Review: WebFOCUS Maximizes On Business Intelligence

Smart retailers are using business intelligence (BI) technology to gain insight into nearly every aspect of their businesses, from analyzing cash flow to monitoring buying patterns to tracking the effectiveness of promotional campaigns.

As a company that specializes in BI solutions for the apparel industry, Sky IT Group has worked closely retailers such as Valentino, Garan, Liz Claiborne, Nautica, Michael Kors and Burlington Coat Factory to put BI technology to work throughout the enterprise. Whether that involves analyzing 852 reports, understanding aged inventory or monitoring available-to-ship schedules, BI plays a vital role.

To that end, Sky IT Group uses WebFOCUS, an enterprise BI platform from New York-based Information Builders that's designed for executive, analytical and operational reporting. Thanks to a browser-based interface and extensive data-access capabilities, the software makes data available, accessible and meaningful to virtually any person or application.

Sky IT Group uses WebFOCUS to create and deploy richly formatted reports for customers from virtually any enterprise data, in real time. And because WebFOCUS is architected for the Web, these organizations can extend powerful reporting capabilities to everyone who impacts the business. Users simply need a Web browser to obtain and share information; no plug-ins or special software are necessary.

WebFOCUS is germane to Sky IT Group's business, in particular, because of its ability to run natively on the IBM iSeries platform, along with virtually any other platform Sky IT Group has encountered. It offers fast, native access to a wide variety of data sources that traditional SQL-based reporting tools can't access directly, if at all. It also provides a rich development environment to rapidly build complex production reports with many interactive features.

For VARs, WebFOCUS and related Information Builders products provide three key capabilities -- pervasive reporting solutions, mature development tools and comprehensive integration technology -- as well as reasonable licensing. Here's a closer look at each area:

Reporting Solutions For All Types Of Users
WebFOCUS has highly advanced, ad hoc reporting functionality, which makes it easy for VARs to present parametered reporting output for different types of users. Business analysts and developers can use the software to create parametered reports with user-definable dimensions, calculations, measures and other variables. Because of these flexible run-time selection criteria, a single HTML report template can replace dozens of hard-coded reports. End uers can choose their own parameters and drill-downs through a standard Web browser.

Thanks to these parameter-driven reporting templates, data is easily accessed in its current location and format and then securely published on the Web. And since most users instinctively understand browser interfaces, this approach reduces the learning curve for accessing and receiving information.

The uses for such technology are numerous. For example, a CEO might use a WebFOCUS BI dashboard to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), applying what-if scenarios to analyze possible ways to improve sell-through and margins. Meanwhile, a vice president of production could use BI technology to identify the source of shipping delays, and sales teams could use it to view order status online.

WebFOCUS users enjoy enhanced visualization capabilities via a variety of graphs, charts, scatter plots, GIS mapping capabilities and publishing options. They also can perform subset calculations, allowing them to quickly obtain subtotals or other measures after filtering data. Users can view boardroom-quality reports in Excel, Excel PivotTable, PDF, HTML,and XML formats.