Business Intelligence Journal

Business intelligence, data warehousing and analytics news and resources

First European Customer Goes Live on Global Lawson Business Intelligence Solution

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Swedish pharmaceutical retailer Apoteket is the first customer in Europe to go live on Lawson Business Intelligence 9.0.2, the company’s globalized business intelligence solution. Apoteket incorporated the Swedish language version of Lawson Business Intelligence into the organization’s existing enterprise system. This helps key decision makers more effectively manage the company’s prescription fulfillment process and its supply chain.

The application, first introduced during the Lawson Conference and User Exchange (CUE) in March 2007, will also help the company improve visibility into the management of contractual terms and conditions, handling invoicing and settlement, and generating comprehensive reports associated with key business activities. Apoteket first became a Lawson customer in 1998 and is using Lawson S3 Financial Management, Process Flow, and Services Automation. [Read more…]

Harry & David: Time is Ripe for SAS Business Intelligence

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Harry & David’s famous juicy pears will more easily find their way into the mouths of eager customers because of SAS Enterprise BI Server. SAS, the leader in business intelligence, is helping the Oregon-based gourmet food retailer to manage its marketing activities.

“The marketing department was forced to operate without a usable query tool,” said Tammy Miles, Senior Manager of Database Marketing at Harry & David. “Creating ad-hoc market analysis reports was a significant burden, and we knew we needed something more. We’ve been using SAS for more than 25 years at Harry & David, and it just made sense for us to stay with SAS. The SAS Enterprise BI Server’s high configurability and ease of use helped us keep the learning curve low. SAS is an ongoing success for us.” [Read more…]

JasperSoft Open Source Business Intelligence Community Grows to Over 30,000 Developers in Nine Months

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More than 30,000 BI developers have registered for JasperForge.org since it was launched in July of 2006, creating a vibrant ecosystem of businesses and community developers that has already produced over 130 BI projects.

JasperForge.org is an online developer site that provides free access to software and tools to build, deploy, and extend open source BI software. Projects range from developer tools to integration toolkits to localization powered by an interactive online translation tool, JasperBabylon, where more than 30 different translation projects are underway. Some of the more popular JasperForge.org projects include the Drupal Bridge for JasperReports, iReport with Hibernate, Oracle Stored Procedures, Reporting and OLAP Analysis Tools for Bugzilla, and Jasper4Eclipse, an iReport plug-in project for eclipse.

“The rapid growth of JasperForge.org shows that open source BI provides unique value that goes beyond what proprietary BI solutions can deliver,” said Tim Cloonan, director of community relations at JasperSoft. “In JasperForge.org, we see both commercial businesses and independent community developers taking advantage of our free project hosting services to build solutions for their specific problems. The solutions are rapidly built with community support without having to wait for large proprietary software companies to understand and evaluate how to best address the needs of both groups.”

Reflecting the breadth and range of the Jasper community are projects from Cincom, a large software and services company, and John Bindel, a software developer who independently developed better file virtualization capabilities for JasperReports. [Read more…]

Cognos Previews New Analysis Tool for Microsoft Excel

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Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN) today previewed Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel®, a new enterprise BI capability that enables Microsoft Excel users to directly access centrally controlled and secured Cognos 8 BI performance information for improved decision-making.

The self-service nature of the new capability will make it easy for business analysts, financial analysts or line of business managers to interactively explore and analyze multidimensional information within Microsoft Excel, without draining valuable IT resources. Using formula-based data access, business users will be able to find answers, solve business problems and report key results in the format most convenient to them, while leveraging the Cognos 8 BI infrastructure for data consistency, freshness and security. For richer analysis and formatting, or for broader enterprise distribution of reports, they can re-use the results of their exploration within other worksheets or Cognos 8 BI’s proven reporting and analysis capabilities.

“The ability to conduct drag and drop exploration and analysis of controlled BI data within Excel will really benefit the business analyst who wants to solve analytical problems in a familiar spreadsheet environment,” said Vivian Adashek, financial systems project specialist, Manpower. “These analysts are gaining direct access to the underlying data sources within Excel so they can flexibly analyze trusted secure information from Cognos 8 BI together with other data sources without requiring IT to do this for them. As always, Cognos is listening and partnering with its customers on new product innovations.” [Read more…]

Ace Hardware Gets Business Intelligence Makeover With Information Builders

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Information Builders announced that Ace Hardware Corporation, the largest retailer-owned hardware cooperative in the industry, has chosen WebFOCUS as its enterprise reporting tool due to the solution’s ease of development, scalability, and data access and integration capabilities.

Founded in 1924, Ace grew a few Chicago hardware stores into a company that includes more than 4,600 stores in 50 states and over 70 countries. As the company grows in size, employees and revenues, it has become critically important to have a business intelligence (BI) standard that can get users the information they need, when they need it, for better decision-making. [Read more…]