunwear, Ryder System, and Thomas Cook.

“Netezza is delighted to provide MicroStrategy with the TwinFin data warehouse appliance, which is designed for rapid analysis of extremely high data volumes,” said Matt Rollender, Director of Strategic and Technology Partnerships at Netezza. “The complementary technologies of MicroStrategy and Netezza provide leading enterprises with the power to analyze expanding data warehouses and distribute actionable information to thousands of diverse users.”

“MicroStrategy and Netezza have a strong business and technology relationship focused on providing customers with high performance and scalability at a low total cost of ownership,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO. “The new TwinFin appliance from Netezza represents a significant addition to our High Performance and Scalability Lab and to our major initiative to deliver even greater enhancements in performance and scalability for our customers’ enterprise-wide BI deployments.”

About Netezza Corporation

Netezza Corporation (NYSE: NZ) is the global leader in data warehouse, analytic and monitoring appliances that dramatically simplify high-performance analytics across an extended enterprise. Netezza’s technology enables organizations to process enormous amounts of captured data at exceptional speed, providing a significant competitive and operational advantage in today’s data-intensive industries, including digital media, energy, financial services, government, health and life sciences, retail and telecommunications. Netezza is headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts and has offices in Northern Virginia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Australia and Singapore.

About MicroStrategy

Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology. MicroStrategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations worldwide make better business decisions every day. Companies choose MicroStrategy for its ease-of-use, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability.

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

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the May 2010 edition of “BI Insight” – our newsletter focused on the thoughts, events and products shaping our industry.

“How do I deliver the right product—in the right quantity, at the right location, and at the right price?”

Times have changed and there has been a paradigm shift in the thinking of organizations. Organizations are seeking focused and robust Analytical solutions to answer specific questions. All manner of companies are looking out for approaches that will make them more agile and adaptable, and improve real-time decision-making capabilities.

Gartner rightly says, “To drive real business improvement, you have to keep score. But reaching consensus on what will be measured, how and when, is easier said than done”.

With so many competitors in this highly commoditized market, how do companies differentiate from their competition? Who are the most profitable customers/products/categories? How are the customers buying their product/category? How can they best evaluate the impact of market trade funding on sales to repeat successful promotions? Do you have sufficient data to take appropriate decisions to increase customer satisfaction?

With the help of Business Intelligence and Analytics, we are trying to answer these questions accurately – and possibly in real time! This edition of our newsletter focuses on some of the trends for “intelligent” analytics across the CPG & retail industry. We hope that our articles help you find strategic insights and acts as a catalyst for your business transformation.

This month’s highlights:

1. Systech’s project success in Category Management for a major home video distribution company
2. A featured report on collaborative strategies and technology solutions in Supply Chain Management.
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

A major home video distribution company sought Systech’s assistance to bolster their category leadership for the DVD category in the retail scenario. They required retailer specific solutions and comparable insights across many retailers and markets.

Objective

The objective of the Category Management project is to provide the data foundation, both strategically and technically, for the overall Category Management Application and subsequent releases, the better forecasting and allocation of new releases, and fixture level assortment planning and merchandising. The approach targeted the most influential variables within a category manager’s span of control: Adjacencies, Aisle Flow, Planogram Configuration, and SKU Assortment in an effort to simplify the consumer shopping experience.

Challenges

Data

• Highly disparate sources of data made it difficult to get a holistic view
• Lack of visibility into financial performance, channel sales and inventory across 13 territories outside US

Incentives

• Category management functions between the retailer and the distributor across the globe was not aligned
• Different promotions and plannogramming at various retailers across different locations made it difficult to perform an efficient analysis

Process

• Standardization of master/reference data across multiple categories
• Required definition of goals, metrics and incentives

Technology

• Required timelines and quality of analysis on large volumes of granular data
• Needed access into significant number of resources to crunch data, gather insights and make it actionable

Solution

Systech worked with the client to develop Enterprise Data Architecture to Integrate Data and applications residing in 13 different sources across many countries. Informatica was configured for the ETL process to extract data from source & populate the data mart. Systech’s seamless data exchange through automation, resulted in minimal manual intervention. Conversions and interfaces were also built from existing and legacy systems to a flexible platform, and migration was managed without any disruptions to the users. To make the deployment efficient, Systech adopted a Phased Approach (by territory)

Systech also designed, developed & implemented the data warehouse, the reporting & Dashboard applications to provide information on Sales, inventory, promotion, assortment planning, merchandizing, market share by retailer, by SKU, by time, by region using MicroStrategy. Defining key business drivers and KPIs to achieve deeper insights into the product was also facilitated.

