Analytic Vision is pleased to highlight select clients whose business intelligence solutions our team has helped design, develop, and implement, making a significant impact on key areas of their business success.

Sales Analysis, GL Analysis, and Customer Profitability for Sara Lee Food Group
We worked with a large food processing company that was in the early stages of reorganizing to combine several independently run divisions into one organization that would share the same business processes and software solutions. We assisted them in implementing a business intelligence solution that integrated Lawson financials, JD Edwards sales, Siebel CRM, and four different legacy sales systems into a single data warehouse. This data warehouse fed several sales analysis Essbase multidimensional data marts that are accessed by over 400 employees with Hyperion Analyzer, and another 500 employees with ShowCase Enterprise Reporting solution. We also created an allocated customer profitability Essbase data mart for their finance department. Because it will take two years to convert all divisions over to JD Edwards and Siebel, the business intelligence solution is their only source for understanding how the new cross-divisional organization is performing. As such, they view this information as mission critical for running their business, as it allowed them to make this major organization change two years ahead of schedule.

For more detail on this success story, click Sara Lee Success Story Details

EZGO-Textron Utilizes Hyperion Essbase
Analytic Vision helped this leading manufacturer of golf cars enhance their financial reporting and analysis capabilities by assisting them with the design and development of three Essbase data marts that were fed from a DB2/400 data warehouse. The first implementation was for general ledger analysis. The biggest challenge in fully automating this solution was the fact that the JBA general ledger was limited in how it defined the many hierarchies that analysts desired. Analytic Vision developed a custom, table-driven data entry process that allowed financial analysts to define as many hierarchies as they desired, and the Essbase solution would automatically implement the hierarchies into the Accounts dimension. This entire process from design through implementation took just over three weeks.

This first success quickly led to two follow-on projects that included a detailed cost analysis solution and a leasing analysis solution. The cost analysis Essbase solution has a noteworthy feature that dynamically allows all costs for the most recent two months to be analyzed from GL accounts down to the actual purchase order lines. While the Essbase data mart holds two years of history, the automated rolling two months of extra detail was a design compromise to provide tactical analysis capabilities and still maintain good performance within Essbase.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Auction Operations Analysis for Worldwide Wholesale Auto Auction Company
This company is the largest high-volume wholesale automobile auction company in the world with over one hundred (100) auction locations in the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The initial scope of this project was focused on the design and development of two Essbase data marts that utilized the Showcase STRATEGY business intelligence suite on the IBM eServer iSeries platform. The first data mart was focused on auction operations and was used to analyze trends and exceptions of buyer and seller fees, as well as sales volumes. The grain of this data mart was at the day level; this allowed for the drill down into individual auction events. The second data mart was focused on accounting information, which was used extensively during the month-end close and for key performance indicator assessment. Between the two data marts, over one hundred OLAP views were generated with Hyperion Analyzer. These views were all linked via an organized screen navigation approach that allowed for convenient and logical analysis for the end users. After the initial knowledge transfer from Analytic Vision during these two projects, the client went on to develop three more Essbase data marts on their own. They later called us back in to create a partitioned Essbase database that pulled information from all five data marts, and also had us develop a forecast projection spreadsheet that pulled data from various Essbase sources and utilized Visual Basic to automate the solution and make it easy to use.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Integrated Web Analytics for a Worldwide Internet Auto Auction Company
This company required a web-based sales analysis system for their customers that provide the automobiles for auction (Ford, Mercedes, etc.). Analytic Vision helped them develop a data warehouse that feeds an Essbase Sales analysis cube. An important requirement for this company was that the presentation of the Essbase information be integrated with the same look and feel as that of the rest of their extranet site. To facilitate this requirement Analytic Vision utilized Alphablox to develop customized and personalized analytic views that were seamless to the end user accessing the web site. Here are a few key features implemented on each of these analytical views:

• Single sign-on between the new application and existing web applications
• Personalization of web look and feel based on the user profile
• Ability to export report data to Microsoft Excel and print as PDF documents
• Full OLAP capabilities such as drilling up/down/across, sorting, etc.
• Essbase security is accessed to dynamically build member lists in drop-down boxes
• Only members with Essbase activity are included in the drop-down lists

