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.

Background

In this case study we describe how a leading specialty retailer achieved a greater insight into Key performance and Sales metrics through Systech’s MicroStrategy implementation. The MicroStrategy implementation supported business users to analyze sales and inventory to identify key trends and opportunities.

To accommodate their expanding business the client sought 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 making informed decisions. Systech Solutions, Inc. was assigned to design an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) for them in this regard.

Challenges

The client 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 in-house applications, JDA and PeopleSoft.
• To configure and implement a scalable tool to query the EDW and to create reports.
• To build 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 data warehousing infrastructure, a DataStage ETL environment and a MicroStrategy 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 from in-house applications, JDA and PeopleSoft. Since the source data was stored in individual schemas, the transformation 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 (KPIs) 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 by Systech team provided the client 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.
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 and provide executive summary reports, analyze sales promotion and study products sales.
Systech created a robust architecture and a flexible platform. This architecture combined right level of access with required functionality and resulted in a positive user experience.

In this case study we describe how a leading provider of pharmacy benefit management services achieved improved pricing and design strategy through Systech’s comprehensive, cost effective solution and analytics solution.

The client needed a powerful Business Intelligence system to cut costs to analyze spending patterns across the country. An improvement in physician compliance to utilize and better manage the pharmacy dollar was needed in order to lower healthcare costs and provide better services for customers. They needed to find a cost effective, complete and comprehensive solution which would perform complex analysis quickly and efficiently.

Challenges

The principal challenge was the analysis of claims costs, profits, sales comparisons, product comparisons and overall productivity. The customer wanted a robust system that would be easy for their IT department to maintain after it was implemented and also, one that would be scalable and reliable.

Solution

As a strategic consultant Systech’s first evaluated client’s infrastructure and environment, and recommended a datawarehouse infrastructure for implementing the solution. Systech was responsible for building and maintaining a robust Business Intelligence solution. The data warehouse is used to report on a variety of information for a multitude of clients. This helped to identify the key metrics such as top prescribers, members, and drugs by medical groups among many other functions required for prescription claims analysis and fraudulent claims detection. The data warehouse also enabled accurate forecasts of the industry’s leading trends, utilization trends & patterns. It enhanced the quality and reliability of the information gathered.

Result

The solution helped our client perform accurate forecasts of pharmacy trends leading to improvements in benefit plan design and pricing, resulting in better financial decisions. It helped physicians be better informed and helped provide quality health care for patients. Fraudulent claim detection also helped save revenue leakage for the company.

Systech has developed a unique approach that combines its in-depth knowledge of customers’ business processes with expertise in BI solutions to create an analytical solution for Category Management for CPG & Retail.

Arun Gollapudi, CEO, Systech Solutions, Inc. explains, “Many CPG and Retail businesses are becoming victims of fluctuating dynamics in industry. Margin pressures are increasing and product lifecycles are shorter in a downturn. Systech has initiated a solution that would positively impact CPG and Retail businesses by collaboratively targeting profitable product and customer segments. We are confident this solution will provide advanced analytics to our clients at a competitive cost .”

The solution deals with the key applications of Category Management such as:

• Assortment Planning
• Inventory Management
• Price Management
• Supply Market Analysis
• Market Comparison
• Vendor Management
• SKU Rationalization
• Planogramming
• Visual Merchandising
• Monitor key metrics, analytics and scorecards

Systech’s application for Category Management would provide customers a solution to strategically manage categories and gain an insight to unlock additional saving.

Talend Launches Talend Integration Suite RTx

Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, recently announced the availability of Talend Integration Suite RTx, a new real-time data integration platform for enterprise application integration needs.

Based on Talend’s award winning, enterprise-grade data integration platform – Talend Integration Suite – the new solution allows IT organizations to accelerate the velocity of data across IT systems. With up-to-the-minute data, customers receive a higher level of data consistency across applications, providing more accurate decision making capabilities.

RTx provides organizations with benefits in many areas. For example, with RTx, companies can save time and money by developing and maintaining data integration processes in a fraction of the time and cost it takes with proprietary technologies. For online merchants, RTx provides the information necessary to make promotional offers on-the-fly, based on user behavior, resulting in more targeted offers with better response rates. RTx also improves customer service by synchronizing and maintaining data from multiple sources so that all stakeholders within an organization can access accurate information.

