Our experience with BI projects have convinced us that in most cases there is a certain amount of reinventing the wheel. As an example, let's consider analyzing your companies’ sales data. With many BI products are not capable to inherently understand what a sales report is. You must tell them how to define Sales Volume, Profit, and Margin %. This can be time consuming and adds to the cost of implementation and deployment. Once you have described this structure, you need to design report layouts, build query screens, filters and charts. This further increases time and complexity.  You begin to realize that every company that analyzes sales is essentially doing the same thing. Reinventing the wheel.

What we have developed is an innovative two stage approach to BI. The first stage comprises the Template that represents the essence of what you are trying to analyse. It contains all the definitions of what you need to evaluate. It allows you to query and interrogate out of the box, without having to design all this from scratch. The second stage is the Mapping that allows you to connect the abstract Template into your own actual data.

As an example, for sales, we have developed a sales template that inherently understands sales. It will display Qty Sold, Average Cost, Average Selling Price, Total Costs, Total Sales, Profit and Margin %. It will allow you to analyse these by Category, Item, Rep, Branch, By Day, By Week, By Month, By Quarter and By Year, or any other custom field. You can drilldown, generate pivot reports, filter the data, render charts and do comparative analysis. To implement our tool, all you have to do is connect it to your data. There is no need to spend a fortune on consulting and reinventing the wheel. By using pre-built templates, the cost and time of deployment of your BI project is reduced because you only need to map the template into your own data. You do not need to implement the entire solution from scratch.

We have a web based client that executives find easy to use. It is not necessary to design query screens or report screens. The client part analyses your mapping, and automatically configures the interface of the template to match your own business needs.

As an example, a large consumer electronics company needed to understand what was going on in their supply chain. They use SAP as their ERP, but found the SAP BI tools could not cope that well with non SAP data. For a minimal cost, they were able to use Interactive Reporting’s Sales Template to map their dealer sales data and gain better insight into what was happening with that channel sales.

 O’Mahony Packaging were able to use Interactive Reporting’s Sales Template and the built-in Accounting Adapter for Sage Line 100 to have a flexible web based interface that allowed them to quickly analyze sales data without the need for regular lengthy printouts. Margin and sales volume slippage was quickly spotted allowing corrective action. Sales margins could be sorted which highlighted good and bad sellers and a detailed analysis of sales reps showed which ones needed help.

The Shaw Group, with 15 large department stores in Ireland, were able to take connect Interactive Reporting’s Sales Template and Purchasing Template to their HQ Sales and Purchasing databases. This reporting tool gave their staff the power to analyse just about anything including branch, major department, sub department, buyer, bar code, size, style, and colour. Users could also be restricted to only view their branch’s figures. Key reports could automatically be emailed to appropriate users.

In the BI marketplace, there has been a lot of mergers and consolidation of companies. Cognos bought Adaytum for $157 million. Business Objects bought Crystal Decisions for $1.2 Billion. Hyperion bought Brio for $142 million. Consolidation can lead to reduced competition and increased prices for customers. We at Interactive Reporting promise you that we will fight them on the servers. We will fight them in the marketplace. And give you, the customers, increased choice and flexibility.

            Our approach is to make BI simpler by helping you avoid reinventing the wheel. We include standard templates with our product that help simplify complex BI projects. Additional templates can also be downloaded from our template marketplace. Standard templates are available for sales, purchasing, inventory, AR, and GL. We also make available a template editor allowing you to build your own templates. By using industry standard templates, you can focus more time on understanding your own business and less time on building and deploying more complex BI solutions. Our approach can sometimes cost an order of magnitude less than competitive products.