Several key factors motivated Life Fitness to reevaluate its BI platform strategy. Specifically, Life Fitness sought to take advantage of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE’s architectural advantages, information delivery capabilities, and its integration with Oracle Database, Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Middleware products — all of which Life Fitness relies upon.

The Life Fitness evaluation of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE found that the product included key functionality in a single solution that was not included with its existing BI tool. Rather than going through the time-consuming process of running multiple different reports in series to get the information they need, Life Fitness constituents will be able to quickly access and view all of their BI information simultaneously in one place through Oracle Interactive Dashboards. Life Fitness will also implement Oracle Delivers, a proactive intelligence solution that helps to enable pervasive BI by providing business event monitoring and alerting to users via email, dashboards, and mobile devices. Oracle Delivers will free Life Fitness analysts from having to continuously run activity reports to search for exceptional conditions. Instead, they will be alerted only when specific conditions, opportunities or problems arise.

“Choosing Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition made sense technically and strategically for Life Fitness,” said Peter Malling, Senior Manager of Data Warehousing and Network Operations, Life Fitness. “Technically, we value having a single, unified BI metadata model because we’ve struggled to maintain consistency across different subject areas of data with our other BI tool. Strategically, we expect significant benefits from having a BI platform that is more tightly integrated with our other key applications and infrastructure software including Oracle Database, Oracle Portal and Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle is best positioned to help us get the most value out of those products.”

Life Fitness will upgrade its existing Oracle data warehouse to Oracle Database 10g Release 2 running on IBM AIX to take advantage of its enhanced manageability and performance capabilities. The centralized data warehouse contains inventory, manufacturing, supply chain and transactional data extracted from Oracle E-Business Suite as well as from systems of its
international subsidiaries. “We expect Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition is going to utilize every drop of data warehousing features and functionalities within Oracle Database 10g,” added Malling.

Headquartered near Chicago in Schiller Park, Ill., Life Fitness is the leading brand of fitness equipment in health clubs worldwide and distributes its equipment in more than 120 countries. Since 1999, Life Fitness has relied on business intelligence (BI) to distill and disperse critical information to key constituents and decision makers within the company as well as to external dealers, suppliers and large customers. BI is critical for the enterprise globally and supports engineering, field sales, finance, inventory management, order management, and supply chain
management. For example, the Life Fitness sales organization relies on BI to track sales and order pipeline related to goals, while the order management and supply chain organizations relate projected and actual sales information to available inventory, assuring adequate product availability to meet demand.

With 3,500 employees and $260 million in annual revenues, Yesim Tekstil relies on a foundation of Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Application Server 10g and Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE to support its Information Technology needs. Using Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE, Yesim Tekstil can analyze sales, finance and production opportunities in real time. Utilizing Oracle’s open, standards-based BI solution has also enabled Yesim Tekstil to merge and analyze information from different platforms.

“We chose Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition because we needed a single, integrated business intelligence solution,” said Sadiye Sidar, IT Manager, Yesim Tekstil. “With it, our users will be able to analyze sales, finance and production opportunities in real-time from data stored across multiple platforms and applications.”

Yesim Tekstil began operations in 1983 as a producer of home textile products, such as tablecloths and sheets. Today, its operations, which employ almost 5,000 people, are housed in a 240,000 square meter facility. Yesim Tekstil specializes not only in home textiles but also in ready-made clothing and has a daily capacity of 250,000 pieces, which consists of 150,000 pieces of ready-to-wear clothing and 100,000 home textiles.

Yesim’s specialty is cotton knitting and this is reflected in its products, 75% of which are cotton, while the remaining 25% are polyester and blends. Manufacturing capacity has grown steadily and operations have been divided, on the basis of specialization and product type, into three separate units: Yesim 1, Yesim 2, and Yesim 3. Yesim stays abreast of the latest advances in technology and its state-of-the-art knitting, printing dyeing, plain dyeing and fabric treatment processes are part of a highly automated, fully vertically integrated manufacturing complex that ensures that, from yarn to finished product, customers can count on Yesim Quality through every stage of the production process.