Product-specific configuration principles were developed to be implemented when new DVDs were introduced into the strategic assortment structure. In addition, Systech developed a fully automated assortment tool that integrated configuration principles with market forecasting to optimize space allocation on an account level.

The category management application was developed in an onsite – offshore model.

The underpinning category strategy set by Systech was to increase footfall into the category, by improving relevance, as well as to simplify the customer shopping experience, through improved layouts, product range segmentation and product presentation.

Results & Benefits

Assortment Planning and Merchandising

•  Assisted in determining which products should be in distribution at specific stores during specific time frames
•  Assisted in determining which, and when, to discontinue an item
•  Helped the buyer determine which assortment of products will best maximize and capitalize on seasonal changes and events like holidays.
•  Matched consumer demographic and psycho-graphic traits to store level assortment
•  Determined incremental gain obtained thrrough cross selling synergy, or diminished sales resulting from cannibalization
•  Helped understand correlations between qualitative activities, such as fixtures and displays, and quantitative results such as sales dollars and unit sales
•  Helped understand cross-merchandising patterns and opportunities, such as selling DVD’s near DVD players
•  Assessed planogram performance in maximizing store sales and/or category profits

Market Share Analysis

•  Assisted in determining the performance of retailers and products across different geographic areas such as the West coast, Midwest, Los Angeles, etc.
•  Evaluated the performance of retailers and products across different channels such as grocery, mass merchant, specialty
•  Assisted in ranking and assessing the performance of vendor sales for specific products across retailers
•  Helped compare the retailer’s sales performance against another part of the market, or across the market as a whole.
•  Assessed the opportunities of expanding the retailers’ footprint into new markets, categories, or channels.
•  Evaluated Market Share across studio, brand, genre, format, top selling DVD

Sales and Inventory Analysis

•  Assisted in analyzing POS sales performance based on product, vendor, store, division, or time frame
•  Evaluated sales, profit, and distribution share across the retailer categories
•  Assisteded in ranking, contrasting, and evaluating the sales, profits, and related performance of specific products across brands or franchises
•  Helped understand how to maximize sales performance based on the physical store layout and store type
•  Assisted the retailer in managing out-of-stocks, as well as assessing opportunity cost
•  Helped the retailer manage inventory capacities at both the warehouse and store level
•  Assisted in planning initial forecasts, as well as replenishments order requirements
•  Evaluated the impact on category profits by analyzing shrink and loss prevention
•  Helped better manage the inventory process by monitoring the product movement

Promotion and Event Analysis

• Assisted in determining increases or decreases in sales resulting from promoting two or more items together
• Evaluated the sales, profit, or distribution or a new item launch or re-priced item
• Determined the impact to product and category performance in conjunction with the price elasticity
• Assisted in assessing the performance of specific retail promotional tactics and combination of Ad Price, Display, Price Points, etc.
• Assessed the performance of special events such as a sporting event tie-in, celebrity store signing, etc.
• Determined the performance of special pack configurations, such as dual packs, premium packs, special editions, limited editions, etc.
• Understood the impact and value add of promotional themes and circular themes
• Assessed the impact of product placement in an advertisement or Sunday circular
• Compared and analysed retailer promotional price point against competitor promotional price points

The majority of concepts developed through this project have been implemented by retailers, leading in all cases to double digit improvement in performance for both the DVD category as a whole, and the whole DVD distribution enterprise.

Supply Chain solutions are becoming increasingly popular in the recent trend of cost-cutting and corporate optimization.  Across the board, organizations are rushing to implement supply chain management solutions, but what options exist, and what conditions make the difference between incredible efficiencies and unnecessary expenditures? First of all, it may be worthwhile to understand the solution that an organization seeks for its supply chain.

