Companies Worldwide Gain Competitive Edge With Business Analytics Solutions From SAP

LONDON, Jan. 31, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Illustrating the power of business analytics to transform the way companies operate, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today offered a view into the remarkable results customers are achieving with business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information management (EIM) solutions from the SAP® BusinessObjects™ portfolio. Across the globe, companies such as Albemarle, Connexions Cheshire & Warrington, DigitalGlobe, InterCall and Takasago Europe are using these solutions to gain insights from the ever-increasing amounts of corporate data to help ensure the ongoing success and growth of their businesses. The announcement was made at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit, being held January 31–February 1, 2011, in London.

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Albemarle Creates Winning Formula for Powering Business Decisions

Headquartered in Louisiana and with locations spanning the globe, Albemarle provides innovative development, manufacturing and marketing of specialty chemicals that benefit the world in which we live. Recently, the company sought to give decision-makers better access to current information, and aimed to integrate consistency and transparency of data into its overall business processes. Albemarle combined the ad-hoc analysis of SAP® BusinessObjects™ Web Intelligence® software with the stunning visualization capabilities of SAP® BusinessObjects™ Dashboards software, and used SAP® BusinessObjects™ Data Integrator software to help increase the accuracy of and simplify access to its data. As a result the company has better managed its working capital and cash flows, and several different types of users all now have the critical information they need, right at their fingertips with a single set of solutions.

"SAP BusinessObjects solutions have allowed us to cater to several different user types with a single tool and a single skill set," said Rodney Nijoka, team lead, corporate performance management, Albemarle. "We've been able to give managers and decision-makers access to many sources of accurate data they have never had before, and now everyone in our organization is hungry for this type of information. SAP has been a great partner in this process, and we continue to look to them to help us with best practices for implementing new technologies."

Connexions Cheshire & Warrington Fosters an Understanding of Information

Connexions Cheshire & Warrington is an information and advice organization offering free services to young people living in Cheshire and Warrington, England. Connexions had been using SAP® Crystal Reports® Server software to prepare its statutory reports, and soon the organization decided to enhance its abilities to analyze information like career development and human resources data. Connexions worked with Maven Solutions to increase efficiencies in its system and implement SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge BI software company-wide. Today Connexions has the ability to perform impromptu analysis, and multiple departments throughout the organization utilize dashboard tools to aid statutory and business reporting.

"We were in search of a solution that would make our reporting process much simpler – but also one that would allow us to do more with the information that we already had," said Catherine Moore, IT development manager, Connexions Cheshire & Warrington. "The biggest advantage after implementing SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI was the ability to replace the primary section of our monthly management information pack with a single, always-current dashboard. This alone saves our staff many hours each month, and it really revolutionized the way we're able to provide access to our data."

DigitalGlobe Zooms in, Focuses on Data

Based in Colorado, DigitalGlobe is a leading global provider of commercial, high-resolution earth imagery products and services. With the most extensive commercial satellite constellation and ImageLibrary available, the company needed a more efficient method of integrating the large amount of data it accumulates. It turned to SAP® BusinessObjects™ Data Services software for a powerful, enterprise-class data integration solution, as well as SAP® BusinessObjects™ Data Federator software to rapidly integrate information from multiple sources into one data warehouse, and help deliver the freshest imagery to customers, faster.

"We've created some truly breakthrough capabilities to analyze our geospatial data and tap into the value of our ImageLibrary," said Scott Hicar, senior vice president and CIO, DigitalGlobe. "We've connected the ImageLibrary with our delivery platform to help our planning organization more efficiently task the satellites. And we have been able to leverage the same capabilities to understand which imagery would be most valued in our Geospatial Cloud, where our customers can access over 185 million square kilometers of up-to-date imagery across the globe. As a result, we can more rapidly access the data within an image and rapidly analyze it in real time to ensure our customers have access to the most timely and relevant geospatial information."

InterCall Listens Closely to Customers

Headquartered in Chicago, conferencing service provider InterCall offers audio, Web and videoconferencing services to more than 40,000 organizations around the globe. With increased competition in the conferencing market, InterCall is developing new capabilities to increase the differentiation of its overall offerings from other service providers. Looking for a solution that could help enhance customer satisfaction and retention, InterCall selected solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio, including SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, SAP® Crystal Reports® software, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards and SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator, to build its new premium, global external reporting platform, Conference Reporting System (CRS).

Due to the integration among the various SAP BusinessObjects solutions, a rapid implementation was completed, enabling the InterCall team to focus on the customers' needs and design process, easily bringing information into dashboards and structuring them to best meet customers' decision-support requirements. The result is that InterCall customers can now access actionable information through a central customer portal to get a global view of their conferencing activity and implementation.

"It's all about making our customers successful. That is our main focus," said Raju Iyer, senior director Information Systems, InterCall. "By using SAP BusinessObjects software we have an architecture and platform to deliver new capabilities to our customers to help them achieve their top-line and bottom-line goals."

"We wanted to provide our customers with an action-oriented reporting dashboard they couldn't get anywhere else," said Matt Boettinger, product manager, Reporting, InterCall. "By using SAP BusinessObjects solutions, we're providing our customers with a powerful, intuitive reporting and dashboard solution that lets us leapfrog the competition. Our customers love how the insights from the dashboard help them take action, which leads to better management and reduced costs."

Takasago Europe Keeps Finger on the Pulse of KPIs

Located in Zulpich, Germany, Takasago Europe is the European arm of Takasago – an international corporation that has been developing flavors and fragrances for some of the world's most successful food, beverage, fine fragrance, household and personal care products for more than 80 years. Takasago Europe's IT experts wanted a solution all employees could access to compile the key performance indicators (KPIs) that mattered to them most. Already running the enterprise resource planning (ERP) application SAP® ERP, Takasago Europe selected SAP BusinessObjects solutions – SAP Crystal Reports, SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards software – to optimize its reporting processes. Since the solutions integrate with both SAP and non-SAP data sources, Takasago Europe can now efficiently prepare reports that extract information from multiple origins. Additionally, employees from frontline sales staff to back-office functions like purchasing have direct access to data and can create reports in multiple languages with the appropriate corporate branding – all in a fraction of the original time.

"We are expecting to achieve ROI in less than two years, and currently in our IT department alone we are saving an enormous amount of time and effort," said Holger Reinbold, IT manager, Business Processes, Takasago Europe. "Integration with our existing software landscape has worked well, both with our SAP solutions and non-SAP applications. Without a doubt, SAP Crystal Reports is our connectivity world champion."

"Most businesses set aggressive goals as part of their growth plans, but it's nearly impossible to meet those objectives without empowering employees, partners and customers with a trusted 360-degree view of information, from operations to strategy," said Steve Lucas, general manager, SAP Business Analytics, SAP. "The bigger challenge is delivering that information in a way that is easy to consume and use, and available when and wherever information is needed. Business analytics empowers all people in a company and its customers to focus on what is important, equips them with the tools they need to derive meaning from the massive amount of data available, and enables bold action to drive business objectives."

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 109,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.  

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