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

International Textile Company Replaces Lawson Essbase Pump with SQL Server
This company had 16 Essbase data marts (8 GL based and 8 Activity based) that were being built from Lawson financial data with the Lawson built in Essbase Data Pump. Between the number of Essbase data marts, and the high volumes of data, the data pump process was monopolizing the CPU during the critical month-end closing process. This was further complicated by the fact that this company wanted to leverage Essbase to help with the closing process, and would typically refresh each data mart up to seven times a day during the close week. Analytic Vision replaced the Lawson Data Pump solution by designing and developing a SQL Server data warehouse that is now feeding the Essbase data marts. This automated solution used Microsoft DTS to extract the data from the Lawson Oracle database, which then triggered T-SQL stored procedures to format and load the dimension and fact tables of a star schema SQL Server database. The Essbase cubes were then quickly loaded from the ideally formatted star schema database. This solution offered the following benefits:

• It quickly pulled data off the production Lawson environment, freeing up this system to use its CPU on operational tasks
• It not only replaced the Lawson Data Pump process, but vastly improved it by building the star schema at the journal entry transaction level, which will enable Essbase drill-thru into the supporting detail
• Having the data warehouse enables this company to build its Crystal reports without impacting operational system performance
• Having the data warehouse gave them the flexibility to combine the two sets of Essbase data marts so they now only need eight Essbase data marts; Lawson did not have the flexibility to provide this

While this company will assess if they should replace the Essbase data marts with Analysis Services cubes in the future, Analytic Vision helped them quickly solve their initial problem of a month-end CPU bottleneck.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

AAA Carolinas Leverages the Microsoft Analysis Services Platform
AAA Carolinas was already using SQL Server for a relational data warehouse; however, they were only accessing this information with relational query tools, and had yet to utilize the analysis capabilities of Analysis Services. Analytic Vision worked side by side with them to design and develop their first Analysis Services data mart, to show them how they could quickly extend the benefits of their existing data warehouse. This solution helped them analyze the buying patterns of their customers, and was a big success with their users.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Property Lease and Financial Analysis for a Property Management Company
This firm is the preeminent developer and operator of upscale multifamily apartment communities, which operates as a real estate investment trust in the Southeastern and Southwestern United States. This firm currently owns and operates approximately 100 apartment communities containing over 30,000 apartment units, with several more communities under construction.

The firm needed the ability to analyze several key indicators including income, occupancy, goal achievement, future income, and future occupancy to correctly evaluate their current and future lease profitability. Leasing agents faxed printed reports to corporate headquarters and Area Vice Presidents keyed this information into spreadsheets for analysis. This manual effort often took several days, was prone to keying errors and did not allow corrective actions to be taken based on the reports in a timely fashion.

Our team was involved in the initial planning, designing, and development of a relational data warehouse and six multidimensional Essbase data marts covering the subject areas of weekly lease analyses and financial analyses. The relational data warehouse was custom developed on an IBM eServer iSeries server, and the data marts were developed with the Showcase STRATEGY business intelligence suite that includes Warehouse Builder, Essbase/400, and the Hyperion Analyzer OLAP product. The data warehouse is loaded from three different data sources: AMSI (a personal computer-based leasing package), JD Edwards financials, and Lotus Notes (which holds monthly market survey information and net operating income projections). Analytical reporting capabilities were developed to generate Excel-based reports from the relational data warehouse and Analyze OLAP views from the Essbase data marts.

After five years of successfully supporting the end users' needs, the company switched platform direction, and had Analytic Vision convert the business intelligence solution into a SQL Server data warehouse that now feeds six Analysis Services data marts. The client also chose to upgrade their presentation capabilities at this time and implemented Alphablox to web-enable the Analysis Services information.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Bryan Foods
Bryan Foods is one of the largest processors of fresh pork in the Southern region of the United States, as well as one of the largest divisions of the Sara Lee Corporation. Faced with limited reporting and analytical capabilities from their legacy sales order system, and an ongoing implementation of new financial and manufacturing systems, Bryan Foods determined that they needed to implement a business intelligence solution that would provide timely and accurate information to the right people to facilitate an improved business decision-making process.
Read how our team assisted Bryan Foods in implementing a variety of analytical solutions that include online sales analysis, automated financial period end reporting, and allocated product and customer profitability analysis.

For more information on this success story, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Stork Screens America, Inc.
Stork Screens America, Inc. (Stork) is part of a worldwide network of companies that manufactures and distributes rotary screens, sleeves and engraving products for its North American customers in textile and graphical printing markets. The Stork Finance department is responsible for all internal and external financial reporting and over time had used several different reporting tools (including manually creating reports in Excel) with each tool having its own shortcomings. Together the Stork IT and Finance departments decided that in order to automate and consolidate the creation of these analytical reports they would implement a Financial data warehouse with a supporting multidimensional data mart on the IBM eServer iSeries platform using the Showcase STRATEGY product suite.

Read how our team assisted Stork Screens America in developing and implementing their Financial Analysis data warehouse and data mart with OLAP reporting, and how this has reduced their monthly closings cycle and improved their delivery of reports to their end-users.

