• Last week we wrote about the reason for the existence of Spreadmarts, and the problems, costs and risks of doing business in this way.
• This week, we talk about a solution for reporting, planning and analysis without Spreadmarts and without the risks. A solution that delivers on the much discussed but seldom realized “one version of the truth” and one that still gets the day-to-day job done …

The People Remedy
One very common dynamic driving spreadmarts is a lack of communication and trust between business and IT. The business doesn’t adhere to the architectural standards and processes designed to support its long-term interests, while IT doesn’t move fast enough to meet business needs. Both business and IT need to recognize each other’s strengths and weaknesses and realize the mutual rewards of synergy.

A Technical Remedy
It’s important to remember that spreadsheets (not Spreadmarts) are an important part of any organization’s technology stack. Problems only arise when spreadsheets are used as data management systems that house corporate data for decision making - reporting, planning and analysis. The technical remedy is to manage and store data and logic centrally in a uniform, consistent fashion and let end-users access this data using spreadsheets and other client access tools. It’s the best of both worlds. IT collects, integrates, and validates data … The Business analyzes, identify trends, creates plans, and makes decisions. The presentation layer is separated from the logic and data.

Walking the Talk
This is easier said than done. Implementing a solution that resolves the Spreadmart nightmare is rather elusive. More often than not, it’s a lack of a technical remedy that rules out the people remedy.

Take budgeting for example. While most believe it is a crucial element of financial management, it is often described as burdensome and time consuming. Line managers typically see little benefit from their budgeting effort. In many cases, this is because the underlying budgeting technologies are simply spreadsheets and email.

What if these line managers had a budgeting solution that eliminates the well documented problems associated with spreadsheet hell? A system that significantly reduces the time spent rolling-up, checking and correcting the numbers. A system where each line manager will also have their financial results, a dashboard of relevant corporate goals and their own KPI’s to refer to at the time of entering budgets.

CALUMO Performance Management solutions provide this and more. A solution that is about analysis and insight, not just data. CALUMO synthesizes core capabilities that embrace spreadsheets, business needs, a unified data management platform and the role of IT.

• A single integrated reporting, analysis, dashboarding, planning, budgeting, and consolidation application built on a unified BI and performance management platform.
• Deep integration between Excel spreadsheets and where the data is stored.
• An extension beyond spreadsheet with a thin web client. Fast, secure, scalable and available anywhere. With all the benefits of an Excel spreadsheet, including writeback, but without any of the problems.

The Benefits

• Solutions like these are typically associated with complex and costly deployments. The unique proposition from CALUMO combines a single integrated application, a unified platform, deep Excel and web capability and most critically, business value.
• Where organizations integrate business analytics and planning with governance, risk and compliance, they can significantly reduce the ongoing cost of compliance and gain a true competitive advantage.
  The real payoff is using the time saved to do better analysis, to optimize the plan, and make better, faster decisions.

Last week saw the release of the latest version of CALUMO for SQL Server Analysis Services, CALUMO 11.4.  This release has rolled up all the features of the CALUMO 11.3 cumulative updates as well as delivering a set of new features and performance improvements.

Highlights

• Text Writeback architecture update
• Publishable Drop Lists and Date Pickers
• Excel VBA API
• New Installers
• Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Compatible
  

Text Writeback Architecture Update
This feature is a key differentiator within CALUMO 11 and in our recent work we took a good look at the existing architecture and reworked it for performance and scalability.

Publishable Drop Lists and Date Picker
Our standard CALUMO drop lists have been enhanced to also support data write back. Now drop lists can be used to enter data from a standard selection list.

Fig 1: CALUMO Drop Lists

The date picker simplifies selection of dates. For example, when budgeting the start date of a new employee using the date picker, a date is written back. Budgets salary and on-costs will calculate and budget from this date.

Fig 2: CALUMO Date Picker

Excel VBA API
These API allow automation and control of certain features of CALUMO from VBA macros within Excel.

New Installers
CALUMO installation is already a very easy process. For example, users can install or upgrade the CALUMO Excel client with a one button click from the status bar, thereby synchronising their version with the CALUMO Server. Adding to this, our new CALUMO installers are now smaller, faster and more reliable and can be automatically built at any time for any revision of the CALUMO codebase.  This enables us to deliver patches to the software as robust installers instead of as manually applied patches.

Other Features worth Noting

• Administrator can set a default start page a default view for a Cube.
• Administrator and Users can set default subsets for hierarchies.
• Sort and top/bottom count filters available in cube browse.
• We include a web based calculation engine supporting most Excel functions in CALUMO published web pages.
• Conditional formatted cells in CALUMO published web pages
  

CALUMO for TM1 10.3, the latest version of CALUMO for TM1 has been released.  This release delivers deeper integration with IBM Cognos TM1 and includes many new features and performance improvements.

Highlights

• Support for TM1 9.4.
• The CALUMO Excel 2007 Ribbon.
• CALUMO Sparks now bundled free with CALUMO for TM1.
• Cool UI updates like (e.g. page loading indicator for published reports making it easy to see a large report is actually loading).
• Many other enhancements, fixes and even better performance.
  

Support for TM1 9.4
CALUMO for TM1 10.3 supports TM1 9.4 and all other active versions still supported by IBM. We note that you should install TM1 9.4 FP1 as IBM have identified and resolved several critical TM1 issues in both the standard TM1 9.4 release as well as the TM1 MR1 release.

CALUMO Excel 2007 Ribbon

Love it or hate it (and we love it), the “Ribbon User Interface” is one of the most significant changes in Office 2007 which replaced the old menus and toolbars. The CALUMO Ribbon is a task-orientated graphical user interface, making it easily to navigate to the CALUMO capability you need.

CALUMO Sparks
Now part of CALUMO for TM1, CALUMO Sparks provides rich compact visualisations of large amounts of data in a single cell. By combining charts and data together in a table, we do away with the need to separately label axes and legends, or the need to associate the table data with the chart information.

For identifying trends, comparing data and highlighting exceptions (with high density information), CALUMO SPARKS makes the design of really compelling executive dashboards easy.

CALUMO SPARKS provides Line, Pie, Bar, Bullet, Grid, Progress, Stripe, Trend, KPI, Bubble, Heat Map & Harvey Ball charts. CALUMO SPARKS is an add-in for Microsoft Excel.

Other Features worth Remembering

• Freeze Panes for Web Reports.
• Context Linking in Web Reports.
• SPF Discovery (Decomposition Tree) in Web Reports.
• Save Web Reports to PDF.
• Drill Through to Transaction in Web Reports.
• Dynamic Rows in Web Reports.
• Zero Suppress in Web Reports.
• Charts can now be published as either an image or ActiveX control.

One of our clients recently showed me this report. Names and numbers have been changed, but in my conversation with them, they were very excited about it and it was clearly an important source of information for them. Their Revenue Analysis Dashboard gives them an immediate window and insight into their top performing regions, clients, products and sectors.

Look at the drop-down lists to see how they can drill deeper into any region, product or sector (I need to ask them why they don't need to dig deeper into client, but if they wanted to, a client drop-down could be added to the dashboard in 5 minutes). Other variables on the report can also be changed (time, currency, etc), so each country can see their data in local currency and head office can consolidate in any currency. They can also look at current or prior period performance or any aggregation of time (eg last quarter, or last year).

Every CALUMO report that uses drop-downs is in effect many reports. In this case, this single report represents thousands of potential combinations.

The data is securely stored in SQL Server, while the dashboard is a simple CALUMO web page for fast, secure, scalable reporting available anywhere. Being a dynamic report, when any variables change, the top ten results are updated and sorted on the fly. Naturally they also have a bottom-ten report for badly performing and unprofitable regions, clients, products and sectors.

Our client also uses CALUMO for convenient and rapid data collection during their planning, budget and forecasting cycles. Furthermore, CALUMO is used for guided self-service analytics. With its excellent query performance, analysis can be refined produced immediately, leading to even clearer insights and smarter actions.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME’s to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

Spreadsheet Hell, Spreadmarts and Other Data Shadow Systems
A spreadmart is a reporting, planning, or analysis system usually built in spreadsheets (Access databases are also common), created and maintained by an individual or workgroup, utilising large amounts of data that should be stored in a data mart or data warehouse, performing tasks such as extracting and transforming data; defining variables and calculations; and creating reports.

Good or bad, spreadmarts are so common, more than 90% of all organizations have them. On the one hand, we should embrace this as evidence of a business need; on the other hand, we must recognize the problems and risks that spreadmarts can create.

One Version of the Truth
Spreadmart creators use different data sources, calculations, measure definitions and naming conventions based on their view of the business. Each group represents a different point of view and it becomes nearly impossible to deliver a consistent, enterprise view of account, measure, customer, product and so on. Spreadmart silos undermine cross-departmental and business synergies as well as economies of scale.

Risks of Errors
With only the business need in mind and no information management rigor, problems can arise:

• Data is often entered by hand leading to errors that can go undetected.
• Users may create poorly constructed calculations, lookups and queries, also resulting in undetected errors.
• Embedded logic, complex macros and hidden worksheets are understood by few and difficult to maintain.
• Spreadmarts usually do not scale beyond a small workgroup.
• Spreadmarts may generate system and data errors when they are linked to other systems or files that change without notice.
• No audit trails exist of who changed what data, or when to ensure adequate control and compliance.
• Spreadmarts expose organizations to significant risk. Business people may make decisions based on faulty data, or incorrect assumptions and analyses.

Time is Money
Research has shown that an average business analyst spends two days a week producing and maintaining spreadmarts. Instead of analyzing data, these high-priced employees act like surrogate information systems professionals, gathering, massaging, and integrating data.

Just do it
Sometimes the data that people need to do their jobs doesn’t exist in a central accessible place. Sometimes the incumbent BI solution does not offer the types of analysis, forecasting, or modeling desired. Sometimes the IT staff or data management infrastructure is inadequate, leaving the business to fend for themselves. Despite the risks, “just doing it” in a spreadmart seems to get the job done and is better than waiting weeks or months for an alternative.

What can be done about this?

• Next week we will discuss a solution for reporting, planning and analysis without Spreadmarts, without the risks, with one version of the truth but still getting it done.
• Where organizations integrate business analytics and planning with governance, risk and compliance, they can significantly reduce the ongoing cost of compliance and gain a true competitive advantage.

With the release of SQL Server 2005 and even more so with the release of SQL Server 2008, Microsoft has delivered OLAP and relational repositories in a single unified solution. Now both OLAP and OLTP is delivered on the same server, through the same API and managed using one set of tools. This is in contrast to other relational database vendors and their respective OLAP servers who have primarily converged their front-end tools while leaving the back-ends unchanged and dis-integrated.

SQL Server’s integrated components include SQL Server Integration Services for ETL, SQL Server Reporting Services for transactional reporting, SQL Server Analysis Services as their OLAP server, and native integration with Excel and SharePoint.

Written from the ground-up in .Net 3.5 (C#), CALUMO 11 is a further extension of this unified platform approach. For example, CALUMO does not create another repository for data, or another modeling engine for business rules and calculations. So, for planning, budgeting and forecasting applications (or any data collection activity) CALUMO input forms provide bottom-up and top-down write back directly into SQL Server and Analysis Services. For dashboards, reporting and analysis, if you already have Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services cubes, simply install CALUMO and you immediately have access to this data in a way that is so simple and convenient, it will forever change the way you think about business intelligence and effective collaboration.

For our customers, CALUMO is sublimely integrated with the way they work, whether through email, spreadsheets, the internet, a SharePoint portal and even PowerPoint.

“The front-end is intuitive and flexible in that we have a range of options for delivery to the wide range of users in our user community. For example, we can use a web portal, standard web for more advanced users, Excel for standard users and power users, deliver PDF’s or hard coded Excel reports. It is so open and flexible as to our options on both the data we choose to analyze, administration or the user experience.”
Alister Cairns, University of New South Wales

About CALUMO 11
CALUMO 11 — Performance Management (CALUMO) is a unified performance management application built on the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform.

CALUMO provides all facets of performance management including Business Intelligence; metrics and KPI dashboards; reporting and analysis; planning, budgeting, forecasting and modeling; management reporting, operational reporting and financial consolidations.

