Smarter, Faster, More Profitable

20 Organizations That Get It

Novo Nordisk

This pharmaceutical giant uses Oracle Clinical 3.2 to share and standardize clinical trials data usage and reporting globally. Oracle Clinical replaced previous manual data copying and transfer methods and now automatically uploads data from multiple sites for analysis at a central facility. The system expedites the multinational regulatory drug approval process through consistent data definitions and interpretation.

The Ohio Department of Education

In a wonderful example of BI with a social cause, the Ohio Department of Education and MicroStrategy Inc. recently developed the Interactive Local Report Card (iLRC) application to promote educational accountability and academic excellence. The iLRC is part of an overall effort by the state to provide online access to consistent and objective information - including academic performance, teacher qualifications, class size, expenditures, attendance, and graduation rates - to measure the effectiveness of Ohio's public-school system.

Solectron

To provide realtime information internally and to the global market, Solectron, the giant manufacturing services company, continually identifies business processes across its organization that need to be integrated in order to better respond to its customers' evolving needs for streamlined supply chains. Solectron also uses a BI system to aggregate data across disparate systems to run profit-and-loss reports for each of its customers every week.

Target Corp.

Target recently introduced a radically influential new system that will potentially give this retailer unique capabilities for customer relationship management and fraud detection: The company was the first customer to move from proof of concept to production rollout of a Compaq Zero Latency Enterprise solution. With wedding and baby shower registry systems, a high-volume bricks-and-clicks operation, credit card services, and a returns-related Achilles heel too often exploited by defrauders, Target hopes to profit handsomely from realtime, enterprisewide application integration. (See Colin White's "Analytics on Demand: The Zero Latency Enterprise" for more information about this type of solution.)

Union Pacific Railroad

Union Pacific is required by law to collect data equaling dozens of gigabytes a month about rail conditions, but competitive spirit is what leads the company to leverage that data, stored in several incompatible formats in various relational and mainframe systems, for its BI initiative. Using reporting, analysis, and query applications, decision makers can find the appropriate information from existing systems and derive answers from composite, incompatible data - without waiting for daily or monthly batch loads into a centralized data warehouse.

U.S. Army

The Army's Tank-automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) is placing critical information in the hands of decision makers who keep the U.S. Army poised and ready for action. Through TACOM's role-based Enterprise Specific Information Portal, supply officers can now conduct critical logistic and inventory analyses much more quickly than they previously did.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Wal-Mart's use of BI to keep inventory and prices low is legendary. Just this past year, Wal-Mart further capitalized on its market position by instituting its Store of the Community initiative, in which local consumer purchasing data, area demographics, customer preferences, and input from store employees helps managers make decisions about how to stock individual stores. Information very specific to communities goes into the decisions, including dates of hunting seasons for particular animals in particular jurisdictions, proximity of different types of outdoor recreational facilities, local standards for softball sizes, and little league season start and end dates.

Welch's

Welch's has changed its sales culture entirely by creating incentives for achieving profitable volume, rather than volume alone. In the first year of deployment, the company's inventory management and analysis system saved Welch's more than $1.5 million. Recently, it also created an extranet called Tradetopia to integrate information from its financial, order entry, and ERP systems. Since deployment, sales have outpaced competitors in the consumer packaged-goods industry by 400 percent.

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The West Midlands, U.K., Police Department

This small police department uses SPSS Inc.'s Clementine data mining tool to cluster and analyze the similar physical descriptions and modus operandi of crimes. Investigators use this information to identify patterns and trends to match unsolved cases with known perpetrators and target and catch repeat offenders.