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Industry Implementations

Macy's Finds a Perfect Fit with Information Builders

Macy's East recently chose Information Builders' WebFOCUS as a reporting environment to gain critical visibility into the effectiveness of advertising placement and product decisions to increase retail sales. By delivering accurate business information to buyers, advertising executives and marketing personnel, Macy's East can react to customers' buying trends by promoting and offering the products customers desire the most.

According to Roman Master, director of IT, Macy's East and Macy's Home Store Advertising, "We needed to get our ad information into one central database, then implement user-friendly reporting tools so executives, advertising personnel and buyers could access critical information without constant oversight by the IT department." By empowering its geographically dispersed users with a self-service easy-to-use reporting platform through WebFOCUS, Macy's is enabling developers to build new applications and streamline business processes rather than writing reports, delivering operational efficiencies.

To ensure that consistency and maintain a competitive advantage, Macy's needed better access to data on how their ads affect retail sales, as well as the ability to aggregate various databases to deliver a single view of its marketing strategies and inventory status. Additionally, Macy's required BI tools designed for end users, not just IT professionals. Prior to implementing WebFOCUS, Macy's Home Store Advertising lacked automation for some of its key advertising planning and turn-in processes, much of which was done manually using Excel spreadsheets.

"Access to data is the real issue for our marketing and advertising managers," said Master. "We are replacing Excel files with a dynamic reporting environment that is online - and when it changes, we can react and build our marketing strategies accordingly. We have never had this level of accuracy before."

Currently, Macy's Home Store Advertising is planning all of its ad campaigns for the spring and fall 2006 seasons including catalogs, newspaper ads and TV spots. Information on these highly detailed campaigns is now stored in the BI application, where managers can easily access it for planning purposes. They can now monitor which types of ads are running in different regions and what merchandise is being promoted. They can then run analysis reports that summarize this information at multiple levels and output reports in different formats including HTML, Excel and PDF.

New England College Improves Recruitment and Enrollment Forecasting with Rapid Insight

New England College has selected Rapid Insight Analytics to simplify its admissions and enrollment process. Rapid Insight delivers sophisticated admissions and enrollment solutions designed to significantly impact enrollment management. By simplifying and automating the data mining process, Rapid Insight Analytics allows college admissions offices to understand and predict critical, cost-effective information, including enrollment probabilities for inquirers and applicants, as well as relationships between student enrollment likelihood, SAT scores, high school GPA, gender and the distance a student lives from an institution.

"The beauty of this software is its ease of use," said Paul Miller, director of Admission and Financial Aid for New England College. "Information that used to take me several painstaking weeks to put together, I'm now deriving with a couple of clicks. I'm able to view the relationships between each of the attributes in my database, and I'm able to put all of this information together to assign an enrollment probability to each person that inquires, or to each student who sends in an application. The software makes it extremely easy to do all of this and to create reports and presentations on my findings."

New England College (www.nec.edu) is an independent, liberal arts institution in Henniker, New Hampshire offering undergraduate, graduate and professional programs to 1,000 students representing 33 states and more than 20 countries.

Grange Insurance Expands Deployment of MicroStrategy for Enterprise Reporting and Analysis

Grange Insurance has expanded its deployment of MicroStrategy as its strategic enterprise reporting and analysis standard. Grange Insurance is a property and casualty insurer that offers home, auto and business insurance and a full line of life insurance and financial products through wholly owned subsidiaries, Grange Life and The Grange Bank.

MicroStrategy's integrated business intelligence platform supports a wide range of applications for Grange Insurance across its multiple insurance and financial products. Hundreds of Grange Insurance associates including territory managers, portfolio managers, and customer management personnel use MicroStrategy to analyze four terabytes of data to identify areas of improvement in product design, customer management, and to recognize cross- and up-sell opportunities. Grange Insurance users also rely on MicroStrategy's Web-based reports to assist them in increasing the profitability of each product, region and agent.

"MicroStrategy gives us a comprehensive view of our business and enables us to better serve our customers and run our operations more efficiently," said Tony Simpkins, data warehouse project manager at Grange Insurance. "Our diverse business generates volumes of data and MicroStrategy provides our associates with analytically based and actionable insight to make more effective decisions that positively impact our bottom line."

CareGroup Rolls Out Bio-Surveillance System Built on InterSystems Caché Post-Relational Database

CareGroup Healthcare System has gone live at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) with an application that delivers automatic healthcare information updates every 15 minutes to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. The groundbreaking bio-surveillance system, which feeds the CDC with information key to early identification of disease trends, is built on InterSystems' Caché post-relational database. InterSystems spotlighted the bio-surveillance implementation at the HIMSS 2006 conference in San Diego, California.