CALUMO provides exceptional value with a low entry cost and fast, initial implementations. CALUMO then scales to support enterprise-class performance management

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME’s to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

CALUMO RELEASES NEW VERSION OF ITS PLANNING AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT APPLICATION

SYDNEY – 4 June, 2009 — CALUMO Group today announced it has launched a new version of its Planning and Performance Management Application – CALUMO 11, which will work with Microsoft Windows® 7/Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 R2 to offer customers enhanced security, as well as innovative user interface features and reliability improvements. CALUMO 11 is a Planning and Performance Management Application which delivers unified Performance Management for the continuous cycle of reporting, planning, monitoring and action on the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform.

“Our ISV community is alive with innovation, and we’re committed to helping our partners drive the next generation of software experiences,” said Ross Brown, Vice President of ISV and Solutions Partners for the Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft. “Adding compatibility for the latest Microsoft operating systems helps ISVs to stay ahead of the competition and give their customers access to cutting-edge technologies.”

“CALUMO is excited to launch this new version of CALUMO 11,” said Dominic Parsons, CEO at CALUMO Group. “Making our application compatible with Microsoft Windows 7/Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 helps us offer our customers compelling benefits, including intuitive user interfaces, tools to keep them connected to data stored on the Web and full support for multi-core processing.”

About CALUMO 11
CALUMO 11 — Performance Management (CALUMO) is a unified performance management application built on the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform.

CALUMO provides all facets of performance management including Business Intelligence; metrics and KPI dashboards; reporting and analysis; planning, budgeting, forecasting and modelling; management reporting, operational reporting and financial consolidations.

CALUMO provides exceptional value with a low entry cost and fast, initial implementations. CALUMO then scales to support enterprise-class performance management.

As part of CALUMO’s continuous improvement and proven track record for development software that can be used now and tomorrow, CALUMO has leveraged new features for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 giving better performance and more simple installation.  No other BI/BPM vendor is ready for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME’s to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

Query performance was the most frequently reported product-related problem cited in Nigel Pendse’s BI Survey (www.bi-survey.com). Our own research further indicates that poor response times (especially write-back performance) are responsible for the failure of up to 85% of Business Intelligence and Performance Management projects.

The CALUMO Group has developed and released, in CALUMO 11, a set of algorithms and methods to achieve breakthrough response times for business intelligence and planning type activities including ad-hoc analysis, dynamic reports and write-back forms for planning budgeting and forecasting.

CALUMO 11’s query and write-back algorithms have been optimised to avoid any performance issues. These CALUMO performance optimising technical innovations include:

• automating the optimisation of MDX.
• automating the optimisation of write-back.
• batch and compress data transfers between internet client and server [in both directions].
• automate the correct order of calculation.

Our customers use this capability extensively for convenient and rapid data collection during their planning, budget and forecasting cycles. During any data collection, our customers can focus on the business process without being distracted by poor write-back performance or response times.

CALUMO 11 is also used by our customers for executive dashboards, guided self-service analytics and dynamic reporting from Excel or through the Web. Users view parameter-driven reporting templates, or create their own custom views and reports.

CALUMO’s excellent query performance means that self-service analytics can be done at the speed of thought. Questions can be refined and supplementary analysis produced immediately, leading to even better questions, answers and smarter actions.

CALUMO’s approach radically unclogs our customers’ IT department’s backlog of reporting and analysis for the business and shrinks the gap between analysis and action.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1996 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME’s to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

ORANGE PEEL AND CALUMO GROUP FORM STRATEGIC ALLIANCE TO TAKE ENTERPRISE BUSINESS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT TO THE MICROSOFT DYNAMICS COMMUNITY

A Shared Vision for Joint Technology to Drive New Growth Opportunities

SYDNEY & LOS ANGELES – 31 March, 2009 — CALUMO Group and Orange Peel Corporation have today announced a strategic alliance based on their joint release of Budgeting, Forecasting and Reporting (BFR) for Microsoft Dynamics for Business Performance Management. The application will provide an effective and scalable entry point for all Microsoft Dynamics users to set a roadmap for business intelligence and planning, leveraging the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform.

“Orange Peel has the deep understanding of BPM, the US market and the Microsoft Dynamics portfolio required to bring tremendous value to the Microsoft Dynamics community. BFR is the first fruit of our alliance and we couldn’t be more excited about the value it can create for Microsoft Dynamics clients. The first steps to enterprise BPM are always rapidly addressing immediate pain points and showing immediate tangible business value. Our applications’ emphasis on performance, reliability and ease of use make that a reality,” said Dominic Parsons, CEO, CALUMO Group.

Orange Peel CEO, Per Solli, further explains, “CALUMO 11 is the perfect platform for BFR. The Microsoft Dynamics community can now achieve immediate results needed to service their business and leverage their systems investment while staying firmly on the Microsoft platform. When businesses are ready and able to invest in their future to drive deeper deployment and greater value from their BPM, CALUMO provides the perfect answer for scaling on the Microsoft platform.” By engaging the companies at the technology and business levels, the alliance will allow both companies to drive new growth opportunities and improve productivity for its customers.

Orange Peel has elected to only offer BFR through Microsoft Dynamics certified partners. These partners have the extensive knowledge of their clients and the Microsoft Dynamics range required to ensure their clients reap immediate benefit. Orange Peel are working with both end users and partners to help them move through a road map for BPM that sees them doing better business sooner.

About Orange Peel Corporation
Orange Peel Corporation is the North American distributor for CALUMO. OPC has a solid background from implementing BPM solutions for both enterprise clients and the mid-market, based on the Microsoft BI Stack. OPC is recognized for innovative thought-leadership in the BPM arena and has adapted agile SCRUM methodologies for customers and partners to use, in order to achieve quick results on their BPM investment. Orange Peel Corporation head office is situated in Los Angeles, USA. For more information visit www.orangepeelcorp.com.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

It's not all about software.  Impressive as it is, we create our software for our clients to use to effectively drive better management and performance. It's really about people, our prospects and clients, and about the engagement and alignment that business intelligence can bring.

Our professionally qualified people (mainly CAs and CPAs) have long experience in a wide range of businesses, and their unique skills are in ensuring that enabling with technology enabling is more than just that.  Our people ensure that the information made available is integrated into day to day workflows, supports ready decision-making and downstream commercial activity.  This makes sure that the business outcomes are realised, rather than remaining as bullet points on PowerPoint slides no-one looks back on.

Richard Parsons, BCom CA, joins CALUMO
So it is with pride, in our increased capacity to engage with professional services firms, that we welcome Richard Parsons as General Manager Queensland.  A CA himself, Richard has been on both sides of the professional services fence, as an accountant with PriceWaterhouse, as Financial Controller and General Manager of SMEs, and most recently, as a 9 years veteran Change Manager with law firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques.  His fluency in practice drivers, enthusiasm for identifying and then releasing untapped business value, and understanding of professional services firm stakeholder dynamics is invaluable.

Take what he said to our developers about CALUMO 11 in his first week:

“I love it - its best of breed, and your development process and validation routines are to die for.  But while best-of-breed technology is important, breakthrough business intelligence is about people and processes, not just technology - its the Consultants that elevate people’s thinking to what’s actually attainable, get the process right and the people engaged.  I could do it with a slate and chalk - but happily we can do it with your stuff instead.”

If you think you’re up for Richard’s energy, straight-talking and razor sharp focus, give him a call on +61 7 3367 9301.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specializations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

We previously brought you our AFL Ladder to illustrate BI visualization using CALUMO Sparks. We've updated the report with 2008 season results and even more vivid sparklines and metrics.

AFL Satisfaction Index
The CALUMO "AFL Satisfaction Index" below traces and compares the competitive paths of the top and bottom 3 teams playing in the Australian Football League (AFL). The chart shows 264 win/loss outcomes for the last two seasons (2007 & 2008), comprising 44 games for each of the 6 teams.

We called this chart the "satisfaction index" because it is highly predictive of the level of satisfaction fans and supports have with their team. Geelong, for example, is in the pounds seats and can expect growing club memberships and will be walking into sponsorship negotiations with confidence.

Business Productivity Index
This type of chart can also be intensely useful in business performance management. Imagine comparing the competitive paths of your least and most successful consultants, products, customers, or any other business segment. Take the following "Partner Productivity Index" chart for example. Here we compare the performance of 6 partners in a professional services firm. Their "productivity" over an extended period of time has been reduced to a key performance indicator between +10 and -10. This could be based purely on actual revenue versus budget revenue, or a sophisticated metric combining many measures of partner performance. There will no doubt be good reason for the standout performance by Kirkbuton and apparent underperformance by Haddlesey, closely followed by Owston. Perhaps seeing their performance presented in this way will inspire the three middle order partners to strive for future over-achievement.

Breakthrough Business Benefits from Unified Performance Management
High quality visualization and reporting like this is only part of the business intelligence puzzle. A unified performance management application like CALUMO, including budgeting and forecasting, analysis, modeling business rules, financial consolidation, as well as seamlessly integrated data can provide spectacular business insights and ROI.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specializations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

PerformancePoint Services included in MOSS
On 24 Jan Microsoft announced the decision to consolidate PerformancePoint Server Monitoring and Analytics into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Microsoft is making it easier for customers to achieve "BI for the masses" by including PerformancePoint Services in the SharePoint Enterprise license thereby delivering the complete Microsoft BI Platform (SharePoint, Excel and SQL Server) to customers at an even lower total cost of ownership.
 
PerformancePoint Planning Discontinued
Microsoft also announced that PerformancePoint Planning will be discontinued. It must be remembered that PerformancePoint Planning was only a planning application built on the Microsoft BI Platform. Discontinuing this first version planning application is actually liberating to what is now an even more unified BI platform comprising SharePoint, Excel and SQL Server.

Performance Management = Planning + Business Intelligence
Discontinuation of PerformancePoint Planning does not mean that customers cannot "do planning" on the Microsoft BI Platform. The essence of planning applications (budgeting and forecasting) is allowing users to input feedback both numbers and text (write back). Planning also includes other features (eg manipulating data according to business rules etc), but most of these are also BI features. The term Performance Management is used to describe the convergence of Planning and BI on a unified platform – the cycle of Plan, Monitor, Analyze. The advantages of true Performance Management are readily evident by integrating planning with BI in order to analyze and compare history with future plans and what-if analyses. The architecture of effective Performance Management must be unified.  Failing to do so requires constant batching and transformation as the many parts of the system exchange data.  Few (if any) vendors other than Microsoft can lay claim to this architecture.

How then to achieve Planning + Performance Management on Microsoft's BI platform
CALUMO Planning is a complete planning application built on the Microsoft BI platform. The CALUMO features below summarize planning capability, the missing pieces of the performance management puzzle, with integration to SharePoint, Excel and SQL Server.

1. Planning input forms - Bottom-Up and Top-Down write back
2. Self Service Reporting and Analysis - Ad-hoc (pivot) browse and dynamic reports
3. Excel and Web client for ad-hoc browse, reports and input forms
4. Simple, flexible architecture - Planning over any SQL Server Analysis Services cube structures
5. Support for: Drill Down (Members), Drill Through (Transactions or Cubes), Grids, Charts, Freeze frames, Text management, Slice to Excel etc.
6. Integration with SharePoint, Excel and SQL Server

 

Alfred E. Neuman "What, me worry?"  Hecklers will claim a gap-toothed smile in Microsoft's BI capability. Don't be fooled, CALUMO is evidence that planning is not missing and will continue to work with customers and Microsoft to offer true Performance Management on Microsoft’s unified BI Platform. Web budgeting at the University of New South Wales is just one example of this.

CALUMO - Microsoft Business Intelligence Partner of the Year
For the CALUMO Group, 2008 Microsoft BI Partner of the Year, the withdrawal of PerformancePoint Planning has removed any perceived confusion or conflict over differences between PerformancePoint Planning and CALUMO Planning. CALUMO Performance Management, including planning has a credible track record and heritage, including Microsoft case studies at the University of New South Wales and Aevum

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specializations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

Microsoft Announces Updates to Business Intelligence Roadmap
A summary of this announcement is the decision to discontinue PerformancePoint Planning and merge PerformancePoint Monitoring & Analytics into SharePoint as PerformancePoint Services.

