CincomBI Cincom Business Intelligence Solutions Business Users Overview Find the perfect answers to your strategic business questions. SIMPLIFICATION THROUGH INNOVATION
Introduction Being able to make the right business decisions at the right time can be a tremendous competitive advantage for your enterprise. Cincom Business Intelligence Solutions (CincomBI) provide the facilities necessary to get the right information from your day-to-day operational data to make critical business decisions. Workers at all levels of an organization recognize that key decision support resources can be found in the data that already exists in their operational IT systems. These data resources can help form the answers to business questions that range from simple reporting to inferential analyses. Questions such as: Am I targeting the right customers for our new sales initiative? Do I know the impact on product sales by discontinuing a service? Can I more accurately plan on seasonal buying trends? Am I looking at the right measurements for ranking my suppliers? Can I more accurately predict the profit lifecycle of a product? What dependent variables affect the initial revenues for new products? Operational data can be in a variety of different systems in a variety of formats. Accessing and restructuring that data to enable decision support can be difficult. Solutions have typically been based on complex, software technology with high hardware and software costs. Cost, complexity and risk are often barriers to the adoption of business intelligence solutions. warehouse and analytic technologies have typically not been available for small to midsized businesses where ease-of-use, flexibility and low costs are vital. "In a data-rich world, businesses are inundated with information. Yet used strategically, it can guide decision-making and boost performance. That s why Business Intelligence is on every CIO s must-have list for 2008." Gartner, Inc. Cincom Systems, Inc., a recognized leader in the DBMS world, understands that most enterprises, regardless of size, have an extensive history of operational data that can be a valuable resource for decision support. Utilizing our vast experience with DBMS technologies, Cincom Systems has developed a cost-effective, enterprise-class, Business Intelligence solution for the Small to Midsize Business (SMB) market Cincom Business Intelligence Solutions. Cincom Business Intelligence Solutions (CincomBI) enable your midsize business to make the right business decisions at the right time to improve your bottom line. CincomBI provides a complete, end-to-end solution for business intelligence at an affordable price. And just as important, the IT costs to develop, deploy and maintain solutions are aligned with the needs and budgets of small and midsized companies.
What a Cincom Business Intelligence Solution Offers the Small/Midsize Business Empower the Business User Business intelligence is no longer just for highly trained analysts and programmers. CincomBI allows you to develop reports without help from your IT staff. CincomBI provides reporting tools and allows you to utilize your current tools and even use Microsoft Excel for ad hoc analysis. Dashboards can be created that provide status at a glance information to give you insight into your operational or analytical information. Solution Orientation You need more than just technology. You need guidance in leveraging technology to reveal product performance statistics, profit trends and productivity comparisons. CincomBI provides training resources, practical how to guides and real-world samples of business intelligence solutions. In addition, consulting services are available to assist with your business intelligence solution development. Personalized and Relevant CincomBI empowers your workers to make business decisions based on the specific information they need. CincomBI delivers relevant content for different job roles making it easy for you to get the right content to the right workers in the right format at the right time. Developer Productivity CincomBI allows you to develop, deploy and maintain a business intelligence solution with an investment that is appropriate to your business. CincomBI allows solution developers to develop ETL, data warehouses, OLAP cubes and reports without programming. With its componentized design and use of standard interfaces, CincomBI can be integrated with your current systems or integrated into other reporting or analysis tools. Highlights Nearly 70 percent of midsize companies indicate that customer relations is one of their top challenges to growth and profitability. Nearly 50 percent of executives say their firms are actively planning to implement new business intelligence and CRM capabilities. Less than 15 percent of midsize firms are confident they have complete business intelligence and CRM capabilities in place today. source: IBM
Business Intelligence That Fits Your Company Your business is unique. You don t have time and resources to change your business to conform to a one size fits all business intelligence solution. You need a solution that you can start using right away with the flexibility to build more complex business intelligence over time. No Barriers to Growth A number of vendors with large, complex business intelligence products are now targeting the small to midsize market. The products are often just their standard enterprise product with a smaller price. However, there are hidden costs as there is often reduced functionality, limits on number of users and high IT costs associated with complex tools. These costs amplify as your business grows. CincomBI supplies a complete solution for one affordable price. And there are no limits on growing your usage. Who are my current currrent customers? Analysis Why Why are are customers customers increasing increasing spending? spending? Historical & Cleansed Operational Access Which customers increased spending? Modular Growth You don t need to build a complete analytic solution to start seeing benefits. Right away you can start taking better advantage of your operational data. And over time, you can build more complex business intelligence solutions. CincomBI s reporting technology allows you to directly access your operational data. You can build standard reports, dashboards or even ad hoc reports to better understand your operational conditions. warehousing technology allows you to build data stores that are optimized for analyzing data, particularly the analysis of trends over time. Our warehouse solution allows you to: Restructure data into a form that is easier for analysts to understand Combine data from several sources into a unified business model Cleanse data to meet the needs of analysis or changing standards Provide a historical basis for analysis Reduce resource usage on operational systems To better answer your why questions, you can build an analytic solution on top of your data warehouse. Our OLAP tools allow you explore the measures and dimensions that are important to your analysis. The same reporting, dashboard and ad hoc reporting technologies are available in all three levels of CincomBI.
