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September 17, 2003

12 That Get It

Taking the pulse of BI leadership, we highlight a dozen companies meeting success in BI implementation — and achieving business goals to become smarter, faster, and more profitable

by David Stodder

Speeding up business-critical decision-making; winning the quest for substantial cost savings; establishing and leveraging a single version of the truth: These are strategic IT goals being met by today's intelligent enterprises. Business intelligence and data warehouse solutions for data access, analysis, reporting, and integration live at the heart of these efforts.

For our annual BI Technology in Focus issue, we sifted through editorial research as well as submissions to a call for entries on our Web site and selected 12 companies as leaders in strategic BI implementation. Alas, some good ones were left on the cutting room floor. I'm sure readers know of other organizations that could have made the cut. By all means, bring them to our attention — we plan to highlight more companies that "get it" in future issues.

We hope you enjoy this cross section of BI implementations that have put their organizations at the forefront in their respective industries and deserve careful attention from companies looking to achieve strong "return on intelligence" themselves.

Best Buy

With its bright price-tag logo becoming a visual fixture across North America, Best Buy is making good on an aggressive growth plan. Now a leading specialty retailer of consumer electronics, appliances, and entertainment software, Best Buy can point to its strength in leveraging data resources as a major reason for its success.

Every night, the company pulls multiple terabytes of detailed customer transaction, inventory, and other data from more than 350 stores into a data warehouse running with Oracle, Sun Microsystems servers, and EMC Corp. storage systems. Supporting hundreds of concurrent queries, Best Buy's data warehouse keeps retail managers informed and able to react quickly.

However, the real secret to Best Buy's success may be its business performance management (BPM) application, which keeps strategic leadership on top of current conditions. MicroStrategy's technology is the centerpiece of an efficient, instant reporting and analysis engine. Moving forward, the company plans to use its BPM strength to bring intelligence to collaborative business relationships.

The Chamberlain Group Inc.

"Transformation" is a good word for what happens to an organization when data integration efforts succeed. For The Chamberlain Group, a subsidiary of Duchossois Industries, cost savings and knowledgeable employees who can respond collaboratively to changes are key among such transformations.

A leading manufacturer of commercial door operators and residential garage door openers, the company uses DataMirror Transformation Server to establish a Microsoft SQL Server-based data warehouse by integrating more than 27 million daily transactions from multiple IBM iSeries (AS/400) applications and Microsoft Windows NT servers. Distributed data capture, transformation, and flow are managed by the DataMirror system, which enables users to get a complete picture. The system has garnered IT industry awards and Chamberlain marketplace leadership.

Clalit Health Services

Predating even the founding of the State of Israel itself, Tel Aviv-based Clalit has always been focused on the shared need for the good health of a large and growing number of patients. However, from an IT perspective, growth can be expensive. Clalit needed to achieve its goals at a manageable cost. The company turned to Microsoft SQL Server and Analysis Services running on 16 Unisys ES7000 hardware processors. ProClarity Enterprise Server software provides the analytic applications for Clalit's variety of users, including doctors, specialists, and personnel who need to work with medical records.

Scalable, cost-effective BI is essential for companies in the ever-growing healthcare industry. However, the true test may lie ahead as Clalit seeks to support many types of data and users who need a diverse range of views, aggregations, and visualizations.