Supply chains exist in every organization and therefore, any solution that is being contemplated should only increase the efficiencies in the supply chain.

To begin with, there are three key areas that need to be understood:

1. Business Partners in the supply chain
   1. Who are they?
   2. What role do they play in the overall chain?
   3. What is the value that they provide?
   4. What level of cooperation can I get from them in improving efficiencies in my supply chain?
2. Business Process for the supply chain
   1. What are the inefficiencies in my current business process?
   2. What opportunities do I have to remove these inefficiencies?
   3. Where do I need cooperation from my business partners?
   4. What bargaining power do I have to demand this cooperation?
3. Application of Technology
   1. How can I best leverage commonly available technology to improve by business process?
   2. What applications should I use?
   3. Do I make or buy these applications?

Business Partners in the Supply Chain

Increasingly organizations have started involving all the business partners in crafting a coordinated supply chain solution. The Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) initiative of the Voluntary Inter industry Commerce Standards (VICS) is a case in point. CPFR outlines processes, guidelines and standards for member organizations (also the business partners) that can reduce the complexity of the collaboration.

 Business Process for the Supply Chain

 True supply chain management invariably involves the business processes of diverse business partners. Without commonly understood and adopted business process, any supply chain will fall apart. But to ensure that the business process is uniformly adopted across the supply chain, business partners need to understand the value they will derive in adopting a unified business process.

In many instances, what appears to be a process optimization for one organization may not have an optimizing effect when the entire supply chain is considered. An illustration of this is the improper adoption of Just in Time (JIT) inventory. Some organizations approached JIT by asking suppliers to carry and deliver the inventory as and when needed. This seemed to reduce inventory for these organizations but quickly it became evident that inventory remained a problem, as did the carrying costs associated with it, when you consider the entire supply chain.  Just In Time cost methodologies have proven to be a hopelessly vicious cycle: costs shifted to partners within the supply chain were passed back to the organizations with increased product cost.

 Collaborative planning would mean that all business partners work together, share information and plan each others requirements so that the supply chain is indeed, truly optimized.   For example retailers are now willing to part with POS (Point of Sale) information to their suppliers who can then use it to better understand customer buying patterns and trends. This then leads to better planning on part of the supplier and higher turnover of inventory for the retailer, because the right goods are stocked at the right time.

 Application of Technology

 Any modification to the business process to optimize the supply chain should keep in mind the technology that is currently available. In many instances, tremendous efficiencies can be achieved by merely introducing a new technology to the supply chain, without modifying the business process. In other instances, business process engineers have to work in collaboration with Technologists to understand how commonly available technology can be craftily incorporated into business process to derive competitive advantage. In some other cases, one may have to adopt existing applications, simply because they have become industry standards.

The Role of Technology in Supply Chain Optimization

 There are no universal solutions/applications available off-the-shelf that can manage your supply chain. In almost all the cases, it is a combination of applications that help manage the supply chain. Some of the commonly available applications that are used to manage the supply chain are:

1. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems: These are designed to centralize all transactions through one core application.  This helps to manage operations and to ensure that there is a 360-degree view of the organization.
2. Demand Planning Solutions: Designed specifically to forecast demand in advance for production/purchasing departments to plan their activities. Work in conjunction with Business Intelligence solutions and feed forecast/planning information to ERP Systems.
3. Business Intelligence Solutions: Facilitate informed decision-making by providing analysis of current and historical information. Provide input for all departments of the business.
4. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: Provide a 360-degree view of the customer by capturing all client interactions such as products sold, support provided and customer enquiries. This ensures that the customer gets consistent service from the organization. Feeds into CRM Analytics solution and BI Solutions.
5. CRM Analytics Solutions: Helps in understanding customer interactions and consumer behavior. Provide inputs for marketing to understand customer segments and product preferences, which then influences demand planning.
6. Global Distribution Systems: Helps in management and movement of goods and services. A key to ensuring customer satisfaction while helping improve and plan sales and distribution activities.
7. E-Procurement Solutions: Aids in the search for procurement of goods and services. Organizations spend significant amount of resources on procuring direct and indirect materials.  These sourcing and vendor selection issues can be substantially reduced by putting in place a right e-procurement solution.