Empowering Each Type of Business User Not everyone in your organization will interact with a BI solution in the same way. A majority of the users will probably be BI consumers. They receive reports and utilize dashboards. CincomBI allows you to: Schedule reports to be delivered in the appropriate format. Base report content on a user s role. Embed content in operational systems using Web interfaces. Casual users will directly use BI tools for more ad hoc questions and analysis. They can utilize Web-based pivot tables and tools to construct their own reports with little training from IT. Power users can construct more complex queries utilizing query tools, and they can also use OLAP pivot table support in Microsoft Excel. Heard on the street... CincomBI delivers an extremely powerful solution, at an affordable price that enables business users to make better business decisions. CincomBI has a rich set of features that will let us create and deliver useful, valuable reports and analyses to better manage our business.
Business User Facilities CincomBI allows business users to concentrate on decision-making and performance analysis. CincomBI s easy-to-use graphical facilities empower business users to develop their own reports, or modify standard reports, without depending on IT solution developers. Reports CincomBI provides a reporting framework to maximize your use of business intelligence information. Reports can be structured to meet your organizational structures and performance improvement objectives. Reports can integrate data from a variety of sources and can be delivered in a variety of formats such as Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, HTML, etc. Complex layouts can be easily developed using tables, cross-tabs or charts for screen display or print. Analysis Views Analysis Views are similar to reports displayed in a Web page but allow you to dig deeper into the results. Pivot tables allow you to slice and dice data to examine it from different points of view. You can drill down to see sub-categories or roll up to see summaries. You can also see the origins of data used for each measure. Charts can be added to the page and adjusted for any type of presentation. The CincomBI Ad Hoc Reports Editor allows business users to easily create and refine reports on-the-fly. You can drag and drop columns and groups, select labels and styles and select summaries and data formats for each field. Ad hoc reports are created from topics defined by a user with administrative permissions.
Dashboards Dashboards allow you to compose a Web page from multiple reports and views to give you a clear picture of current business performance. You can use gauges to give instant visual meaning to measures. The dashboard can provide links to other dashboards or detailed reports to probe information in even more depth. Ad Hoc Analysis CincomBI integrates with Microsoft Excel allowing you to use familiar Excel Pivot Tables and Charts with your business intelligence data. You can dynamically create tables and charts using drag and drop operations. This allows you to explore and perform ad hoc analysis without advanced knowledge of multidimensional methods. Drill-down and summary operations are provided to enable you to further explore and understand trends. Business Intelligence Server To maximize the use of a business intelligence solution, the right content must be delivered to the right users in the right format. The Business Intelligence Server solves these problems by providing a Web-based environment for the delivery of BI content. Content may originate from a number of sources such as operational legacy databases, historical data in data warehouses or analytic data in OLAP cubes. Business intelligence content may be delivered in a variety of formats such as dashboards, tabular reports, charts and pivot tables. Content must be delivered to users according to their interests or organizational roles. And the content must be presented in the appropriate form. The CincomBI Server provides the services necessary for: Report Services User and Access Services Presentation Services Solution developers configure the CincomBI Server by defining report and presentation services and the initial organizational roles. Business users can then tailor the CincomBI Server for any changes in users and organizations, and to identify which users get which reports in which format. In addition, Cincom can provide consulting services to further customize the CincomBI Server or integrate it with the operational systems. Analysis Warehouse Report Services BI Server User & Access Services Presentation Services Operational
About Cincom For nearly 40 years, Cincom's software and services have helped thousands of clients worldwide simplify the management of complex business processes. Cincom specializes in the areas of business where simplification brings the greatest value to managers who want to grow revenue, control costs, minimize risk and achieve rapid ROI better than their competitors. Cincom serves clients on six continents including BMW, Citibank, Boeing, Ericsson, Penn State University, Milacron, Siemens, Rockwell Automation and Trane. For more information about Cincom's products and services, contact Cincom at 1-800-2CINCOM (USA), 1-513-612-2769 (International), send an e-mail to info@cincom.com or visit the company's website at www.cincom.com. Cincom, the Quadrant Logo, Cincom Business Intelligence Solutions, CincomBI and Simplification Through Innovation are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cincom Systems, Inc. All other trademarks belong to their respective companies. 2008 Cincom Systems, Inc. FORM CB071207-2 12/08 Printed in U.S.A. All Rights Reserved World Headquarters Cincinnati, OH USA US 1-800-2CINCOM (1-800-224-6266) International 1-513-612-2769 Fax 1-513-612-2000 E-mail info@cincom.com http://www.cincom.com