Customers Benefit with Business Intelligence at a lower TCO
Effective immediately, SharePoint enterprise customers can download PerformancePoint for free. Conversely, customers who bought PerformancePoint with software assurance can download SharePoint for free.

View this video with Guy Weismantel, Director of Microsoft BI, where he explains these changes and the future value Microsoft customers will gain from this strategy.

Also read the Q&A with Kurt DelBene, Senior VP of Office Business Platform Group at Microsoft. The interview gives some insight into the strategy announcement, why Microsoft made this decision, how planning customer will be supported and what the overall benefit to customers will be.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com), Microsoft BI Partner of the Year 2008, is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specializations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

Business intelligence (to quote from the lyrics of the Eagles' hit of the '70s) "this could be heaven or this could be Hell." Our story of Business Intelligence at the Hotel California below is a fun illustration of this.

Checking in at the Hotel California
Three friends check in at the legendary Hotel California. After paying $100 each for the $300 "master's chamber" suite, they go up to their room. The manager suddenly remembers that a special rate of $250 applies and gives the "night man" $50 to return to the guests. On the way, the night man realizes that $50 is difficult to share amongst three, so he pockets $20 and returns only $10 to each guest.

The Conundrum
Each of the three friends paid $90 ($100 less $10 refund) which is a total of $270. Add to this the $20 the night man pocketed, which is now a total of only $290. In order to reconcile the total back to the original $300, where is the missing $10?

CALUMO - Making Insights Transparent
The problem is caused by confusing what should be added or subtracted to balance this equation. Here are two correct ways of looking at or explaining this conundrum:

The manager has $250 and the "night man" has $20. Added together, this is equal to the $270 paid by the three friends. Add to this the $30 returned to the friends and we are able to reconcile back to the original total of $300.

Alternatively, the three friends originally paid $300, less $10 each friend received back, which is equal to the $270 paid. Of this, the "night man" kept $20, leaving $250 which is the price of the room.

At CALUMO we think the missing $10 is a great example of how important it is to transparently link data and business rules and to bring simplicity to any solution. Business Intelligence is all too often presented as over complicated and expensive. With CALUMO, an integrated, unified approach to business intelligence, reporting, analytics, planning etc, an organization can gain great insights and make better decisions throughout the enterprise.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specializations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

Controlling the Cost of Compliance with CALUMO

The National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007 was passed in September 2007 establishing a mandatory reporting system for corporate greenhouse gas emissions and energy production and consumption. The first reporting period under the Act commenced July 2008 with reports due in July 2009.

Key features of the Act are:

• Reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption and production by large corporations.
• Public disclosure of corporate level greenhouse gas emissions and energy information.

The Calumo and Elwyn groups in conjunction with CIO’s and Sustainability Experts from front running organisations have collaborated to develop an environmental reporting platform to enable corporations to meet the initial reporting requirements.

While the specific detail regarding the format and substance of the reporting requirements have not yet been fully locked down, it is clear that organisations will be required to capture, analyse and report on those operations of their organisation that have significant energy consumption or generation.

We expect that as the new legislation evolves over the introductory period organisations must be able to quickly adapt to the inevitable iterations that will flow from both global and local imperatives. This reality informed the design of our Environmental Reporting platform to offer;

1. quick and highly adaptable implementation to minimise the cost of expected changes to the Act during the introductory period 
2. a one-stop shop for data capture and all environmental reporting
3. flexibility to enable data to be collected from existing ERP and operational data sources
4. multiple hierarchy reporting platform to enable look-through transparency of information and accountability
5. qualitative (via commentary and traffic light reporting) capability to allow management to better interrogate the information.

About the Elwyn Group
Elwyn Group is a boutique consulting firm specialising in reporting solutions to medium and large organisations utilising pre-existing or custom developed solutions.  

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

SYDNEY,- 3 November, 2008 — After taking the difficult commercial decision to substantially change their Business Intelligence technology stack in February of this year, University of New South Wales have taken out a little time at the conclusion of their annual planning process to celebrate what has been achieved.

Reflecting on the process the UNSW Finance Division stated “This project has and will continue to be the catalyst for very positive change at UNSW. The UNSW team, with CALUMO’s expert guidance, are delivering a platform that enables us to maximise the financial resources available to support our teaching and research priorities more effectively and in minimal time.”

“The time frame from commencement to yielding real business value was astonishingly short.  The University environment is very demanding and complex; the flexibility and performance of CALUMO has been excellent.  It’s a breath of fresh air for the user community and the University was proud to be supporting world-class Australian innovation in Business Intelligence.”

CALUMO Group CEO Dominic Parsons said “As an academic institution there is a great deal at stake for the future in laying a platform that will enable the institution to effectively deliver on its vision.  Working with the University has been a special opportunity for us and the combination of their staff, senior sponsorship and our delivery teams has produced a benchmark result.”

The UNSW system is serving 250 users with critical information in frequencies ranging from daily and monthly to quarterly and annually.  It allows for collaboration across that broad range of users both for reporting and contribution to future financial and academic resourcing plans.

Summing up from the teams’ perspective MIS Manager Alister Cairns added “We are saving considerable time in administration compared with other products in the market. CALUMO’s simplicity of design and openness allows us a flexible system that we can use for data collection, analysis and reporting on a wide range of data. There are no unnecessary administration programs, and thus native Analysis Services, SSIS and SQL Server are used to develop and administer applications (Cubes, fact tables, data sources, dimensions etc.)”

“The CALUMO reporting frontend is intuitive and flexible in that we have a range of options for delivery to our wide ranging user community. We can use a web portal, Excel, deliver PDF's or hard coded excel reports. It is open for us to decide on our options for the data we choose to analyse, the user experience and administration.”

UNSW is using Microsoft and CALUMO Business Intelligence solution for their annual budgeting cycle, management reporting and forecasting.  The value return from BI increases exponentially with deployment.  Over the next 12 months UNSW are planning to further expand their BI platform to incorporate additional reporting and scorecarding.

About the University of New South Wales
UNSW was established in 1949 and now has close to 40,000 students, including more than 7000 international students from over 130 different countries. UNSW has an annual turnover of $1 billion and employs over 5000 staff. UNSW is a founding member of the prestigious Group of Eight research intensive universities in Australia and a member of the Universities 21 international consortium

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

CALUMO and Microsoft will co-present  “The Business Intelligence Scenario” at The 2nd Annual Southern Region CFO Symposium 2008, where more than 100 CFO’s are scheduled to attend over two days.

Business Intelligence has gathered increasing profile in recent years as both the IT and Finance functions have become aware of its potential to improve business. Tim Dawson (Financial Services Industry Manager, Microsoft ) and Chris Mentor (Director Consulting Services CALUMO Group) will profile typical BI scenarios focusing on deployment challenges and outcomes.

When: Monday 13th and 14th October 2008
Where: Hilton on the Park, Melbourne

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

 

- Last week we presented a logic puzzle devised by Einstein which we used as a simple analogy to explain business intelligence and the components (cubes, dimensions and elements) typical of a real business with thousands or millions of transactions.
– This week, we provide a solution to the puzzle as well as discussing the Data Mining perspective illustrated in Einstein's puzzle...

Click on this link to look back at the original puzzle and the 15 hints provided.
The question is: Who owns the fish?
Here is The Solution:

Since we know we have only 25 data points to derive, let's start by making a five by five table (instead of a 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5  or 15,625, six dimensional cube) where columns represent the five houses and the rows represent nationality, colour, drink, smoke, and pet per the table below.

 

• In the next table below, let's fill in the easy clues first (hints 8, 9 and 14).
• Then, the green house/white house combination (hint 4) cannot be houses 1 and 2 or houses 2 and 3 because the second house is blue. It also cannot be houses 3 and 4 because the green house owner drinks coffee (hint 5) and the third house owner drinks milk. So the green house must be fourth and the owner drinks coffee and the white house is fifth.
• The red house with the Brit (hint 1) cannot be the second, fourth or fifth house (which are blue, green, and white), nor can it be the first house (which contains the Norwegian), so it must be House 3.
• Therefore, the yellow house with the Dunhill smoker (hint 7) must be the first house and horses are kept in the second house (hint 11).

 

We can now complete the puzzle in the last table below as follows:

• The Norwegian in the first house does not drink milk or coffee, because we already know these beverages are drunk in the third and fourth houses.  They do not drink tea, because the Dane drinks tea (hint 3), nor beer, because the Blue Master smoker drinks beer (hint 12) and the Norwegian smokes Dunhill. Therefore, the Norwegian must drink water.
• The Blend smoker is in the second house, with a neighbour who drinks water (hint 15).
• This Blend smoker cannot drink beer (hint 12), so the beer-drinking Blue Master-smoking person must live in the fifth house.
• The tea-drinking Dane (hint 3) lives in the second house.
• The German who smokes Prince (hint 13) must be in the fourth house.
• The Swede must live in the fifth house with his dogs (hint 2).
• The Pall Mall smoker lives in the third house and raises birds (hint 6).
• That leaves only the Norwegian in the first house as the one with cats who lives next door to the man who smokes Blend (hint 10).

Therefore, assuming that the fifth pet is a fish, it is the GERMAN who owns the fish.

The Data Mining Perspective
It is worth commenting that the distribution of data in this problem makes it manageable as a solution in two dimensions. In the business world however, there will be thousands or millions of transactions and the distribution of data will not be so neat. For example, not all Germans own fish and not all people who drink water also smoke Dunhill. So with many many transactions, business decision makers might typically want the answers to questions like:

• Which nationalities drink beer?
• Is there a link between pet ownership and cigarette preference?
• What is the most popular house colour in Norway?

For questions like these, the process of discovery is inverted and, rather than having the gathered intelligence allow us to fill in the data points, we use the available data points to enable business to extract answers about the relationships implied by the data. Relationships that may not be apparent or obvious from a dimensional business intelligence review of the available data. This is Data Mining. “Data mining is the semi-automatic extraction of patterns, changes, associations, anomalies, and other statistically significant structures from large data sets.”

So how do Business Intelligence and Data Mining differ? Terms associated with traditional BI include analytics or exploration, drill down, trending, reporting, planning data entry and modeling of business rules. For data mining, terms include predictive analytics, classification, association, regression, segmentation.

In a future post, we will go into these data mining terms in more detail.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

Calumo is partnering with Microsoft in a series of sessions, to illustrate how Microsoft, one of the world's largest companies, reduces the cost and risk associated with financial reporting.
Microsoft Corporate Accounting Group Manager Lisa Nelson, and Director of Corporate Accounting Alice Jolla, will be discussing in detail how Microsoft's financial reporting process creates a well controlled work environment.

CALUMO Group will be discussing the relevance of this best practice to Australian close and reporting. These practices enable Companies to dramatically streamline time-consuming traditional methods by operating out of one consolidated environment. Companies can collaborate and manage calendars, task lists, documents, and sign offs with a complete audit history and streamline the audit process to boot.

• Microsoft has benefited through this best practice as follows:
• Reduced annual report filing time from 50 days to 31 days
• Shaved approximately five days out of internal checking process
• Reduced black-out periods for stock trading
• Enabled quarterly reporting simultaneously with earnings press release
• Streamlined auditor involvement and reduced related costs

These events are scheduled for:
Melbourne: 23 September 2008
Sydney: 24 September 2008
Perth: 26 September 2008

Please Register Here.
Places at this complimentary event are limited - don’t miss your chance to attend an exclusive invite only session.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

The logic puzzle below is attributed to Albert Einstein and it is said that only 2% of us can solve it.

The Puzzle
There are 5 houses in 5 different colours.
In each house lives a person with a different nationality.
These 5 owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet.
No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same drink.

Hints
1. The Brit lives in a red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the house right in the middle drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blend lives next door to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next door to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The owner who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blend has a neighbor who drinks water.

The Question: Who owns the fish?

