Performance Management Strategy

When you work with CASoft to develop a Business Intelligence Strategy, you get a long-term vision, a roadmap for implementation that outlines specific initiatives – complete with ROI-driven business cases - and an actionable plan to implement the strategy within your organization.

Using the Corporate Performance Management framework, CASoft addresses the processes, methodologies, metrics and systems needed to measure and manage your company’s performance as part of a closed-loop cycle.

CPM incorporates such methodologies as balanced scorecards, budgeting and planning, metrics, dashboards and key performance indicators. If your organization already has some Business Intelligence capabilities in place, we work to ensure that they merge seamlessly into the overall strategy.

Business Intelligence Assessment

Sometimes you need a fresh perspective - and the technical skills and process knowledge that can help you assess your situation and recommend a course of action. That’s where CASoft comes in. We’ll work with you to identify specific issues, constraints and opportunities, and then make clear, actionable recommendations to address problem areas.

Our assessment projects are highly focused – and typically last just a few days to a couple of weeks.

Assessment services include:

Data stewardship process assessment
Data warehouse and ETL architecture assessment
Data warehouse performance assessment
Dimensional data model review
Reporting and analysis assessment
Business Intelligence product upgrade/migration assessment

Business Intelligence Implementation

CASoft focuses its BI implementation service on delivering enterprise reporting and analysis capabilities for specific functions within your organization – including billing, inventory management, sales orders, customer relationship management or financial management. These BI solutions can take the form of inventory analysis, product analysis, sales analysis, customer analysis, profitability analysis or vendor analysis.

With a Business Intelligence implementation, your company gets a robust reporting and analysis solution that incorporates a combination of dashboards, scorecards, trending reports and operational reports.

Typical implementations are deployed as an interactive web-based user interface. Users can view summary data in tables, charts or graphs - and drill down to more detailed data – all in a seamless user experience.

Using a standard implementation methodology based on Ralph Kimball’s Data Warehouse Lifecycle, our implementations include the following deliverables and components (see diagram below):

Business Requirements Definition
Technical Architecture Design
Detailed Design (user interface, data model, ETL)
Data Model and ETL Development
User Interface Development
User Acceptance Test
Deployment and Support
Project Management

Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting

History shows that the market punishes companies that do not consistently and accurately forecast their financials. By contrast, companies that forecast their performance can maximize shareholder value – and see bottom line results.

Using the Cognos Planning tool and best practices, CASoft implements budgeting and planning capabilities that help clients move out of the “Excel dark ages” – and into a collaborative, real-time enterprise planning solution that’s flexible and scalable to thousands of users. Our solutions enable businesses to create, reuse and fine-tune a custom-tailored planning model.

The result – you can have the processes and tools you need to accurately forecast your business.

Enterprise data Warehousing

With a cost-effective, managed enterprise data warehouse implementation, CASoft enables organizations to aggregate, integrate and analyze vital information from heterogeneous source systems - whether it involves consolidating data from multiple ERP systems, or combining multiple sources of customer data into a single reporting database.

There is a right way to build a data warehouse. CASoft identifies both the operational and analytical reporting requirements - then designs a solution to satisfy them.

Data Warehosuing Chart

With our extensive practical experience with Operational Data Stores (ODS), staging areas, data marts, ETL design, dimensional data modeling and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) data stores, CASoft can help you design and develop a data warehouse solution to match the operational and analytical reporting demands of your enterprise.

Data Quality Profiling and Stewardship

Any Business Intelligence solution is virtually worthless if the quality of the underlying data is suspect or bad. Data quality issues can have all sorts of consequences for businesses.

Is your enterprise data an asset or a liability? In order to gain a better perspective, many companies are looking to data quality assessments (data profiling) as a way to evaluate their current data.

A data quality assessment involves inspecting data, measuring the defects, analyzing the cause and impact of those defects, and then reporting the results of the analysis to key stakeholders. With a data quality assessment, businesses can address the root cause of each individual data defect.

CASoft’s options range from a one-time manual or automated update of the source system data to implementing an enterprise data quality tool that can be used to thoroughly cleanse your data. Still, merely cleansing the existing data is not enough. You also need the data stewardship processes and ownership in place to ensure that data remains clean going forward.

Microsoft Business Intelligence Capabilities

To help you manage and make the most of your data, Microsoft offers a comprehensive Business Intelligence solution for data warehousing, OLAP, budgeting, analytics, dashboards, Business Performance Management, Scorecards, and Enterprise Reporting. Their integrated platform is comprised of MS SQL Server, SharePoint, Business Scorecard Manager, SQL Analysis Services, SQL Reporting Services and Performance Point.

Microsoft BI Architecture

Microsoft Business Intelligence Technology
Microsoft Office Performance Point Server
Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
Microsoft Office Excel and Excel Server
- Microsoft SQL Server
- SQL Analysis Services
- SQL Reporting Services
- SQL Integration Services

Cognos Business Intelligence Capabilities

Cognos Business Intelligence Suite sets the standard by which all BI tools are measured. Cognos delivers metadata modeling, pixel-perfect reporting, ad hoc analytics, OLAP, data transformation, dashboard and scorecard tools that are intuitive, powerful and scaleable. Their reports, scorecards and dashboards are delivered in a “zero footprint” architecture that serves consumers, authors and administrators alike.

Cognos Architecture

CASoft can help you leverage Cognos to make your complex, diverse and high volume enterprise data a valuable asset.

Cognos Business Intelligence Technology

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Server
- Report Studio
- Query Studio
- Analysis Studio (OPAL analytics)
Cognos 8 Framework Server
- Metrics Studio
Cognos 8 Framework Manager
Cognos 8 PowerPlay Transformer
Cognos 8 Data Manager

Oracle Business Intelligence Capabilities

The Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (EE) is a comprehensive suite of enterprise BI products,delivering the full range of BI capabilities including interactive dashboards, full ad hoc, proactive intelligence and alerts, enterprise and financial reporting, real-time predictive intelligence, disconnected analytics, and more. In addition to providing the full gamut of BI functionality, the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE Plus platform is based on a proven, modern Web Services-Oriented Architecture that delivers true next-generation BI capabilities.