For more information on this success story, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Point of Sale Analysis for an Apparel Manufacturer
A large manufacturer of intimate apparel in the US had implemented a Point of Sale (POS) data warehouse using a relational OLAP solution on a UNIX platform, but the end-users for this analytical system were not satisfied with performance, reliability and uptime for this solution. One of the major challenges was the high data volumes —over 25 million POs transactions per week. The IT group within the organization was tasked with solving these problems and providing the end-users with additional analytical functionality.

This company chose the Showcase STRATEGY suite of business intelligence tools for their software solution. Our team was brought in as a Showcase Services Partner to lead the project and to assist in the design, development and implementation of a new Point of Sale solution An integrated team of client personnel and consultants was used to maximize requirements understanding and to optimize knowledge transfer.

The new design included the creation of a relational DB2 star-schema data warehouse and market segment-oriented multidimensional OLAP data marts. The over twenty multidimensional Essbase data marts were created based on the required market segmentation and data volumes, as low-level data marts were combined into corporate level summary data marts to optimize performance and security. Our team members also created the required online analytical views as well as developed and delivered customized training to the company’s employees.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Customer Profitability Analysis for an Apparel Manufacturer
A second analytical application developed for this same client was an allocated customer profitability data mart. This solution involved the creation of a custom allocation rule process that allows for the analysis of profitability across each of the customers and their associated hierarchies. This solution provided several functional benefits, including automated period end reports, the basis for sales organization bonus calculations, the ability to more accurately rank customer activity, and the ability to view sales organization activity from both a historical point of view (sales representative actual history), as well as a current historical look that shows how a sales representative is doing with their current customer account assignments compared to how this same group of accounts performed in the prior year.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Service Job Tracking Analysis for an International Carpet Manufacturer
An international carpet manufacturer and service provider runs a highly customized job tracking system that has been implemented in over twenty separate environments, one for each location. Given that they have over twenty product and customer masters, analyzing performance from a corporate level was essentially impossible. Our team utilized the Showcase STRATEGY suite of products to develop a job tracking relational data warehouse that supports an Essbase data mart with a set of Analyzer views. The timely visibility of the automated reports and views helped this company quickly identify issues such as non-profitable jobs, late-paying customers, and jobs over budget.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Consolidated Financial Analysis for an International Carpet Manufacturer
A second analytical application developed for the same client involved consolidating their financial data to automate and support corporate level reporting. This company is running six different general ledger packages around the world. Their financial reporting and analysis capabilities were mainly based on manual-intensive Excel spreadsheets. Our team helped the client design and develop a scheme of multiple Essbase data marts that provided low-level reporting and an automated cross-reference process that merged a variety of account structures into a corporate Essbase reporting data mart.

The ability to consolidate the general ledger information into a single corporate ledger saves the company two weeks of manual effort each month. In addition to providing timely access to their general ledger data and saving resource dollars, the benefits of seeing summarized data over time with the ability to expand into more detail has proved extremely valuable. They are now able to identify exceptions quickly and focus on resolving business issues that impact the bottom line.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Property Management Analysis for a Worldwide Bank
The Corporate Real Estate group of this leading bank developed an analytical application, using the Showcase STRATEGY business intelligence suite of tools, to provide their analysts and business partners with the ability to compare and benchmark their properties throughout the U.S., but was not achieving the desired results and performance. Our team members worked with the client to redesign their application to provide increased functionality, usability and improved performance. This new design included the creation of a relational DB2 star-schema data warehouse to house the detailed property data and a multidimensional OLAP data mart. Our team members also created the necessary online and web-based reporting as well as developed and delivered customized training to the banks employees.

A second analytical application was also designed and developed, by our same team members, to provide the Corporate Real Estate team members with access to strategic services information. This new design also included the creation of a relational DB2 star-schema data warehouse and a multidimensional OLAP data mart. Due to the previous design and development of the Property Management data warehouse, the development of this solution was accelerated by the reusability of common data warehouse elements. Our team members also created the necessary online and web-based reporting for the banks employees.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Sales and Purchasing Analysis for Leading Aerospace Manufacturer
A leading manufacturer of commercial passenger aircraft cabin interior products had implemented the JD Edwards Enterprise Resource Planning software across six different environments to support their business operations for various divisions. This company decided that they needed to implement a business intelligence solution that would allow them to view, report, and analyze their sales and purchasing information for each business division, as well as at a consolidated corporate level. They chose to implement their solution on the IBM eServer iSeries server using the Showcase STRATEGY business intelligence suite of tools.