At the CALUMO Group, we have been providing business intelligence and performance management solutions since 1998. To solve this puzzle, we viewed it as a typical business intelligence or data mining challenge where very often all the information required is available, but where the means to derive and present the answers is not that obvious. Here is how we answer these questions for our customers:

The Business Intelligence Perspective - Cubes, Dimensions and Elements
We broke the problem down into a matrix, or cube, comprising six dimensions with each dimension comprising five elements as follows:

We then combined the six dimensions into a cube. Physical cubes can only be three dimensions, but the representation below is a great way to visualize the concept of six or more dimensions. Start with the cube made up of 3 dimensions; Drinks, Smokes, Pets. This cube is then embedded into a further cube comprising; Houses, Nationality and Colour.

It's of significant interest at this stage to note that the puzzle only contains 30 populated data points (5 houses, 5 Nationalities, 5 Colours, 5 Drinks, 5 Smokes, 5 Pets). The possible data points or combinations are comparatively huge at 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 or 15,625. This phenomenon of few actual data points, but a large number of possible data points is referred to as sparse data and data explosion and is very typical of real life commercial business intelligence applications.

Remember, this puzzle only has 6 dimensions with only 5 elements in each dimension and only 5 transactions in total. Imagine a real business with dimensions like Customers or Products, which typically have hundreds or thousands of elements, and cubes with more than 6 dimensions and transaction numbers in the thousands or millions.

On a typical CALUMO assignment, we gather and transform data to support the business intelligence building blocks. We then integrate and present the data in a unified business intelligence and performance management application. The challenges we face and the business answers we provide are not too dissimilar to Einstein's puzzle.

So, it is no coincidence then that all of our consultants are able to derive the answer to Einstein's puzzle. Were you able to work it out, or more importantly, are you able to answer all the difficult business intelligence questions at your organization? If the answer is no to the first question, and if you're interested, we will be posting the solution to the puzzle next week.

If the answer is no to the second question, please contact us to find out how CALUMO can help you get the answers for stand-out business intelligence and performance management. If you were able to work out the answer (in less than 15 minutes), please contact us to consider a career in business intelligence at CALUMO :-)

- In addition to providing a solution next week, we will also be discussing the Data Mining perspective illustrated in Einstein's puzzle.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

Sydney, NSW, - September 9, 2008 — Today, MIKADO DYNAMICS is proud to announce that we are now an IBM Cognos Platinum Reseller Partner, making us one of only a few other Australian partners to achieve Platinum status and with offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane! The Platinum partner status is the highest level of distinction within the IBM Cognos partner program and MIKADO DYNAMICS has achieved this through our continued success in delivering successful business solutions and increased product sales.

"Going Platinum with IBM Cognos recognises that MIKADO DYNAMICS is seriously committed to its customers, it's people and its partnership with IBM Cognos and the Cognos TM1 BI Platform" said Dominic Parsons - MIKADO DYNAMICS CEO.

About IBM Cognos Reseller Partners and Partnering with IBM Cognos
IBM Cognos Reseller Partners sell IBM Cognos products and provide business intelligence, enterprise planning and corporate performance management consulting services, ensuring the successful implementation of IBM Cognos products. IBM Cognos Partners provide products, services, and technology expertise that help our customers improve and direct corporate performance. Our broad range of partnerships allows us to meet the distinctive needs of our customers in purchasing, deploying, and servicing their business intelligence and performance management solutions. Cognos TM1 offers a single software suite that supports all the components of corporate performance management - from planning and budgeting, to measuring and monitoring performance, to reporting and analysis. Through their industry expertise and specialized knowledge, our partners extend that offering, helping our clients maximize their technology investments.

About MIKADO DYNAMICS and The CALUMO Group
MIKADO DYNAMICS (a CALUMO Group associated company) is the longest standing performance management solution provider in Cognos TM1, with over 12 years experience. The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

Microsoft announced the release of SQL Server 2008 on August 6th, 2008. Code-named "Katmai", SQL Server 2008 is the new version of the company’s acclaimed data management and business intelligence platform. This version of SQL Server provides powerful new capabilities such as support for policy-based management, auditing, large-scale data warehousing, geospatial data, and advanced reporting and analysis services.

SQL Server includes several data management and analysis components as follows:

Database Engine
The Database Engine is the core service for storing, processing and securing data. The Database Engine provides controlled access and rapid transaction processing. The Database Engine also provides rich support for sustaining high availability.

Analysis Services - Multidimensional Data
Analysis Services supports OLAP by allowing you to design, create, and manage multidimensional structures that contain data aggregated from other data sources.

Analysis Services - Data Mining
Analysis Services enables you to design, create, and visualize data mining models which can be constructed from other data sources by using a wide variety of industry-standard data mining algorithms.

Integration Services
Integration Services is a platform for building high performance data integration solutions, including packages that provide extract, transform, and load (ETL) processing for data warehousing.

Replication
Replication is a set of technologies for copying and distributing data and database objects from one database to another, and then synchronizing between databases to maintain consistency.

Reporting Services
Reporting Services delivers enterprise, Web-enabled reporting functionality so you can create reports that draw content from a variety of data sources, publish reports in various formats, and centrally manage security and subscriptions.

Service Broker
Service Broker helps developers build scalable, secure database applications. This new Database Engine technology provides a message-based communication platform that enables independent application components to perform as a functioning whole.
 
About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

IBM Cognos TM1 9.4 was released on August 14 and can be downloaded from the Cognos support site for registered customers (userid and password required).

Key new features of this release include:

1. "Active Forms" replace dynamic slicing
   TM1 9.4 has removed dynamic slicing.  Instead, new Active Forms allow for standard Excel format options in a worksheet and to view and update live TM1 cube data directly in Excel when connected to a TM1 server.
2. New features to support Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance
   - Three TM1 Administrator Roles
   - New TM1 Audit Log
3. Long String Support
   TM1 9.4 supports strings longer than 255 bytes in cell data and SQL statements.
4. Microsoft Windows Vista and Excel 2007 Support
   - New TM1 ribbon for Excel 2007
   - .xlsx files can be opened in TM1 Web if Excel 2007 is installed on the web server
5. TM1 Web 64-bit IIS Support
6. Unicode Support for multiple languages

A more detailed review of all these new features can be found in the attached TM1 NEW FEATURES GUIDE.

Pictured: In 9.4 seconds, a WORLD RECORD by Frank Wykoff runnning the 100 YARD DASH on June 7, 1930 - A segue reference to "version 9.4" (since Usain Bolt can only run 100m in 9.69 seconds) and a reference to the legendary speed of TM1 cubes.

Integration of IBM Cognos 8 and TMI 9.4
Other exciting developments include Integration of IBM Cognos 8 and TMI 9.4.
At the Cognos TM1 Forum this week (3-5 September) Cognos demonstrated how Cognos 8 Business Intelligence enhances the deployment and implemention of IBM Cognos TM1. This included complex and simple reports, multi-source dashboards, report packs, comprehensive analyses, managed reports with prompts, scorecards, scheduling, distribution and alerts, without scripting or coding!

Utilising the real-time in-memory facilities of TM1 cubes, data updates can be reflected immediately by the BI components. Employing a multi-user live scenario, Cognos illustrated these abilities in a web-based zero footprint environment.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

Mikado Dynamics (a CALUMO Group associated company) is an IBM Cognos Platinum Reseller Partner. The Group is the longest standing performance management solution provider in Cognos TM1, with over 12 year’s experience.

Have a look at our English Premier League Ladder which illustrate 08/09 season results to round 25 using CALUMO Sparks with some vivid sparklines and metrics.

English Premier League Satisfaction Index
The CALUMO "Satisfaction Index" below traces and compares the competitive paths of the top and bottom 3 teams playing in the English Premier League. The chart shows 150 win/loss outcomes for the last 25 rounds of the 08/09 season.

We called this chart the "satisfaction index" because it is highly predictive of the level of satisfaction fans and supports have with their team. Manchester United, for example, is in the pounds seats and can expect growing club memberships and will be walking into sponsorship negotiations with confidence.

Business Productivity Index
This type of chart can also be intensely useful in business performance management. Imagine comparing the competitive paths of your least and most successful consultants, products, customers, or any other business segment. Take the following "Partner Productivity Index" chart for example. Here we compare the performance of 6 partners in a professional services firm. Their "productivity" over an extended period of time has been reduced to a key performance indicator between +10 and -10. This could be based purely on actual revenue versus budget revenue, or a sophisticated metric combining many measures of partner performance. There will no doubt be good reason for the standout performance by Kirkbuton and apparent underperformance by Haddlesey, closely followed by Owston. Perhaps seeing their performance presented in this way will inspire the three middle order partners to strive for future over-achievement.

Breakthrough Business Benefits from Unified Performance Management
High quality visualization and reporting like this is only part of the business intelligence puzzle. A unified performance management application like CALUMO, including budgeting and forecasting, analysis, modeling business rules, financial consolidation, as well as seamlessly integrated data can provide spectacular business insights and ROI.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specializations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

Port Douglas, Queensland,— August 7, 2008 — Today, CALUMO Group proudly announced that it has won the Partner of the Year Award for Business Intelligence at the 2008 Microsoft Australia Partner Program Awards. The company was chosen out of a local field of top Microsoft Partners as delivering market-leading customer solutions built on Microsoft technology.

Pictured: holding the award and celebrating were Bruce McCarthy, Dominic Parsons, Johann Potgieter, Brenden Russell, Jeff Walter and Mike Henegan of CALUMO Group.

Accepting for CALUMO, group CEO Dominic Parsons said “I am proud to accept this award on behalf of the CALUMO team.  Our developers and professional services teams work tirelessly to deliver truly innovative, effective and world-class solutions for our clients.  This is our second award from Microsoft in as many years and to be recognized with the inaugural Microsoft award for BI is a great affirmation of our vision for Performance Management.”
 
The CALUMO Group has been providing Business intelligence and Performance Management solutions for over 12 years and began working with Microsoft only 3 years ago.  Their unique BI application and pragmatic approach to delivering fully fledged BI has been openly embraced by its clients.
 
This award recognises partners who provide data-warehousing and business-intelligence solutions that improve organisations by providing business insight to all employees — leading to better, faster, and more-relevant decisions.  CALUMO Group was recognised for superior technology and innovation in Business Intelligence. 
 
“Our partners are the lifeblood of Microsoft’s business and through the Awards we’re able to highlight and recognise those who have gone above and beyond in delivering exceptional technological solutions and services to Australian customers,” said Mr Paul Voges, Director of Small and Mid Market Solutions and Partner Group, Microsoft Australia.
 
“It’s an honour to acknowledge their dedication and success as part of the Microsoft partner community, and also to recognise the broader role that they play as leaders in Australia’s IT sector.”
 
The Microsoft Australia Partner Program Awards recognise Microsoft Partners that have developed and delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions over the last year.
 
 
About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

Whilst enthusiasm and investment in business intelligence and performance management projects continues across enterprises of all sizes and all industries, major project successes cannot be taken for granted.

From enlightening to disappointing, we use the “helicopter view” and “head in the clouds” analogies to describe the range of outcomes possible from business intelligence projects.

The "Helicopter View" is a metaphor for rising above the detail of the situation so that you can see it as a whole, and see the wider context. It means taking the overview in order to see the essential rather than the detail.

Business Building Blocks
The "Helicopter View" is the big picture of your business and a way to see how all of the parts fit together. To achieve this, the Business Intelligence solutions must be holistic and include all the building blocks of the enterprise. The Business Intelligence solution must also highlight the linkages between the building blocks. The building blocks typically include:

1. Customer Segments – who are your customers?
2. Value Proposition - what do you offer each of your customer segments?
3. Channels - how do you reach each of your customer segments?
4. Customer Relationships – how do you relate to your customers over time?
5. Revenue Streams - how do you earn money?
6. Key Resources – based on which assets are you running your business?
7. Key Activities - what key activities do you need to run your business?
8. Partner Network - with which partners do you leverage your business?
9. Cost Structure – where and what are your most important costs?

 

Convergence of Data and Performance Management Applications

Performance Management includes a multitude of Business Intelligence applications. The benefits of the “Helicopter View” can only be fully realized when the entire suite of applications is integrated into a single unified application or platform.