“The fast pace of business today means companies can’t rely on day-old or even hours-old data, and the speed at which IT delivers this data can be the difference between good and bad service, between a happy customer and a lost customer,” said Mark Madsen, president and founder of Third Nature, a technology research firm. “Integration today is mostly performed by hand-coded data movement processes developed by application programmers. Continued reliance on batch data movement and hand-coded integration is a recipe for failure. Companies that want to excel today need a real-time data integration infrastructure and progressive IT organizations are using data integration tools that combine real-time data movement with transformation and quality rules – without the laborious programming effort.”

MicroStrategy Incorporated Announces a Free Reporting Software Package

MicroStrategy Incorporated, a provider worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, recently announced a free reporting software package for departmental BI applications. MicroStrategy Reporting Suite enables companies to use MicroStrategy’s integrated BI platform to develop and deploy premium, Web–based reporting applications, at no cost.

With this compelling new reporting package, MicroStrategy has eliminated cost and time impediments for departments and workgroups to initiate new reporting applications. Business users can simply visit the MicroStrategy Reporting Suite Web site, download the free software, and begin building their reporting applications, all in the same day.

MicroStrategy’s easy–to–use reporting software enables business users to quickly create the reports they need to gain critical insights into business data and make timely, analytically-based decisions. Users can view data in detailed tabular grid reports, graph data to analyze information quickly, drill-down to investigate root causes, make ad hoc queries, manage business performance with arithmetic and statistical metrics, and export data to Excel and PDF. When reporting requirements expand, companies can purchase licenses for more advanced report presentation,

Cindi Howson, Founder, BIScorecard: “Given the product capabilities, migration path, and support, it seems like a deal too good to be true… The appealing aspect [of the MicroStrategy Reporting Suite free offering] is that it provides customers with an easy entree into BI, without that entree being a total throw away. If customers later want to add dashboards or multi-source, for example, they don’t have to start over or migrate to a new product as is often the case with many departmental BI tools.”

SAS Institute highlights benefits BI could bring to education

Johannesburg, South Africa (24 Mar. 2009) – Education can benefit dramatically from advanced analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools, which will provide them with better student data management as well as predictive modelling for understanding future educational demands.

This is the view of Kevin Kemp, head of sales for the commercial division at SAS Institute South Africa, who highlighted the benefits of implementing a BI platform in a tertiary education environment, while speaking at the recent ITS Conference, in Johannesburg.

The conference, hosted by ITS at Emperors’ Palace, brought together users, administrators and financial managers from the education sector and focused on the use of software solutions and technology in the future of education. ITS is a software company with a legacy of more than 20 years’ experience in administration software development for the education sector.

“Implementing a BI solution in an academic environment needs to start with a strong base infrastructure, laying the foundation with data integration and then building intelligent storage and business intelligence on top of that platform,” says Kemp.

“Business intelligence in tertiary education can bring benefits embedded in student data management, HR and fee management, optimising the capacity of universities, trimming costs to make more money available for upgrades, increasing profits, improved marketing approaches and student retention, and could improve student support systems as well as online learning facilities.

“Universities handle incredible amounts of data, and being able to access that data in real-time, analyse reports, discover patterns and provide student support where it is needed, would increase student retention and smooth the running of the university.”

SAS Institute has already made a significant contribution towards education institutions, with a number of local success stories, including Walter Sisulu University, North West University and Unisa.

“Education is experiencing massive transformation, and holds the key to the future, to resolving the skills shortage and driving economic growth in South Africa. Technology and education need to be intertwined to take South African learners and education institutions into the future.

“In 2006, the education minister of Singapore used the slogan: ‘Thinking schools, learning nation’ in his annual address to the country. This is an approach that South Africa could seriously benefit from should it be adopted by our education system. By having technologically advanced places of learning, that run optimally like ‘thinking schools’, students will benefit from improved learning, educators can teach better and a nation can grow,” ends Kemp.

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.

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.