PerformancePoint Server case studies

With 4800 employees, Opticon is a Danish company that faced many challenges related to financial consolidation, budgeting, planning, forecasting, and reporting. Disparate systems and data sources were creating redundant work for finance users and raising questions about the consistency and accuracy of information. With more than 50 business operations around the world, Opticon faced challenges in trying to consolidate financial figures for monthly, quarterly, and year-end reporting. Using a Web-based database system, the server was capturing and calculating data in real-time, which slowed down the pace at which users could enter their numbers. The system was even slower during budgeting period, when the system was constantly being loaded with volumes of data from different sources.

Opticon worked with Solver Inc. and began building a solution with Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, an integrated performance management application with capabilities that include financial consolidation, planning, budgeting, and forecasting. Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is based on Microsoft SQL Server 2005, which enables it to provide scalable and secure data management. It also offers the additional advantage of utilizing the 2007 Microsoft Office system, which is composed of programs most Opticon users were already familiar with, including Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and, of course, Excel.

To read more about the case study for Opticon, see Oticon Hears The Value of Performance Management with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007.

The Credit Valley Hospital is a community hospital in one of Canada’s fastest growing communities. In order to promote greater visibility and accountability in its processes, Credit Valley needed a more cost-effective method to track and monitor medical resource, patient, and financial information.

As a healthcare leader, The Credit Valley Hospital wanted to exceed the new provincial requirements. According to Dan Germain, Chief Financial and Information Officer at The Credit Valley Hospital, in order to promote greater transparency and accountability the healthcare provider needed a more cost-effective method to track and monitor medical information. "We're faced with a healthcare system that is under intense pressure to meet regulatory requirements and patient needs. We want to track information accurately while ensuring that our resources are being utilized effectively.” For example, the hospital wanted to move away from the use of white boards and manual lists and, in their place, more effectively manage its clinical and financial databases. The challenge was that tracking metrics and measuring performance management indicators involved e-mailing numerous standalone documents and spreadsheets across the organization — a cumbersome and potentially error-prone process that was creating concerns around data accuracy and consistency.

The hospital deployed PerformancePoint Server as part of its business intelligence (BI) platform. The solution enables staff to define and use scorecards and key performance indicators (KPIs) to drive accountability throughout the facility. They now have access to trending analysis and analytics that tell them who is getting sick with what, and breaks down data by demographics.

To read more about the case study for the Credit Valley Hospital, see Hospital Delivers Better Business Insight with PerformancePoint Server 2007.

Successful universities are ultimately driven by student enrollment rates. Moreover, it is commonly the valuable information locked inside enrollment data that holds the key to successful marketing tactics and improved revenue. Capella University describes the following business challenges from previous attempts to incorporate reporting and analysis tools.

• KPIs were identified but IT lacked the proper toolset to display them to decision-makers.

• Standard reporting tools required too many resources for helping users understand the relational database model.

• IT considered Web components for the front-end solution but decided this would require too many development resources.

Capella chose to move operational data to a SQL Server database and put data into OLAP cubes to simplify displaying hierarchies and relationships to end users. The flexibility of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 allows IT to tailor the delivery of data according to unique user needs across several departments, including admissions, marketing, finance, and individual educational departments. Casual users are provided with static views of data while approximately 20 business analysts use the "slice and dice" capabilities to perform deep root-cause analysis of the data. Dashboards and enhanced charting capabilities allow users to display high-level KPI information and more easily monitor the performance of the university.

To read more about the case study for Capella University, see Capella University Monitors Growth with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

Philips, a supplier of high-quality medical equipment, provides service for purchased medical systems. More than six thousand engineers work worldwide to gather information on the performance of the medical equipment, such as MRI scanners and X-ray machines. Information that can be analyzed for trends and reported on can be downloaded automatically via a remote service network.

Philips wanted to streamline the activities performed by customer service, service representatives, and field service engineers. To do this, Philips uses an SQL Server database with its data warehouse capability. The database currently holds 0.5 TB of data and more than 800 million records of events. The monitoring activities for locations that are linked to the system cover aspects such as image quality, hardware errors and crash information. Philips is able to act pre-emptively on hardware issues.