Business Intelligence Journal

If you are a business owner, money and debt may be a continuous issue. When you encompass significant business debts, you have minimal options of what you can do to eliminate your debt problems. You can cut back, expand, or go out of business.

Cutting Back

Featured below are several different ways you save money on your business’ overhead:

• Control labor costs. Evaluate your employee situation and make certain that you are not overstaffing your business. Another consideration is to determine if the cost of labor can reduce by making an employee and independent contractor, thus eliminating insurance, benefits and tax withholding out of the labor equation. Utilize a voicemail system as opposed to a receptionist.
• Reduce overhead. Reduce entertainment and other perks, compare insurance carriers and cut back on travel expenses. Cutting back on travel means staying at less expensive hotels, traveling by car if possible, etc.
• Reward productivity and efficiency. Reward your employees with bonuses when they help the business by pointing out money saving areas that may have been overlooked by you and the other powers that be. Also, let it be known that employees will benefit with pay increases and bonuses for high work output.

Expanding

Even though it may seem ironic, one method for a business to get out of debt is to fall more into debt. More specifically, by applying for a small business loan, not only will you satisfy your cash needs, you have the option of growing your business.

There are a variety of personal loan options for you and your business. It is important to note that when you utilize business financing, that you make certain your loan is not going to bolster bad business practices, but will instead allow you get through an unexpected money crisis. Read the rest »

Corporate Express US, a wholly owned subsidiary of Corporate Express NV (NYSE: CXP), has selected MicroStrategy for its online customer reporting application. Corporate Express US Inc. is one of the world’s largest business-to-business suppliers of essential office and computer products and services.

With MicroStrategy, Corporate Express customers will be able to run reports and analyze data related to their office supply purchases. More than 10,000 customers are expected to use this online service, which will be available through Corporate Express’ award-winning EWAY Internet ordering site. Corporate Express customers, from executives to business analysts, will be able to view procurement data using at-a-glance dashboards and standard reports and by drilling down to transaction-level data for more detailed investigation. Corporate Express currently uses MicroStrategy to monitor business performance at the corporate and
divisional levels and to perform interactive enterprise reporting and analysis. Read the rest »

Business Objects announced the launch of Business Objects Crystal Decisions Professional. This new edition of the Business Objects Crystal Decisions suite is tailored specifically for the needs of small and mid-sized companies and is the second mid-market offering launched by the company since February 2007. The announcement underscores an aggressive commitment from Business Objects to continue to deliver flexible, easy-to-deploy, and affordable BI solutions for mid-market companies – those companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenues or fewer than 1,000 employees. Business Objects is the first and only BI vendor to offer an all-in-one business intelligence and data integration product designed for the mid-market.

Business Objects Crystal Decisions Professional offers the benefits of highly developed data integration functionalities as well as intelligent reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, and dashboards capabilities. The data integration feature provides the ability to extract data from different database types that include Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Oracle, Ingres, and many others, and integrate that data into a single target source. This is especially critical for small and mid-sized companies that need to integrate their business intelligence functionality across multiple data sources. Companies new to Business Objects Crystal Decisions will also find Professional provides the flexibility to deploy and use business intelligence to complement existing business applications, data sources, and platforms, and delivers insight in a single, affordable package to help solve their business problems. Read the rest »

Jenzabar, Inc. is extending its long-standing partnership with Cognos by offering the powerful Cognos 8 Business Intelligence suite to new and existing Jenzabar customers.

In conjunction with the Jenzabar family of administrative solutions, Cognos 8 BI will deliver a complete range of BI capabilities to Jenzabar clients: reporting, analysis, scorecarding, dashboards, and business event management as well as data integration on a single, proven architecture. The solution will also deliver powerful search functionality for both BI and Enterprise Search. Cognos 8 BI offers schools a simplified BI environment that improves user adoption, enables better decision-making, and serves as an enterprise-scale foundation for performance management. Read the rest »

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 the rest »

Business Objects announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Inxight Software, Inc. Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Inxight is a leading provider of software solutions for unstructured information discovery, including text analytics, federated search, and data visualization. Financial details of the transaction, which is expected to close in July of 2007, were not disclosed.The combination of Business Objects and Inxight Software will provide organizations with a comprehensive BI solution to address all of their data assets. With the combined technology, companies will now have streamlined access to both structured information within databases and data warehouses, and unstructured information such as emails, documents, notes fields, and web content that is estimated to comprise more than 80 percent of all organizational data. Inxight brings a compelling combination of text analytics, federated search, and visualization capabilities to the BusinessObjects XI platform to enable customers to easily discover, manage, and analyze unstructured content inside and outside of their organization. Read the rest »

JasperSoft Corporation announced an unlimited subscription-based offering for its newly released JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite Professional Edition 2.0. The special offer provides a 12-month, unlimited subscription to the entire JasperSoft BI Suite, which includes Gold Level support and direct access to an assigned technical account manager for $35,000.

With a JasperSoft unlimited subscription, an organization can develop, deploy and fully support any number of BI applications, driving business-wide value. This is an ideal opportunity for any organization that wants to broadly deploy BI and provide widespread access to its benefits. JasperSoft provides open source-based professional reporting, analysis and data integration solutions, which gives people a better way to manage their business at a fraction of the cost of traditional BI solutions. Read the rest »

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 the rest »

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 the rest »

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 the rest »