 As we can see, Supply Chain Solution is not an off-the-shelf product. It is a coordinated consolidation of various applications and solutions that have been seamlessly integrated to perform a variety of functions across the supply chain.

Approaching Supply Chain Optimization

Decision making for better supply chain management is inescapable, no matter how good a technology solution one might have. There are strategic as well as operational decisions to be made for the supply chain. Strategic decisions have an impact in the long term and invariably involve changes to the business process. Operational decisions are more immediate and have an impact on day-to-day operations with little impact on business processes.

 To effectively solve the supply chain optimization issues, an overall strategy needs to be developed.  Involving technology solution providers can be of immense help, since they can bring in their knowledge of currently available technology and its application to business processes.

Typically, the entire strategy cannot be implemented at the same time due to resource limitations and organizational impact.  Therefore, opportunities for improvement need to be ranked based on relative contribution to supply chain efficiency and effort required.  This will provide the road map for implementing the various components for improvement.

 The best place to start would obviously be the area that is most fundamental to the business and will provide the maximum impact to business value. Other solutions can be built around this base solution. Even so, it is important to understand the business partners in the upstream and downstream of the supply chain, and collaborate with them in developing and implementing the solution.

Conclusion

 To summarize, Supply Chain Management solutions involve:

1. All Business partners in the supply chain
2. Business processes in the complete supply chain rather than just the individual organization
3. A combination of various technology solutions that are seamlessly integrated to provide complete visibility to the supply chain

 The starting point for implementing Supply Chain Solutions is to develop a high-level strategy that will provide the roadmap for the organization. This should be developed in collaboration with all of the business partners involved in the supply chain. Business areas with the greatest potential for return on investment should be targeted for implementing the appropriate solutions. 

MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that it will offer a mobile application platform for developing and deploying iPhone Apps.

MicroStrategy Mobile for iPhone offers a new way to develop and deploy iPhone Apps that is faster, easier, and more maintainable than using traditional Integrated Development Environments. MicroStrategy Mobile for iPhone offers the following benefits:

• Reduces the time to develop new iPhone Apps − MicroStrategy’s mobile app platform includes the infrastructure needed to support each new iPhone App, so application developers only need to focus on creating the user experience and not on the back-end infrastructure.
• Easy for non-developers to create professional iPhone − MicroStrategy’s iPhone applications do not require any coding. Using MicroStrategy’s mobile app platform, iPhone Apps are assembled in a point-and-click fashion. App creators can choose from an array of finely-designed, iPhone-optimized displays and controls.
• Easy for companies to rapidly deploy iPhone App updates − MicroStrategy’s mobile app platform uses an on-demand form of application deployment called “in-stream” deployment. As soon as new or updated applications are ready, they are instantly available to iPhone users directly from MicroStrategy’s mobile app platform.

“Utilizing platforms that can easily assemble applications on mobile computing environments like Apple iPhone is the wave of the future,” said Mark Smith, CEO and EVP Research, Ventana Research. “MicroStrategy’s release of its new platform and capabilities will not only help to deliver world-class BI to Apple iPhone, but also make the assembly and publishing of a broader set of information-class applications much simpler to accomplish.”

Mobile BI applications represent a new breed of business applications that are simple-to-use, highly focused, and available whenever and wherever business is conducted. Business people no longer need to delay decision-making due to a lack of information or delay executing a transaction simply because they are away from their desks. Mobile applications delivered through Smart phones such as the iPhone have the potential to revolutionize business processes across every industry.

For example, mobile BI applications can:

• Provide executives with real-time performance information 24 hours a day
• Enable claims adjusters to complete claims immediately on site
• Empower sales associates to offer discounts and cross-sell recommendations at the moment of the sale
• Provide regional managers the ability to manage their stores, restaurants, bank branches, and other retail outlets
• Deliver management information and guidance to franchise owners
• Give plant managers up-to-the-minute data on plant operations
• Allow inventory managers to reorder stock while managing the warehouse floor
• Provide health care professionals with immediate access to patient test results

“MicroStrategy’s new mobile app platform will allow us to develop the vast majority of our iPhone Apps without coding,” said Terry Adams, Senior Director at Herbalife. “MicroStrategy’s platform approach to mobile application development will allow us to develop a series of business apps for the iPhone quickly and with less effort than building them from scratch using the Apple SDK.”