Inextricably linked to unified application is the requirement for the convergence of data. Gather the data to support the above "business building blocks” and “performance management applications”. Transform and make it consistent via such processes as Master Data Management and data cleaning (if necessary). Integrate and package the data for BI consumption.

The “Helicopter View” relies on the convergence of both data and performance management applications.

Without a business intelligence helicopter view, supported by reliable and timely detailed information produced by quality and repeatable processes, you could be running your businesses with your head in the clouds when your focus should really be on the ground.

Business Intelligence and Performance Management Home

Comments

On Feb 14, 2008 New York City unveiled a new online performance management system they called "Citywide Performance Reporting" (CPR). CPR takes 500 key performance indicators, which are updated monthly, and makes them available to the public online. You can visit the New York CPR site here.

With an annual budget of US$58.5 billion, NYC is many times larger than Australia's largest council; however the performance management challenges faced by NYC are still comparable to those faced by Australian local government agencies.

The New York City press release said: "CPR is the culmination of more than two years of work coordinated by the Office of Operations, and involving more than 40 City agencies." The three key benefits of CPR can be summarised as follows:

1. CPR uses a standardized reporting format across all agencies and all data types, and provides a single point of access for all users.
2. CPR aggregates data across agency into "citywide themes," which represent groups of related services such as infrastructure, education, or public safety.
3. CPR will identify problem areas and improve service delivery. It is another step in improving transparency and customer service for New Yorkers.

You can read the full press release here.

Notably, these 3 benefits are very similar to the challenges faced by Australian Local Government agencies. The stated 3 key benefits of the CALUMO Local Government Performance Management Solutions" are as follows:

1. Integrate and transform multiple data sources into highly informative metrics and KPI reports for performance management of diverse and competitive Council operations.
2. Provide open and transparent reporting for improved governance and stakeholder management.
3. Provide planning and reporting from a single reliable source, satisfying a council’s strategic, organisational and compliance requirements.

The following is a screen shot of one of NYC’s online performance reports:

Whilst I have several criticisms of how the CPR data is presented and ultimately therefore it's value to the end-user, I only want to point out two flaws in CPR, which are specifically claimed in the press release as benefits.

1. "CPR is trend-based, not target-based. It compares current performance to performance during the same time last year providing a short-term performance trend or "snapshot", intended to be used for real-time decision-making."
   In our opinion, comparing current performance to the same time last year does not provide a meaningful trend and I doubt it could be used for real-time decision-making.
2. "CPR will offer graphical representation of performance, including pie charts to make performance trends easy to identify."
   CPR includes only pie charts. Pie charts are not typically used to identify trends. Pie charts are also often criticized for taking up too much space on a page and that it is not easy to visually compare the size of each slice.

I have provided below an example of the equivalent CPR report from CALUMO Local Government Performance Management Solutions.

(click on image to enlarge)

CALUMO Local Government Performance Management Solutions deliver the functionality Councils need to achieve their many internal planning and reporting objectives. It delivers open and transparent reporting for improved governance and stakeholder management.

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Please join us as our guest at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Summit in Melbourne on 28 November, or Sydney on 29 November. The focus of this complimentary one day event is to excite and educate high level delegates with solutions built on Microsoft’s comprehensive BI platform.

One of the presentations, by Lea Munro of Queensland Rail, is a CALUMO user story titled “Forecasting & Reporting – How Queensland Rail have Extended the Microsoft BI Platform”.

One of the greatest risks to effectively embedding any corporate BI system is the failure of IT and operations to connect, agree and move forward together.  By choosing the Microsoft Platform and CALUMO, QLD Rail set out with the best possible start – an infrastructure that IT knew, understood and trusted; and an application layer that offered end users the depth and flexibility they need to both submit and extract the information they need.  This approach has provided QLD Rail with a successful initial roll-out and the capability to scale rapidly across its enterprise.  In this session Lea Munro discusses QLD Rail’s process for selection, the success of the initial roll-out, lessons learned and plans for the future.

The Business Intelligence Summit delves into the technology and practical benefits behind Microsoft’s leading business intelligence products, and how to seamlessly integrate them within your organisation. It’s the first of its kind to be held in Australia.

Click here to register.

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At the CPA Congress in Sydney on 24 October 2007, our CEO [CALUMO Labs Pty Ltd] Johann Potgieter, presented "Exception Reporting - Extracting the Opportunities from a Data Rich Environment". Johann provided insights on why business intelligence applications are top priority for CIO's in 2007 (Gartner). His presentation included current trends in exception reporting including examples of dashboard gauges, alerting & conditional formatting.

Johann presented new data visualisation techniques using sparklines (aka in-cell charts or microcharts) and gave some examples of predictive analytics and data mining to extract opportunities from data.

The CPA Congress is the biggest event for public sector and business professionals to discover insights for sustainable performance. Each year the CPA Congress attracts over 2,500 like-minded industry professionals and maximises professional development by offering over 80 sessions across a range of topics from high profile speakers www.cpaaustralia.com.au

Click on the link to view/download the Exception Reporting presentation.

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What women want and other analytical questions

Last night my wife showed me a spreadsheet where she's been recording her weight for the last 9 years (she herself admits to being a bit OCD). I saw a perfect application for CALUMO In-Cell Charting to present this data in an intensely meaningful way using a sparkline.  She was so impressed when I showed her the chart and for once my need for analytics, proof & logic satisfied her need to be understood.

My Analysis
Within a few seconds of building the chart, I was able to make the following observations:

• Other than on 4 occasions, she has stayed within + or - 10% of her 9 year average weight (her normal range).
• You can easily spot her 2 pregnancies at the 2 chart peaks, but I note she consumed more chocolate thickshakes during her first pregnancy, thus explaining her max of 90kg (at the red dot) just before the birth of our first child.
• She experienced more dramatic weight loss after her first pregnancy than after the second pregnancy. The faster weight loss was assisted by weight loss tablets, which took her to her min of 63kg (at the green dot), but the low was short lived when she stopped taking weight loss tablets.
• I proudly note a healthier and more sustainable approach during & after her second pregnancy (fewer thickshakes, no weight loss tablets and plenty of exercise).
• In the early years, prior to her first pregnancy, there are a few volatile up & down swings. These reflect those volatile and decadent years before children.

So why did I use an in-cell chart?

Well, for one thing the chart above is effectively representing more than 3,000 data points (9 x 365). CALUMO In-Cell Charting provides an intelligent visual presentation of large amounts of meaningful data for identifying trends, comparing data and highlighting exceptions. Secondly, the chart display with the min/max, normal and closing looks deceptively simple – its actually not for the novice to achieve in standard spreadsheet packages. By combining charts and data together in a table, we easily achieve this and do away with the need to separately label axes and legends, or the need to associate the table data with the chart information.

CALUMO In-Cell Charting (AKA Sparklines) provides Line, Axis, Bar, Bullet, Grid, Strip & Arrow charts. Imagine the application of this where a single page transforms and concentrates large amounts of corporate data into KPI's on a single page for rapid and effective review and analysis.

One of the Six Most Promising Private Technology Ventures from Australia

Red Herring Magazine announced today that Calumo Labs Pty Ltd has been officially selected as a winner of the prestigious Red Herring 100 Asia 2007 awards.  The news was announced at a gala dinner during the Red Herring 100 Asia event in Hong Kong, China, on August 31.   "Its been a great year for Calumo Labs, and to be a winner amongst such an outstanding field of innovative and disruptive companies is greatly rewarding" said Johann Potgieter, CEO, Calumo Labs.

Red Herring 100 Asia is an exclusive event honouring 100 cutting-edge private technology companies from across the Asia-Pacific region.  The event brings together an elite roster of entrepreneurial and global venture investment firms to showcase excellence in innovation.
 
Winners were selected from a pool of more than 500 applicants based in 16 countries/regions including China, India, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Australia and Vietnam.  The names of the 100 announced winners can be found online at www.herringevents.com/asia07/redherring100.html#100.
 
The Red Herring editorial team carefully selected the winning companies based on both quantitative and qualitative criteria such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their ecosystem. The 100 winners are based in 16 countries/regions including China, India, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Australia and Vietnam.
 
"After a rigorous evaluation process, we’re very happy with winners we selected,” said Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-Chief of Red Herring.  “There was a large pool to choose from and we’re impressed by the calibre an innovative talent bursting from Asia’s business and technology sector.”

About CALUMO Labs Pty Ltd
CALUMO Labs software is the only complete, unified Performance Management and Business Intelligence solution built entirely in .Net2 and powered by Microsoft’s Analysis Services 2005. CALUMO provides planning, forecasting, consolidations, reporting, analytics and dashboards across financial, executive and all operational departments. CALUMO Labs empowers the enterprise through insight, integration and collaboration. For more information, visit www.calumo.com.
 
About Red Herring
Red Herring is a global media company uniting the world’s best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine; an online daily technology news service; technology research, and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider’s access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. For more information, visit www.redherring.com.

SYDNEY, Australia, August 31, 2007 –  At a gala function at the 2007 Microsoft Australia Partner Conference held at Hamilton Island, Microsoft awarded Calumo Labs Pty Ltd the Microsoft Partner of the Year Award in the category "Data Management Solutions, Database Management".

The award recognises the partner that provides outstanding solutions in data warehousing and business intelligence. The winning partner’s solutions provide organizations with a competitive edge in performance reporting and business insight across the enterprise, leading to better and more timely business decisions.

"The award is a testament to the depth of experience and innovation that Calumo Labs brings to customer solutions delivered on the Microsoft platform" said Christine Bishop, Product Marketing Manager SQL Server, Microsoft Australia. "Given the significant investments that Microsoft have recently made to make BI capabilities more accessible across the organization, partners such as Calumo Labs are vital to the future success of Microsoft and its customers."

"We are delighted to have received this award from Microsoft” said Jeff Walter, Marketing Director, Calumo Labs. “It confirms our leadership position in delivering innovative BI solutions to clients using Microsoft technologies. For us, the award underlines the enormous opportunities for Business Intelligence delivered on the Microsoft platform and reflects the dedication, talent and professionalism of the entire Calumo Group team." Mr Walter also offered "Special thanks to the Microsoft Australia team for their ongoing support and willingness to always ‘go the extra mile’ for their partners."

Pictured: Jeff Walter holding the award and celebrating with Christine Bishop (Product Marketing Manager SQL Server) and Tony Mudie (ISV Business Solutions), Microsoft Australia.

About CALUMO Labs Pty Ltd (formerly SPF Pty Ltd)
CALUMO Labs software is the only complete, unified Performance Management and Business Intelligence solution built entirely in .Net2 and powered by Microsoft’s Analysis Services 2005. CALUMO provides planning, forecasting, consolidations, reporting, analytics and dashboards across financial, executive and all operational departments. Calumo Labs provides comprehensive consulting, training and support services for BI solutions built with Calumo on the Microsoft BI platform. CALUMO Labs empowers the enterprise through insight, integration and collaboration. For more information, visit www.calumo.com.

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One of the Most Promising Private Technology Ventures in Asia

Red Herring Magazine has announced that CALUMO Labs Pty Ltd has been included on a list of 200 finalists for the Red Herring 100 Asia 2007 awards. The 100 winners will be announced at the Red Herring 100 Asia event in Hong Kong, on August 29-31. “As one of only seven finalists from Australia, our selection reaffirms the value of combining leading technology, demand driven innovation and over 10 years experience in Business Intelligence” said Johann Potgieter, CEO, Calumo Labs.

Red Herring carefully selected the finalists based on criteria such as technology innovation, financials, business model, management team, customers and alliances.  The 200 finalists are based in 16 countries/regions including China, India, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Australia and Vietnam. The names of the 200 companies short-listed as finalists for the "Red Herring 100 Asia 2007" can be found online at http://www.herringevents.com/asia07/redherring100.html

"The 200 finalists we selected from across 16 countries and regions are all excellent contenders," said Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-Chief of Red Herring. "They are exceptional companies who thrive on innovation and strongly define the important role of technology in Asia’s economy and throughout the world."