One of the challenges that this company faced in implementing their desired analytical solution was their lack of experience with the Showcase STRATEGY software and with the design and development of an Enterprise Data Warehousing solution. The company wanted to train their IT staff on how to design and develop an Enterprise data warehouse/data mart solution while at the same time delivering the required solutions to their end-users and business analysts. The second major challenge was to combine the operational information from their six JD Edwards environments into a single combined source of sales and purchasing information. This company, on the recommendation from Showcase, selected our business intelligence team for their project, based on our reputation in other challenging business intelligence engagements.

Our team members worked with the client to design, develop, implement and deploy these new applications and to transfer knowledge to their IT staff. These new applications included the creation of a relational DB2 star-schema data warehouse to house the detailed sales and purchasing data and several multidimensional OLAP data marts. Our team members also created the necessary online and web-based reporting as well as developed and delivered customized training for the client employees

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Quality Control Analysis for a Leading Textile Manufacturer
This firm is the tenth largest textile manufacturer in the United States. They had developed several in-house systems on the IBM eServer iSeries system for the collection of quality control testing results, but had no efficient method of analyzing the results of those tests. The Quality Control and Information Technology departments decided to select the Showcase STRATEGY business intelligence suite, based on the product's reputation for being the leading solution for the IBM eServer iSeries.

One of the challenges that this company faced in implementing their desired analytical solution was their lack of experience with the Showcase STRATEGY software and with the design and development of an Enterprise Data Warehousing solution. The company wanted to train their IT staff on how to design and develop an Enterprise data warehouse / data mart solution while at the same time delivering the required solutions to their end-users and business analysts. One of the other challenges was that all of the data required to build the desired application did not exist, and a system would need to be designed and developed to supply the additional data. Based on our past experience with successful Showcase STRATEGY implementations, the client selected our business intelligence team to lead the project.

Our team members worked with the client to design, develop, implement and deploy these new applications and to transfer knowledge to their IT staff. These new applications included the creation of several applications to collect additional quality-related data, a relational DB2 star-schema data warehouse to house the detailed quality testing results and a multidimensional OLAP data mart. Our team members also created the necessary online and relational reporting as well as developed and delivered customized training for the client employees.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Production Scheduling Analysis for a Leading Textile Manufacturer
This textile manufacturer mentioned in the above success story also had implemented a production planning system utilizing the i2 Rhythm software package, but during their last upgrade the reporting and analytical components of this package stopped providing the information they required to plan their production activities. The Production Planning and Information Technology departments decided to again utilize the Showcase STRATEGY business intelligence suite to provide the required analytics.

The company chose to work with our business intelligence team based on experience with delivering the services and solutions to solve these challenges and our prior successes with other projects.

Our team members worked with the client to design, develop, implement and deploy these new applications and to transfer knowledge to their IT staff. These new applications included the creation of several relational DB2 star-schema data warehouses to house the detailed production schedules, Annual Operating Plans (AOP), and Inventory data and a multidimensional OLAP data mart. Our team members also created the necessary online and relational reporting as well as developed and delivered customized training for the client employees.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Essbase Performance Tuning for a National Home Builder
This company is one of the largest homebuilders in the United States with a primary concentration in building homes for first-time, move-up and active adult home buyers. Their Finance department had chosen to implement their business intelligence initiative on the IBM eServer iSeries platform utilizing the Showcase STRATEGY business intelligence suite. The Financial Analysis database that was developed with their in-house resources and consultants was not achieving the desired time window for loading and calculating their Essbase multidimensional database, so they brought in one of our team members.

By optimizing their Essbase server, database settings, outline structure, data load method, and calculation scripts, we were able to reduce their load and calculation times from seven (7) hours to fifty (50) minutes. We were also able to shrink the database size from over eight (8) gigabytes to under two (2) gigabytes.

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com

Essbase Performance Tuning for Worldwide Calendar and Poster Manufacturer
Producing quality planning, organizing and record-keeping products, this company is the world's leading calendar and poster manufacturer. They had chosen to implement their business intelligence initiative on the IBM eServer iSeries platform utilizing the Showcase STRATEGY business intelligence suite. The Point of Sale/Inventory Analysis Essbase application that was developed with their in-house resources was not achieving the desired load and calculation times for their Essbase multidimensional data mart, so they brought in one of our team members to performance-tune the application.

By optimizing their Essbase server and database setting, outline structure, data load method, and calculation scripts, we were able to reduce their load and calculation times from twenty-one (21) hours to two (2) hours. This provided an overall reduction in the update to the data mart of ninety percent (90%).

For more information on these solutions, contact us at success@analyticvision.com