VISUAL BI SOLUTIONS

BACKGROUND

Please give a brief description of your company.

My firm is in the post-acute care space within healthcare, meaning we have long-term acute care hospitals. We have rehab services, nursing centers, nursing homes, and in-home health.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I head up the data warehouse development.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was the business challenge that you were trying to address with this work?

We use Visual BI Solutions for outsourced development. We give them some data projects that tend to be a little smaller in scope. We’ve outsourced some of our development to augment our skills here.

SOLUTION

Can you describe the scope of their work?

If they developed something, and we have some sort of production issue, we may go to them for the support. If not, we will support it ourselves. The primary purpose is development outsourcing.

How did you select them to work with?

We met their leaders initially at a SAP conference. They can work with SAP well.

Could you give me a sense of the size of the initiative in a personnel work hour figure?

We use them as flex staff, anywhere from three to seven full-time employees.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How have they performed so far?

The engagement has been good. I’ll say there have been some growing pains on our side. There’s a certain skill set to outsource development. We started this 18 months ago. We’re just now getting to where we can start to get better at it. That’s mainly on our side, not theirs.

What’s really unique or special about them that compared to some other IT groups?

They have done a good job, and performed to expectations. I can’t really answer that question well because this is our first experience with outsourced development.

Is there any area that you think they could improve upon or something you would do differently?

I don’t think so, no. I think our biggest challenge is on this side, not on their side. We’ve got to supervise someone who is not on the same floor with us. There is a time zone difference. So, it’s a cultural shift that we’re growing into.

BACKGROUND

Can you describe your company?

The company is a refining and marketing company, we have refineries that we produce products from. We also handle logistics and retail in order to move the products.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I'm a director in IT.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your business goal for the project?

The business goal for the project would be to provide dashboards for our executives. We were trying to reduce manual work. We wanted a presentation style that is easy for executives to use.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of the project?

Visual BI Solutions was responsible for developing the dashboard, we had come up with the requirements and then turned it over to them for full development.

What technologies were used?

SAP Business Objects.

What does SAP offer your organization?

We have a lot of SAP software; we're in a data warehousing environment and we use the reporting and analytics capabilities. We have SAP as our ERP system; we also incorporate SAP with our business warehouse and HANA technology.

Business Objects has good integration capabilities into SAP so we've opted to use their suite of tools. SAP gives us capabilities to do ad-hoc reporting, dashboarding and formatted reports.

What was your process for selecting Visual BI Solutions?

I was familiar with them. I've seen Visual BI’s capabilities demoed and I like the way that they had built their dashboards. Their capabilities and methodology seem to be pretty good. We brought them in to do some of those things and they've done a very good job.

Can you give us a sense of the size of that initiative?

Before, we had ongoing dashboard help from Visual BI throughout the year. We’ve employed about 1.25 full-time person hours throughout the year to handle dashboarding. We also have a person that will do some research on HANA and helps us with some of the proof of concepts that we need, such as trying to figure out how to use hierarchies.

When was that project completed?

They just built a new dashboard for us last week, the latest round of the engagement.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any stats or metrics to track improvement?

I don’t.

How did Visual BI perform throughout the work?

They performed very well. They were timely in delivery and they delivered a quality product.

When working with them, what is really unique or special about Visual BI?

They have a pretty good work ethic. They try hard to do a good job and to have a good product. They're easy to work with. They want to not just do the standard work but make it better.

Visual BI Solutions built their own add-ons to take a step further to increase the capabilities of the dashboards. That really differentiates them from some other companies. They really understand the usability of the product and are actually trying to make that product better.

Is there any area that you think they can improve upon or maybe you would do differently?

There’s nothing that I can think of at this point.