Knowing where to begin to make the best use of BI technologies is often the hardest step in the process. LBi has years of experience helping clients plan their unique BI strategies.

Step 1: LBi starts with an analysis of your existing architecture. We sit down with the business users and discuss your business goals and what you want from BI. Beyond that, we learn your business.

Step 2: LBi formulates a BI strategy that is unique to your organization. This includes recommendations of the most appropriate technologies to achieve your BI goals. We'll suggest multiple options with varying price points.

The bottom line: We make sure you have all of the information you need to make an informed decision about the future of your BI technical architecture. If you want us to, LBi will help you implement your strategy and see it through to completion.

Have someone contact you with more information about our BI Strategy and Planning services.

Sometimes an existing database structure is simply not suited to efficiently run complex BI queries. Often, a particular application is designed only to report on data that it collected itself. LBi's ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) and data warehousing take care of those challenges.

ETL takes your existing operational data and massages it into a format that is more suitable for reporting.The use of ETL will let you collect and organize data from a host of sources and combine it all into a single data warehouse.

In addition, LBi has years of experience consolidating and converting legacy databases into BI warehouses. We can take your existing databases and turn them into an efficient and intuitive reporting repository. See our Data Warehouse case study.

For more on ETL, see our news story The Benefits of Extract, Transform and Load (ETL). Also see our story on Kettle, an open source ETL tool.

Have someone contact you with more information about our ETL and Data Warehousing services.

LBi has the business knowledge, agility and technical skills to give users virtually unlimited access to the data their system collects - far beyond the canned reports the system came with.

Your company is probably using one or more software applications to continually capture data about your business operations. And these applications probably have a reporting component with some pre-designed reports.

But what happens when a user wants more - when the canned reports aren't good enough?

LBi can craft the reporting solutions that give users virtually unlimited access to the data that their applications are collecting.

Example: Ad-hoc Reporting
Ad-hoc Reporting is among the most frequently requested BI items. LBi can deliver an Ad-Hoc Reporting tool that enables users to create their own queries against the available data.

The result: All users, from raw beginners to advanced power users, can query for virtually any data they like, manipulate and analyze the data, and create their own professional-looking reports.

We can also deliver powerful analytical tools, such as custom BI dashboards. End users get a simple and intuitive way to create complex queries, with a layer built on top of the Ad-hoc Reporting engine. This gives even more users the ability to design custom queries.

Have someone contact you with more information about our Reporting and Analytics services.

LBi helps clients do even more with their BI data - and do it more efficiently - through customized, informative and interactive dashboards that graphically present information in an entirely new way.

Benefits of a custom BI dashboard from LBi include:

• Giving management easy access to the tools it needs to analyze patterns and identify trends.
• Integrating familiar graphic presentations (e.g., pie charts, bar charts and line graphs) that will provide new insight into existing data.
• Designing a solution without needing to first buy an expensive BI package, such as Business Objects or Cognos. LBi can develop an inexpensive custom dashboard using your existing databases.

Here is an example of a custom dashboard from our LBi HR HelpDesk application:

LBi's efficient and adaptable Business Objects Application Framework combines functions from diverse offerings of Business Objects into a single package, accessible via Web applications, to provide BI tools to end users.

Through our technical expertise and HR business knowledge, we have developed a framework that encapsulates many of the most powerful and often-used features of business objects.

Key benefits of the Business Objects Application Framework include:

• Quick and easy access to SDK (software development kit) features that are most commonly needed in integrating a Web application with Business Objects.
• Building on existing Business Objects SDKs, allowing us to use the framework to rapidly deliver Business Objects solutions without reinventing the wheel for each new application.

Powerful, Flexible and Effective Features

Direct Access to the Business Objects - Users are automatically connected to Business Objects behind the scenes when they enter the Web application. Access to the Business Objects session is required to perform virtually any operation.

Custom Reporting - Users can generate Web Intelligence reports directly from application code by exposing the key pieces of the Business Objects SDK. Developers can create rich and highly dynamic reports, without needing to create pre-defined templates. Instead, reports can be driven off of user input at the report's runtime.

Access to Business Objects Universes - Web developers can access the Business Objects data model and provide end users with powerful tools, such as ad hoc reporting and dynamic querying. This level of access to the Business Objects universe gives your regular users the ability to run complex queries without needing to understand the complexity that lies behind the scenes.

Scheduling and Publishing - Users can schedule reports to run at determined intervals and parameters. Publishing automatically delivers these reports to selected recipients.

Read our article on Benefits of LBi Software Frameworks.

Have someone contact you with more information about our Business Objects Application Framework services.