About CALUMO Labs Pty Ltd
CALUMO Labs software is the only complete, unified Performance Management and Business Intelligence solution built entirely in .Net2 and powered by Microsoft’s Analysis Services 2005. CALUMO provides planning, forecasting, consolidations, reporting, analytics and dashboards across financial, executive and all operational departments. CALUMO Labs empowers the enterprise through insight, integration and collaboration. For more information, visit www.calumo.com.

About Red Herring
Red Herring is a global media company uniting the world’s best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine; an online daily technology news service; technology research, and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider’s access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. For more information, visit www.redherring.com.

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Just for fun I created the AFL ladder below using CALUMO to illustrate two of our business intelligent in-cell charts.

In the first column of the table, we're using a win/loss bar chart to show each team’s record for the 17 rounds of the 2007 AFL season. A blue bar represents a win, a red bar a loss and a blank bar a draw. With 16 teams and 17 rounds played, the bar chart effectively shows the visual equivalent of 272 data points, maximizing data density without compromising readability or ease of use.

Let's take a look at these results: Geelong took 5 rounds to warm up, but definitely seem to be on a winning roll now. Collingwood & Fremantle both seem to have a "win at home, loose away from home" problem. After winning six games straight, West Coast started paying the price for not being able to play their best football.

CALUMO In-Cell Charts provide an intelligent visual way of presenting large amounts of meaningful data for identifying trends, comparing data and highlighting exceptions.

In the last column of the table, we compare the percentage wins using a simple relative sized horizontal bar combined with numeric value percentage wins. By combining charts and data together in a table, we do away with the need to separately label axes and legends, or the need to associate the table data with the chart information. In order to achieve this, CALUMO Visualization Widgets provide in-cell charting for presentation class dashboards and charts.

With the click of a mouse, CALUMO In-Cell Charting make the design of really compelling executive dashboards easy.

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CALUMO has been chosen as one of five finalists in the "Applications and Infrastructure Tools" categories for the prestigious 2007 iAwards.

The Applications and Infrastructure Tools award is presented to the most innovative nomination for the development of applications and infrastructure tools. Any software program that operates hardware increases the efficiency of systems, measures and/or monitor systems usage and performance. Any software program that provides for data access/retrieval, data manipulation (eg.sort/merge), data management, data warehousing and program design/development. It includes all database management system (DBMS) software; decision-support and executive information system (EIS) programs; spreadsheet programs; front-end and back-end CASE tools; and emerging areas like cooperative processing and/or object management application development tools.

The iAwards finalists reflect the diversity of innovation across the Australian high-tech community. The iAwards program recognises the need to celebrate the significant contributions that ICT makes to the Australian economy.
 
The iAwards will be co-presented by AIIA, the Australian Financial Review, the CSIRO ICT Centre and MIS Australia at the iAwards gala dinner on Wednesday 30 May 2007 in Sydney.

The Australian iAwards are an initiative of The Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).

About AIIA
The AIIA is the leading national body representing the information and communications technology (ICT) industry. With almost 500 member companies right across the country, from every sector of the industry and representing every size of company. AIIA sees itself as the representative of the Australian ICT industry.

The role of AIIA is to set the strategic direction of the ICT industry, influences public policy, engages industry stakeholders and provides member companies with business productivity tools, advisory services and market intelligence to accelerate their business growth. AIIA assists the ICT industry to meet its business objectives, both locally and globally.

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– In Part 1, I discussed the rise of Microsoft’s OLAP market share and how this benefited us by educating the market on the benefits of business intelligence and what has become Business Performance Management.
– In Part 2 last week, I discussed our decision to embrace Analysis Services including our research findings and the enormous opportunity we saw for BPM applications on Analysis Services 2005.
– This week I will discuss our BPM vision and product roadmap and explain in some detail the CALUMO Microsoft Partnership where we’re embracing elements of their BI platform whilst applying our subject matter expertise to provide a more sophisticated and complete offering..

Let me start by saying that in our view Microsoft’s entry with PerformancePoint is an important validation of the BPM market as a whole.

For PerformancePoint, the immediate opportunity is to see how ProClarity has been combined with existing capability such as Business Scorecard Manager and other new capability to provide a framework for budgeting, forecasting, planning, and consolidation. In light of PerformancePoint and other developments, we will continue to embrace any new capability if we think there are components of the technology that make sense and add value for our customers. CALUMO is a certified member of the “Microsoft SQL Server Data Warehouse Alliance” and for a long time now we have leveraged elements of the Microsoft BI platform to deliver our BPM applications. We intend to continue to rely on this approach.

What differentiates our offering is that we continue to offer significant application logic over and above the Microsoft platform. As I mentioned in my previous post, the market understands BI and BPM because of Microsoft’s reach, but often needs or wants a more sophisticated solution than is available through vanilla Microsoft. The OLAP Report has just released its annual OLAP Market Shares showing Microsoft's share increase by nearly 4% from 2005 to 31.6% for 2006. Tellingly the report also states that “Microsoft Analysis Services is typically chosen by smaller organizations”. CALUMO extends the reach to medium and large organizations with more advanced capability than would otherwise be satisfied by a non-Microsoft solution such as Hyperion, Cognos, or Business Objects.

Partnership with Microsoft

In our view, Microsoft sees the value of working closely in partnerships that can add value to their stack. An example of this is their Office Business Applications (OBA) initiative. Microsoft wants Partners to develop applications that integrate closely with Microsoft Office to front-end business applications. These OBA’s are important to Microsoft because they provide a way to get Office entrenched in businesses. By the way, OBAs are for use with Office 2007 only. With our extended Calumo OBA we take the program even further with extensive integration with Internet Explorer, SQL Server 2005 and support for older versions of Excel.

Our technical partnership makes sense too. If you look at the BI/BPM landscape as a whole, it’s increasingly becoming a black and white choice between new technology solutions versus old technology solutions. CALUMO had a blank canvas technology wise and functionality wise. As a result, we don’t have any integration issues with multiple products or legacy code. Everything is .Net2.0 and SSAS. Technically therefore working closely with Microsoft is mutually beneficial. Originally it was only a question of an order of magnitude increase in performance between 2000 and 2005. Of late it’s been a best practice approach in database design and high-end business requirements.

Our value-add over PerformancePoint includes operational analytics, predictive analytics, and depth and breadth across our applications. To try and be more specific regarding depth and breadth across applications, some of our features available through both Excel & the Web include:

• Ad-hoc Browse (through Excel and or the Web)
• Slice to Excel
• Rich Excel client functionality
• Web Reports - functionally rich, dynamic, freeze frames
• Read Only or Write back (through Excel and or the Web)
• Bottom-Up (basic & advanced)
• Top-Down  (basic & advanced)
• MDX Support
• Support for Stacked Dimensions
• Multiple Cubes within a single view
• Report/Batch Manager
• Text management
• Drill Down (Members)
• Drill Through (Transactions or Cubes)
• Advanced Member Search & Sort
• Save Data Views
• Save Member Subsets
• Support for Member Aliases
• Support for Grids, Charts, Gauges
• Data Filter - rankings, top/bottom n or %
• X64

Regarding our competitors, a significant differentiator is our ability to offer a complete BPM application on a single unified platform (no legacy code, no integration issues with multiple products). Our Excel Add-in is also very advanced including no less than 35 spreadsheet functions. We have given Excel a lot of thought and focus in development.

This brings us to where we are today where we continue to forge ahead with our vision and believe that the Microsoft BPM Applications gap remains a significant opportunity. We continue to diligently draw upon our previous 10 years subject matter expertise to build sophisticated BPM applications. While we are doing this, the number of Calumo customers continues to grow.

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Conditional Formatting for Maintenance Free Formatting & Presentation

Shading alternate rows is a very common and easy way to make a table with multiple columns more readable. This is usually achieved in Excel by applying Format, Cells, Patterns, Color on alternate rows. So what's the problem? Well, if the table is then sorted, or rows are deleted or added the shading will be scrambled in the process.

Conditional formatting is great way to keep the desired shading without any effort. This is achieved by using a =ROW()=EVEN(ROW()) formula as a conditional format across the entire table as follows.

How does this work?

• The formula =EVEN() rounds any number to the nearest even integer. For example =EVEN(9)  rounds to an even 10.
• =ROW() returns the row number of the current cell.

Therefore when these two formulae are combined in a “Formula Is” condition such as "=ROW()=EVEN(ROW())", if =ROW() is an even number, the formula returns True and applies the conditional format. if =ROW() is an odd number the formula returns False and the conditional format is not applied.

We hope this tip makes things easier for you.

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– In Part 1 last week, I discussed the rise of Microsoft’s OLAP market share and how this was beneficial by educating the market on the benefits of business intelligence and Business Performance Management (BPM). This week I discuss our decision to embrace Analysis Services including our research findings and the enormous opportunity we saw for BPM applications on Analysis Services 2005..

In 2003, we began a “from the ground up” development of our BPM application powered by Analysis Services 2005 (SSAS). Our product CALUMO is the result of these efforts. The development brief was to build a sophisticated BPM application at least equal to or better than what we had done in the past (SPF Plus on TM1 OLAP Server). It also had to be better than the solutions offered by our competitors (Cognos, Hyperion, Outlooksoft etc).

A standout item of research that illustrates the opportunity we saw is the chart below which correlates OLAP Market shares (per the OLAP Report) against the BPM Applications market shares (per IDC).

Note that Hyperion has almost precisely the same OLAP and BPM market shares, yet Microsoft has nearly 30% OLAP market share, but only a trivial BPM share. This is an enormous gap of nearly 25%. Although there are other 3rd party players who leverage Analysis Services filling some of this gap (eg about 2% each from Outlooksoft and GEAC, plus others which were not tracked by IDC), our research showed that most of these customers needs were not being fulfilled. They were either:

• Not using Analysis Services (ie they were using SQL Server, but the OLAP module was shelf-ware), or
• the applications were very simple and could not be classified as BPM.
• In some of these cases the gap was or is being filled with a non Microsoft solution for both the OLAP and BPM components (eg Hyperion, Cognos or TM1).

We believed that providing for and filling the Microsoft BPM Applications gap was the most significant and neglected market opportunity at the time. For us, it has been about being first to market with the latest technology on Analysis Services 2005. It’s also about providing a more sophisticated application than Hyperion, Cognos and our other competitors on a unified platform.

Software development is never easy, but our decisions and efforts so far have been more than vindicated:

• Analysis Services 2005 has proven to be a dramatic improvement on 2000,
• and, because we built CALUMO from the ground up, we don’t have any legacy code, or integration issues with multiple products. Everything is .Net2.0 and we are not trying to support customers on both MSAS and SSAS.
• Also, the subject matter expertise we have from our previous 10 years of BPM software development, has allowed us to design what we consider to be a complete, sophisticated and functionally rich application (for Web, Excel, Reporting, Analysis, Write-back and predictive analytics on one unified platform).

Looking back, we achieved what we set out to do, but how do we continue on this path of judicious serendipity? In light of PerformancePoint and other Microsoft BI initiatives, we’re now even more excited about leveraging Microsoft technology and our ability to build software that could fill the 25% BPM applications gap.

– In Part 3 next week, I will discuss our BPM vision and product roadmap and explain in some detail the CALUMO Microsoft Partnership where we’re embracing elements of their BI platform whilst applying our subject matter expertise to provide a more sophisticated and complete offering..

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With the imminent release of Microsoft PerformancePoint, I have been asked several times how this will effect our vision for CALUMO and the impact it will have on the BI market generally.

The best way to answer this question is to provide a bit of our history and consider Microsoft’s gradual entry into the market [the market being OLAP, Business Intelligence, and Business Performance Management]. One cannot just consider Microsoft’s play based on PerformancePoint alone. One must view Microsoft’s entry based a long history of software releases starting with Excel Pivot Tables, then OLAP Services for MS SQL, Analysis Services 2000, Data Analyzer, Analysis Services 2005, and now PerformancePoint (built out of ProClarity).

We’ve been in the BI business since the early 90’s. It was around the time, Excel Pivot Tables were released by Microsoft. I remember the fear I felt when some analysts and prospects told us that our business could not survive Microsoft's entry into our space. The same thing happened when OLAP Services was released at the end of 1998 and again later when OLAP Services became Analysis Services 2000. Over the years I’ve watched in awe as Microsoft’s OLAP market share soared from nothing to nearly 30% in 2006. At the same time, our business also grew and has been very successful since those early years.