BIDMC is one of ten U.S. hospitals that were approached by the CDC to provide medical data on a 24x7 basis. The initiative is part of a mandate by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Michael Leavitt, who chairs the American Health Information Community (AHIC), a group charged with advising the federal government on standards for electronic health records (EHRs). Bio-surveillance and public health monitoring are among the first focus areas for AHIC, and Leavitt has stated that he wants a system for streaming emergency department (ED) data to public health authorities in place by the end of 2006.

"The state of Massachusetts has always been very proactive in responding to national healthcare initiatives," said CareGroup CIO John Halamka. "The CDC started this data streaming initiative with BIDMC because it is a major monitoring center for Boston."

BIDMC was approached by the CDC about the bio-surveillance project in late November last year, according to Halamka. "They said we had to be live by the end of 2005. The RAD capabilities and high performance delivered by Caché enabled our development staff to build and test the application well within the specified timeframe," he said.

The bio-surveillance system went live on December 21, 2005. The hospital's Caché-based Emergency ED Dashboard system feeds the bio-surveillance application, which in turn provides the ED data, as well as hospital-wide statistics, to the CDC every 15 minutes.

Implementation began with installing a secure CDC server in the BIDMC data center. "Information is encrypted based on the rigorous security requirements of the CDC and transmitted over the Web. This information is not specific to any individual and no names or patient identification are provided in the data stream," Halamka said.

"We transmit information such as the complaint and diagnosis, location in the geographic area where the patient came from, and number of patients reporting with a specific complaint," he explained. "As more healthcare providers implement these streaming data feeds, information at a local and community level will be gathered countrywide. For the first time, we can analyze disease and trauma trends to spot patterns that can be the early warning of a potential pandemic or bio-terrorism attack."

Mendelsons Solicitors Selects DataCore Virtualization

Mendelsons Solicitors, a preeminent law firm in the North of England, has selected DataCore's SANmelody as their enterprise storage management solution of choice. SANmelody will serve as a mission-critical part of the enterprise's IT infrastructure software and enable the firm to achieve a key business objective, which is to deploy a data storage solution that is not only fast, but also extremely reliable in consolidating storage for its wide range of Linux and Windows systems.

A few years ago, the senior management of the firm made the policy decision to allow staff and external consultants to remotely access their IT facilities from home, thereby giving them the freedom of working at their own pace and also freeing up expensive, city centre office space. In order to make this operational change actually work, finding a robust, scalable data storage solution was of paramount importance.

Mendelsons required a storage solution that could provide storage to a thin-client system with the remote server in a hosting centre. This design allows for increased security and reliability with reduced maintenance and support.

The solution needed to be compact and scalable for additional servers and storage in the future. Support had to be carried out remotely and had to be easy to do. It was thought a blade solution would be ideal for the server side, but this has limited onboard storage, so an external storage solution was needed to provide scalability. A blade server solution was purchased to host the applications. Each blade contains two 36GB SCSI disks that are being used to host and mirror the OS. There are 12 SCSI disks in each DataCore storage server. In addition, with each server there is also an external Fibre SATA disk raid array with 16 disks.

"DataCore's SANmelody was the only product we found that would satisfy Mendelsons' requirements of performance, mirroring, fast disk to disk snapshot, ease-of-use, maturity of product and would fit into our client's budgetary constraints," said Daniel Niasoff, IT consultant, Expesys.

SANmelody provides the underlying storage for critical data that comes from Windows and Red Hat Linux applications, including Exchange, SQL, Tivoli and Progress, as well as various ad hoc files and backup data. As deployed, the storage servers mirror each other and transparently failover if required. This also allows maintenance to easily take place as one storage server can be taken down for maintenance upgrades without affecting production. The high-speed SCSI storage is used to provision time-sensitive storage for database and exchange use, and the SATA storage is used for file and backup storage.

Boden Looks to Coremetrics to Improve Customer Online Experience

Boden, a UK online fashion retailer, has selected Coremetrics, a provider of hosted Web analytics and precision marketing solutions, to improve site reporting and analyze customer behavior on its Web site, www.boden.co.uk.

Boden chose Coremetrics, designed to meet the marketing, merchandising, and site-design needs of online retailers, because of the deep analytic insight it provides. Boden plans to use the data gathered to identify key purchasing trends and site weaknesses, with the ultimate aim of improving the online shopping experience and gathering vital customer behavior information.

In addition, Boden joined the Coremetrics LIVEmark Index, a benchmarking solution that lets participants gain a clear understanding of business performance relative to peers and competitors. Armed with this data, Boden will have the insight needed to effectively allocate marketing spend, anticipate industry threats and trends, and make strategic site decisions.

"With a global customer base, it is essential we understand who is buying our products and when," said Katie Payne, online manager, Boden. "Coremetrics provides us with the ability to see complete customer profiles and to respond to groups of customers in a personalized way for optimum response. In the few short weeks since deployment, we have already started analysis of our customers shopping patterns - this high level of technical speed and support was a key feature in our decision to change providers."


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