Realizing results using a Consolidated Business Intelligence (CBI) portal

How many systems do you have to report different pieces of information from your organization? How many reports do you have that are required by your company?

Information sprawl is rampant within organizations today. In fact, many businesses spend more time looking for and organizing information than they do actually using that information. Avanade's Consolidated Business Intelligence (CBI) allows businesses to effectively inventory, locate, secure and share business data assets—such as reports, scorecards, dashboards and data lists—without consolidating reporting systems or data repositories. CBI is a cost-effective solution that provides true business value though a single, easy-to-access portal that helps improve and accelerate decision-making processes.

CBI Features:  

There are numerous benefits to your company in using Avanade's Consolidated Business Intelligence (CBI) solution. They include:

• Increased Ability to Make Informed Business Decisions
• Single Source for Business-Critical Information
• Ability to Easily Locate Information Assets
• Personalized, Consistent and Flexible User Experience
• Increased productivity through streamlined report processes
• Reduced Development, Maintenance, and Support Costs
• Increased Data Security

Screen Shot of CBI:

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Case Study:

Like many IT organizations, Microsoft maintains a complex reporting environment with numerous server-based business information systems. The challenge Microsoft IT faced is that multiple reporting systems can cause business and technical issues, such as silos of information, multiple data repositories, reporting tools, and complicated permission schemas.

  

To help business units within Microsoft make better and faster decisions CBI was developed as a centralized portal application built on Microsoft’s SharePoint Server and SQL Server products. CBI is part of Microsoft IT’s Enterprise Data Warehouse strategy, the solution helps to surface data sources, data subject areas and identify opportunities for data consolidation and enrichment.

Today at Microsoft, the CBI implementation is used by more than 50 business units, it has over 20,000 subscribing users and is accessible by over 90,000 employee, vendors and partners. These numbers grow on a monthly basis as Microsoft IT, with the help of Accenture and Avanade, onboard new business units and their associated users.

  

If you would like understand how CBI can help your company, please contact Avanade via Email or in the Calgary Office at (403) 476-1473. Please call to arrange a meeting and presentation

Dashboards for The Oil and Gas Industry

Recently Avanade in Calgary has been working on a quick dashboarding solution that is geared towards the oil and gas industry.

One of the issues that a lot of oil and gas or E&P companies face are the disparate systems that contains data that is relevant to providing meaningful information that should be correlated and used to getting your job done.

A couple of our local Architects have created a quick dsahboarding solution that is specific for E&P's to provide quick visibility into key performance indicators (KPI's) that they measure, such as production growth, capex spend to budget, output per dollar spent on a project or project type, among others.

This solution is utilizing SharePoint, XL Services and Silverlight and can typically be implemented in days as opposed to weeks or months for other dashboarding solutions. Most organizations already own this infrastructure, so deployment is usually quick and inexpensive.

One of the primary uses for this solution is in small divisions or departments of E&P's. For example, a regional division of an oil company may require a dashboard that show their daily production digits. They can benchmark if their numbers against what is required and if a problem occurs where production is lower, then they can drill down to spot the problem.

This solution can be extended to many different areas in an oil and gas company and any information that is contained in a system can be displayed on it's own or correlated with other information.

If you would like to find out more about our Dashboard offering or any other solutions that we provide, please feel free to contact Chris Hamilton at chris.hamilton@avanade.com or at 403-476-1473.