So why do we think both businesses and others in the space have continued to prosper and grow?  Well, as you can imagine we take understanding this pretty seriously.  The key things we believe are:

• Microsoft’s incredible reach and marketing machinery educated the market about OLAP and multi-dimensionality.
• Pivot tables and Analysis Services 2000 did not have enough features and performance to satisfy many of our customers which were mid-market to large corporates (for example, query performance in conjunction with write back was a problem in Analysis Services 2000 which is a major improvement in 2005).

So, rather than going out of business, we met more prospects who understood multi-dimensionality because of Microsoft, but who wanted more than Pivot Tables and Analysis Services 2000 could offer. Many of these organizations became our customers.

Whilst it was a huge relief to still be in business, we were not naïve enough to think that Pivot tables and Analysis Services 2000 would not one day mature into significantly more complete and competitive offerings.

Based on our research, we considered it significantly more likely that Analysis Services would mature as an OLAP engine before Pivot Tables was enhanced sufficiently to be considered a competitive BPM application.  So, how do you take the successful components of a strong BI business not built on Microsoft and align and prosper with the Microsoft platform -  once again, we spent many hours considering what our business needed to do to remain competitive and continue to delight our customers.

– In Part 2 next week, I will discuss our decision to embrace Analysis Services including our research findings at the time and the enormous opportunity we saw for BPM applications on Analysis Services 2005...

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Microsoft has published a 120 page Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide.

Major topics from the contents page include:

• Enhancing Query Performance
  • Understanding the querying architecture
  • Optimizing the dimension design
  • Maximizing the value of aggregations
  • Using partitions to enhance query performance
  • Writing efficient MDX
• Tuning Processing Performance
  • Understanding the processing architecture
  • Refreshing dimensions efficiently
  • Refreshing partitions efficiently
• Optimizing Special Design Scenarios
  • Special aggregate functions
  • Parent-child hierarchies
  • Complex dimension relationships
  • Near real-time data refreshes
• Tuning Server Resources
  • Understanding how Analysis Services uses memory
  • Optimizing memory usage
  • Understanding how Analysis Services uses CPU resources
  • Optimizing CPU usage
  • Understanding how Analysis Services uses disk resources
  • Optimizing disk usage

The guide is currently applicable to SQL Server Service Pack 2. We hope this is an indication that it will become a living document with further contributions and enhancements as SSAS 2005 evolves and further expert knowledge is acquired through research and practical experience.

Congratulations to the authors and subject matter experts who contributed to this document. As Mosha Pasumansky (one of the contributing subject matter experts) says on his blog "This guide is a big deal, and anybody serious about Analysis Services 2005 should download it and read from end to end."

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Good dashboard, graph and chart design is critical to getting the most out of your Business Intelligence software investment.

Good visual communication of data enhances insights and provides rapid communication of information to decision makers.

We have below an example of a poorly designed chart, followed by an analysis of the problems and our proposed alternative solution.

The chart below forms part of a dashboard which formed part of a BPM application presentation we attended.

Our analysis of the problems with this chart:

• The background visual effect is distracting and adds no value.
• With Pie Charts it can be difficult to visually compare the sizes of pie slices. In this case, the reflective water droplet at the centre of the pie is flashy, but makes it even harder to make this visual comparison.
• The legend uses a lot of display space and does not intuitively match back to the pie slices.

Our Proposed Solution:

 

Note, there is nothing fancy about our solution, but it is simple and communicates clearly and effectively.

• Our use of horizontal bars solves a few problems. Firstly, the legend becomes the Y axis text labels which are now directly associated with their respective bars (this would not have been as convenient with vertical bars, especially with long text labels.)
• Secondly, the values can be sequenced by size, from large to small or vice versa. Ranking adds significant visual value here.
• As a general rule, involve a graphic designer in the development of visual effects (eg a corporate template for reports and dashboards), but when in doubt, remove any background images and visual effects which are not adding any value.
• We did not use many different colours in our solution and as always, we took into consideration what our chart would look if it was photocopied or printed in black and white.

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Alignment of objectives is the most important factor responsible for breakthrough business performance.

Whilst this may sound obvious, it is often a simple idea that provides powerful results. Take a look at the image below. Somewhat abstract, it is a striking illustration of unaligned objectives. Much is said about charismatic business leadership and the need to increase revenues, innovate, or reduce costs, yet without strategic and cross departmental alignment, collaboration and accountability our illustration shows why it would be difficult to achieve anything.

Source: BRW Magazine advertising campaign.
"BRW: Know which way business is heading"

In our experience, the primary barriers to business alignment are culture and technology related.

Examples of cultural barriers include departmental information silos, a lack of cross-departmental knowledge sharing and resistance to change. A cultural shift is required for alignment to occur. To effect cultural change, the best chance of success requires a combination of C-level sponsorship and the involvement of key departments (Operations, HR, IT and Finance).

Technology barriers centre on the difficulties of integrating multiple systems, as well as the capability to deliver relevant and consistent information to each user across all departments. Adopting technology offering a unified platform for consolidation, reporting, analysis, budgeting and forecasting can significantly assist in the alignment of business objectives for breakthrough business performance.

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What is it about the Kalman filter that makes it attractive from a retailer’s point of view ?

As  mentioned in passing two weeks ago the original idea of the Kalman filter when applied to missiles and spacecraft was that as new information became available on the position, velocity and acceleration of the vehicle, the Kalman filter only needed to process the latest data. It was no longer necessary to have to reprocess all of the flight telemetry data recorded since launch to work out the position of the vehicle.

The application of this approach to retail point-of-sale data means that rather than having to process 52 weeks of sales data each week, only the most recent data needs to be processed. A single initial pass through 52 weeks of data is enough to calculate the filter’s coefficients. The filter can then be updated by addition of only the most recent week’s sales data. If you are having to estimate millions of SKU locations this is going to be pretty important. As new data becomes available, updating of the filter can occur at a greater speed than calculating a moving average model. All the more so with the advent of 64-bit servers.

This all well and good, but why go to all this extra trouble to calculate a stock model using a relatively complex method? The main driver of retail inventory levels is forecast accuracy. The stock you order today is the stock you have to live with tomorrow! From real-life retail experience, a Kalman filter estimate is often more accurate three weeks out than a moving average from only one week out. This translates to a 35% improvement in stock turns over a moving average model. If you get 3.5 turns from a moving average, you will get 4.7 turns from a Kalman filter.

There are probably better things to spend money on than unnecessary inventory.

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In our experience, it's always good to start a budgeting & forecasting project during a quiet part of the year. Get it in for a forecast month so that if the project end-date slips, go-live can be shifted a month with no major business disruption. It also gives you the benefit of a soft start on a non-critical forecast, where everyone gets used to the system and transitions smoothly into the budget when this rolls around.

On the other hand, implementing only at budget time can lead to long hours for the project team and, because the project end date (budget start) can’t change, final testing is sometimes only completed during the budget process.

A lot of companies start their Business Intelligence / Performance Management purchase cycle in the latter half of the year leading up to the budget cycle. The vendor selection process and contract signing often take longer than expected, leaving only a couple of months to spare before the system has to be scoped, implemented, tested, trained and rolled out. In other words, getting the system in and ready for budgeting immediately whatever stop-gaps this may include. The compromise is often the planned rolling forecast which takes the backburner for another day. A lot of momentum is lost as resources focus on the budget and other new projects demand attention. Unless the initiative is focused back on completing the rolling forecast capability, then, apart from reporting, the model sits in stasis until the next budget.

Whichever approach you take, we'll be happy to work with you to get the job done on time and on budget, but we also like to think that with a bit of foresight, we can help you remove some stress and accelerate your ROI.

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In business today graphs, charts and gauges often form an important part of measuring and presenting numbers. In our business, which revolves entirely around the presentation of business intelligence and performance management numbers, we see poorly designed graphs and charts on a daily basis.

In order to illustrate (and hopefully prevent) some common design mistakes, we will provide some examples of poorly designed charts, followed by an analysis of the problems and our proposed alternative solution.

The chart below forms part of a presentation we attended, described as “a fantastic presentation of graphics for more visual appeal.”

Our analysis of the problems with this chart:

• The background image is distracting and adds no value
• The gridlines are hardly visible, but do not make it any easier to understand the chart
• The legend uses a lot of space and could be more intuitive to match back to the chart bars
• The bars are unnecessarily thin which makes them harder to see
• The chart has no title
• The Y axis title/units (US$) has been written vertically making it subtly difficult to read.

Our Proposed Solution:

• As a general rule, anything that does not contribute to the meaning of a graph is an unnecessary distraction. Therefore remove the background image and grid lines which are adding no value.
• We considered removing the X and Y axis lines, but decided in the end only to de-emphasize them by changing them from black to light grey.
• We recommend the use of soft, or neutral colours and colours of different saturation. Save bright colours for emphasis only where required. In our solution we could have used colour but used shades of black and grey to highlight that we thought about how our chart would look if it was photocopied or printed in black and white. Imagine how the original solution would look if it had to be faxed.
• The legend has been moved above the chart and ordered in the same sequence as the bars, to ease the process of matching the legend up with the bars.
  Moving the legend provides more space for the chart and allows the bars to be thicker for better visual effect.
• Change the orientation of the Y axis title/units to be horizontal.
• Add a title to the chart

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CALUMO is a three syllable word pronounced Cal (as in the first syllable of calculate) + Lieu (as in “in lieu of” meaning “in place off “) + Mow (as in mow the lawn).

CALUMO is derived from celeusma, a Greek word (but used also in Latin: ke>leuma) meaning the song, chant or command given by the chief oarsmen that gives power and rhythm to the rowers.

In the same vane, CALUMO empowers people facilitating collaboration within an enterprise for unified business performance management.

Some people have told us the name also sounds like calculate from “Cal”; numbers from “umo” derived from numero; and illuminate from “lumo”.

All this is true and reflects a sense of what CALUMO is about, but most importantly we think that people using CALUMO are Business Intelligent.

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We read with great interest recently that Financial Consolidation Applications have reached the Plateau of Productivity on Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Business Intelligence & Corporate Performance Management.

The Gartner Hype Cycle (see fig below) tries to make sense of different emerging technologies starting on the left hand side of the graph and typically travelling from left to right. Following their introduction, technologies can be subject to unrealistic hype bringing them to the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” only to fall into the “Trough of Disillusionment” once reality sets in, before emerging at the right hand side where they finally begin to deliver some of the benefits that were originally promised at the “Plateau of Productivity” (in many cases new technologies never progress far, due to failure along the way).

At CALUMO we provide a rich ecosystem of best-practice solutions based on our core product capabilities. Let’s look at the type of functionality commonly expected in Financial Consolidation Applications as they stand at the Plateau of Productivity.

• Data collection
  • Online over the internet (real-time for collaboration)
  • Mapping (for sites with different ledgers)
  • Validation (stop/proceed based on check-total, variance etc)
  • Online review and approval process at each tier (Workflow)
  • Escalations if late (alerting)
• Journal entries
  • Recurring and manual
  • Automated currency translation gains/losses
  • Automated P&L, Cash Flow, Balance Sheet & notes
  • Intercompany processing
  • Automated balancing
  • Audit trail
• Intercompany eliminations
  • Define intercompany accounts
  • Automated eliminations
  • In balance / out-of-balance reporting
• Foreign currency translation
  • Multiple rate types
  • Define which rate type by account (supports temporal method)
• Consolidation (obviously)
  • Consolidate actuals and budgets
  • Consolidate statistical measures such as headcounts
  • Accommodate different fiscal periods & calendars
  • Wholly owned or minority interest
  • Multi-tier consolidation or hierarchies
  • Revaluations
  • Automated Intercompany eliminations to first common parent
  • Flexible Chart of Accounts
• Financial reporting
  • Results in home or reporting currency
  • Multiple hierarchical reporting
  • Lead schedules for supporting notes
  • Rounding to thousands
  • Allocation of rounding error to specified account

At Calumo we offer a unified architecture for all our modules ranging from Financial Consolidation to BI, Planning and Operational performance management applications. All these are available through a familiar interface (Excel or Internet Explorer) offering the lowest total cost of ownership amongst BPM vendors today.