“MicroStrategy’s many years of experience in providing scalable, enterprise-class platform technology enables us to deliver a mobile application platform that is both industrial-strength and highly flexible,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy COO. “Our new mobile app platform gives companies the flexibility to create a broad array of intuitive business applications that seamlessly access back-end databases and systems, and delivers the same high performance and ease of management and administration that is expected from MicroStrategy.”

MicroStrategy is currently accepting applications for inclusion in its MicroStrategy Mobile for iPhone beta program

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

Oracle Upgrades CRM, Enhances Enterprise Forecasting Abilities

At a time when Gartner predicts companies will become obsessed with measuring the ROI of IT investments, Oracle has just upgraded its cloud-based customer relationship management system (CRM) to include advanced business analytics and forecasting abilities to better measure and increase enterprise productivity.

The emphasis with this new version of its customer relationship management system is on making money, or maximizing the potential to make money. And while Oracle says the new features will enhance productive selling time, the real value is the ‘deep’ information about the enterprise and its partners that it provides.

Enhanced Enterprise Forecasting

That information can come from many sources and channels. However, the bottom line here is the ability for enterprises to not only make general forecasts about future enterprise performance, but to give in-depth analysis of what channels are performing well.

Although there are a number of other upgrades, it is the forecasting abilities have really taken a step forward. Release 17 is now able to take historical and current forecasts, put them together with real time information and make new forecasts of ideal-world scenarios, actual achievements and quota forecasts.

It also aims to pull all the information covering the productivity of teams and team members together including what each team member is contributing to revenues and who amongst enterprise partners are performing.

Digging deep, it analyzes current and future deal registrations, fund and sales pipelines and in doing so enables users to identify top-performing partners and how they will perform in the future.

User Enhancements

Behind all this are a number of new user enhancements that make the cloud-based Release 17 more user-friendly. The new interface has increased the amount of information that can be displayed with users able to customize it for size and easy navigation to specified information.

The interface acts as a head-up display. This is customizable by the user making lists easier to manage and presents all the information about partners or clients on a single screen through which users can mine as deep as they need for the information they require.

Data migration has also been enhanced with automated data loading and migration. On one hand is Oracle Data Loader On Demand, which enables users to move large quantities of information around Release 17, and on the other, Oracle Migration Tool On Demand can export and import configuration details from one Release 17 environment to another.

Other new usability features include:

• Automation of business process through workflows
• New HTML editor for email marketing tool
• Customizable client contact pages

Release 17 also comes with support for three additional languages including Portuguese and Norwegian on top of the 17 that it already supports. Oracle has also released an edition specifically for the life sciences.

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

Microsoft unveils SQL 2008 update, finally SQL 2008 R2 can support larger implementations

Microsoft has released to manufacturing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, the new version of its relational database management system software, the company announced Wednesday.

The software, a major update of the SQL Server 2008 code base, has been in development for almost two years. Thus far, the developer version of the software has been downloaded more than 300,000 times, according to the company.

The R2 version updates the SQL Server 2008 in a number of ways, said Mark Linton, director within Microsoft’s application platform group.

One notable feature is the scale. A single SQL Server 2008 instance can now be run on up to 256 logical processors. Previously, a SQL Server instance could only scale up to 64 logical processors. It will also run on as much as two terabytes of working memory. This will pave the way for more large scale, enterprise deployments, Linton said.

The software also has been updated to work better in Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualized environments. For instance, the virtualized instance of the software can be migrated from one server to another while continuing to run.

The software’s administration software has been updated as well. A new feature, called Utility Control Point, enables database administrators to manage the policies of entire farms of SQL Servers from a single console. “Through one control point, you can administrator your entire infrastructure through a standardized set of policies and tools,” Linton said.

The software also helps other Microsoft products in providing users with “self-service business intelligence,” Linton said. The software can provide live data for a new Microsoft Excel data analysis add-on call PowerPivot, which was designed to manipulate “millions of rows of data” quickly.

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

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

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.