Organisations putting business intelligence to good use

London South Bank University – IBM
London South Bank University (LSBU, above) has implemented IBM’s business analytics software to monitor students’ progress and analyse course performance.

The tool enables LSBU to securely access student attendance records and course performance statistics in one central database. The data is consolidated from each faculty into merged reports. Besides cost and time efficiencies, the new implementation helps LSBU staff to identify students requiring extra help with their courses.

Card readers in classrooms gather data, allowing students to swipe their ID card to register for lectures. The information is transferred to the database and used to monitor individual student attendance. The analysis also extends virtually, with monitoring in place for the frequency with which a student logs into the university’s virtual learning environment.

The success of the system has led to plans by LSBU to extend it to its human resources and finance departments.

City Building Glasgow – Oracle
Angela Murphy, head of IT at construction firm City Building Glasgow (CBG), found that her organisation’s main bespoke application and database were too slow and therefore not fit for purpose. The answer was a technology refresh.

“One of the main priorities was to refresh hardware and to ensure the IT was supporting the business,” says Murphy. “But the new hardware we selected would not support an older database, so we had to upgrade both the hardware and the application at the same time.”

A further problem was identified with the communications processes. There was no means of easily relaying profit and loss and key performance indicators to managers. This quickly became a new BI requirement.

CBG looked into Oracle 11g, but felt that the transition from its existing Oracle 7.3.4 system would have presented too much of a leap both in terms of staff training and hardware requirements. The decision was made to upgrade to 10g.

“Because we were doing a major upgrade of the 10g database application, we struck a good deal with Oracle for the BI solution,” says Murphy.

The result of the project was a much swifter BI function and critical information reaching decision makers at the right time. “It was a smooth implementation,” she adds.

Diageo – SAP
Diageo is a consumer goods company with household brands such as Smirnoff, Baileys, Guinness and Johnnie Walker. The company runs one global instance of SAP’s BI and analytics platform.

Using this platform, CIO Brian Franz is putting together one global supply and logistics network.

“The goal is to put technology in the process to enable a real-time and agile view of the supply chain. The result is that sales can see what is going on in the market right now,” says Franz.

This technology enables him to answer the question: “Why isn’t a product flying off the shelves?” The faster a business can see what is going on in the market, the faster it can react, perhaps amending that product slightly.

“That gives you a competitive advantage,” he says, adding that it also affects pricing: “You run analytic models to help understand what will happen if you take the price up or down slightly. How will that affect sales? The faster you have that data, the faster you can make those decisions.”

Connexions – SAP
Connexions is an information and advice organisation for young people in England. The business used to use Crystal Reports v8 from SAP, but found that reports were not kept up to date.

Catherine Moore, IT development manager, explains: “We did not track who used the reports, or how. They were often out of date, and managers obtained incorrect figures from them.”

She adds that there was heavy reliance on her IT team to maintain and monitor the reports, which put it under extreme pressure.

“When managers wanted ad hoc reporting they had to ask the IT team, which had to generate and disseminate the reports. Everyone felt frustrated as they were unable to get information in a timely manner.”

Matters improved, however, once the business introduced SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, which is specifically designed for mid-sized organisations such as Connexions.
“We introduced the enterprise server, and were able to develop ad hoc reporting. Managers could generate real-time reports themselves,” says Moore.

A further improvement was the dashboard. “We liked the fact that the dashboard we could produce for our KPIs was much more professional than anything we had seen before. Until that point we were using graphs based on an Excel spreadsheet.”

Moore says that internal teams such as HR no longer come to the IT team for their reports. “They can just do a drop and drag on SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence. It has freed up a lot of resources for other projects,” she adds.