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Last week we considered how techniques first used in NASA helped retailers plan their inventory. This week we are going to get behind the man and his thinking in a bit more detail.

Rudolf E. Kalman, a graduate research professor emeritus at the University of Florida and ad personam chair at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich is considered the most influential researcher in the field of control and systems theory.
 
During the 1960s, he was the leader in the development of a rigorous theory of control systems. Among his many outstanding contributions were the formulation and study of most fundamental state-space notions (including controllability, observability, minimality, realisability from input/output data, matrix Riccati equations, linear-quadratic control, and the separation principle) that are today ubiquitous in control.

He is best known for the linear filtering technique that he developed in the years 1959-1961 to strip unwanted noise out of a stream of data. The Kalman filter is widely used in navigational and guidance systems, radar tracking, sonar ranging, and satellite orbit determination (as we saw last week at NASA for the Apollo and other missions, for instance), as well as in fields as diverse as seismic data processing, nuclear power plant instrumentation, and econometrics.

The Kalman filter, which is based on the use of state-space techniques and recursive algorithms, revolutionized the field of estimation and forecasting and while some of these concepts were also encountered in other contexts, such as optimal control theory, it was Kalman who recognized the central role that they play in systems analysis.

During the 1970s Kalman also played a major role in the introduction of algebraic and geometric techniques in the study of linear and nonlinear control systems. His work since the 1980s has focused on a system-theoretic approach to the foundations of statistics, econometric modeling, and identification as a natural complement to his earlier studies of minimality and realisability."

In simple terms Kalman filtering addresses an age-old question: How do you get accurate information out of inaccurate data? More pressingly, How do you update a "best" estimate for the state of a system as new, but still inaccurate, data pour in? The Kalman filter applies a sophisticated algorithm designed to strip unwanted noise out of a stream of data. Strangely this “noise” could be as diverse as unusual inventory movements.

As we saw it should come as no surprise that recently the Kalman filter has proven to have a major contribution to planning some lines of inventory allowing retailers to optimize their stocking levels and subsequently significantly reduce inventory.

Not only is the filter able to remove the noise caused for example by a mother buying 12 pink shorts for her daughter’s netball team but is able to manage in an environment of large amounts of data.

The pink short purchase is an aberration or noise and tends to disturb the normal pattern of sales. This purchase would lead to stock model inaccuracies from the typically unsophisticated planning methods currently deployed such as Moving Average.

Kalman filtering also has a way to link the sales over time such that it effectively uses each new observation to update a probability distribution with no need ever to refer back to any earlier observations.

This has the interesting implication to planning in retail where there are typically large data sets. Once the Kalman filter has been tuned with some initial data it does no more work for the millionth estimate than it does for the first. The net result is an algorithm tailored to applications, where data keeps coming in and decisions have to be made quickly.
 
It is easy to see why Retail Planning with Kalman filtering is at forefront of modern inventory management but there are even more techniques emerging that augment this filter to more precisely allow for patterns such as seasonality. The latest filters apply routines that some clever Chinese guys applied to robotic vision, but more of this next week.

I say, till next week, bring on the Summer and bring on the shorts!

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Recently we had a holiday on the NSW Central Coast and needing a few bits and pieces I ventured in to the local department store.

Being a bloke, I seldom shop and then only when I really need something. So OK, that means I haven’t been to my share of shops but this place was pretty amazing! It was absolutely full of stuff! You could barely get down the aisles but, along with the curios, there were some really handy things. Finding them was hit and miss and it certainly was for me a case of “better to arrive than journey hopefully”.

Recent styles were “cheek by jowl” with Dickensian artefacts… clothes, crockery, string, stationary most anything you might need. A bit of a “one stop shop” and the price was right! It reminded me a bit of when I used to go shopping with my Mum 35 years ago at the discount food store with everything everywhere. Talk about retail aversion therapy!

Being an engineer by background and more analytical than is good for me, I left the shop wondering if the store could survive as the overriding impression was that it had far too much stock. Simply and nostalgia aside, there seemed to be far too much money locked up in “them there” shelves. Surely there was a better way!

Retailers are faced with the difficult problem of trying to match the stock they hold against customer demand in an environment of continual change, often driven by seasonal demand and fashion. The trick is to carry just enough stock so that each customer can find what they want when they want it so you don’t lose a selling opportunity but not so much stock that it sits on the shelf until it is disposed of in next years sale.

One of the big issues is the “forest for the trees” problem. The buying habits of customers are diverse as they come in all shapes and sizes with different style and colour preferences. This means that there are an enormous number of combinations all being continually influenced by season and fashion. Retailers servicing multiple stores have this problem only magnified. With this amount of data it is easy to see how inventory managers have great difficulty seeing the “forest for the trees”.

Faced with an economic and competitive landscape demanding tighter margins for survival it is imperative that only sufficient stock is held to satisfy customer demand. Retailers can no longer afford to make their decisions at the class or category level. Just because there is a run on jeans in one locale it doesn’t mean that the size 12, female stonewashed is moving in all stores or at all.

In the world of retail, of stores and SKUs, there is a well known maxim “Retail is Detail” and we all know that the “devil is in the detail”.

Size 12, female stonewashed jeans may not have been sold last week but if buyers are planning at the total jeans level this will not be visible leading to wrong buying decisions and sub optimal stocking levels.

Thankfully the ever increasing power of computers and the application of NASA inspired techniques with fast and easy methods for seeing the data are making the buyer’s job easier and more accurate.

The power of the latest computers is making it possible to plan at the SKU store intersection and spot trends at the lowest level but this is still overwhelming from a inventory buying perspective.

To overcome this automated buying techniques are deployed based on optimal stock models. Algorithms that review the sales trends determine what the optimal stocking levels are for each SKU in each store and an inventory order is raised on this basis.

All automation algorithms are not equal and some are clearly better than others in predicting future sales. At its simplest level the buying decision may be to replace the inventory from sales from the previous week. The difficulty with this approach is that it does not take into account the amount of stock on the shelf in the store, the changes in seasons, population demographics and fashions or unusual purchases.

An unusual purchase may be a local mum buying a dozen pink shorts for her daughter’s Netball team when only 2 usually sell each week. Ideally the store would only hold 2 or 3 items (enough to allow for restocking lead times).

But how is it possible to forecast the correct stock levels when seasonal, fashion and unusual events are occurring?

Over the years different techniques have been used such as Moving Average and Replacement but none of these do a good job in sorting out the “noise” from the “one off” exceptional sales like the pink shorts for the team or the cyclic run on pencils and pads prior to the return to school.

This is where a NASA mathematician comes to an unexpected rescue. Rudolf Kalman observed that he could apply his linear filtering technique that strips unwanted noise out of a streams of data to the problem of trajectory estimation leading to its incorporation in the Apollo navigation computer.

The Kalman filter as it is now known is widely used in navigational and guidance systems, radar tracking and satellite orbit determination as well as in econometrics. It has now been shown to be very effective at eliminating retail “noise” even a run on pink shorts or stonewashed jeans enabling retailers to create better forecasts, hone their stock models and radically drive down inventory levels.

Through the correct application of these filters reductions in inventory of between 10% & 20% and improvements in stock turns of 10% are not uncommon. Shelf space and dollars freed from over stocking can be refocussed towards more profitable and faster moving items.

This leads to potential savings from stock reductions and increases in revenue from related improvements in stock turn amounting to millions of dollars in even medium sized retailers.

So if next time you visit a store and everything is “just so” and you begin to yearn for the old cramped, nostalgic quaint experience that has “Gone with Gowings” remember NASA chose the stonewashed.

Business Intelligence and Performance Management Home

Recently we had a holiday on the NSW Central Coast and needing a few bits and pieces I ventured in to the local department store.

The store was absolutely full of stuff! It reminded me a bit of when I used to go shopping with my Mum 35 years ago at the discount food store with everything everywhere. Talk about retail aversion therapy!

Being in finance with an engineering background I tend to subject ideas to more analysis than a psychiatrist’s couch so I left the shop wondering if it could survive. The overriding impression was that it had far too much stock. Simply, there seemed to be far too much money locked up in “them there” shelves.

Surely there was a better way! I had an inkling that maybe it was the sort of question that requires some serious science. Maybe NASA knows.
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Some terms go out of fashion as the technology becomes mainstream (eg OLAP), only to be replaced by new terms that better describe new capability expected and hopefully being delivered. One such term is BPM (Business Performance Management) which I believe has recently been superseded by Performance Management 2.0. Gartner's definition of these terms will be subtly different from IDC's and finance sees things differently from IT. There is much room for overlap and ambiguity.
 
For many years we used the words "Planning, Analysis, Reporting" as our company tag line to best describe what we did. Today we use "Business Intelligent" as our tag line, which is more esoteric and we hope more thought provoking as well. Here is what we think about and what best describes what we do now:

Performance Management Applications
          o Business Intelligence
                + Reporting
                + Analysis
          o Planning
                + Budgeting
                + Forecasting
                + Modelling
          o Dashboards
                + Scorecards
                + Metrics
          o Financial Consolidation
          o Monitoring
                + Workflow
                + Notification
    * Vertical Applications
          o Retail, Telco, Banking, Construction
          o Consumer Goods,  Freight and Transport
          o Government, Healthcare,  Manufacturing and Industrial
          o Professional Services,  Resources  Utilities.
    * Horizontal Applications
          o Executive Management
          o Finance
          o IT
          o Sales
          o Marketing
          o Human Resources
          o Production & Logistics
    * OLAP
    * ETL

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Gaining and Retaining the customers you want

The telecommunication industry is currently undergoing major change with a business model that is moving away from voice connectivity to virtually every aspect of communications you can imagine. Customer intelligence is required to enable the business to focus on gaining and retaining the customers they really want.

With the ease with which customers, looking for the best possible deal, are able move from one operator to the next, high customer churn rates are an ongoing problem. Telco’s must continually find new and effective ways to market products and services to new and existing customers in order to increase revenue, recover acquisition costs, and improve customer loyalty and retention. One of the best ways to do this is to maximize customer value through effective cross-selling and up-selling.

Many Telco’s still struggle to do this, yet the customer data that would help identify good candidates for cross-sell and up-sell campaigns is often available somewhere in the enterprise, but not readily available for methodical and systematic analysis.

Without a complete and clear analysis of customer preferences and behavior, effective customer profiling is impossible. Knowing the answers to questions such as "which customers subscribe to multiple services"? or "Which customers always upgrade to the newest equipment?" lets you profile and discover the attributes of similar customers who could be good candidates for cross-selling and up-selling campaigns.

Cross-Sell and Up-Sell is only a part of a unified Telco business intelligence solution. Other components include:

• Customer retention
• Customer segmentation
• Customer profitability
• Market basket analysis
• Customer loyalty program analysis
• Channel effectiveness analysis
• Call behavior analysis

Unified Telco business intelligence and analytics is only part of the solution. The next challenge is to architect these Telco specific components with scalable business intelligence and performance management technology, compromising data integrated from every source within the organization

Any Telco able to do this can gain real value from their data and efforts - Gaining and Retaining the customers they want.

 

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Quantifying business benefit of Business Performance Management is not trivial. As far back as ’92, Debone & Mclean established a framework for measuring Information System benefit. Their framework saw System Quality (performance, flexibility, ease of use, reliability, response time etc) and Information Quality (timeliness, relevance, usefulness etc) as determinants for System Use and User Satisfaction (see fig below).

How do these drive business benefit?

Well, satisfied users easily finding the quality information they want in a BPM system can make great Individual Impact. Large groups of individuals working together create Organisational Impact.

Let’s take a common BPM application - a retail planning and forecasting system.

In this case it’s been implemented well to user needs with high-uptime that provides flexible what-if analysis from store planning to integrated corporate reports, delivered through an easy-to-use web portal with real-time updates. The system provides timely information from production systems and the flexibility allows the end user to slice and dice from perspectives relevant to them. Bill, a store manager, uses this system on a daily basis for reporting and analysis, while Sue, a regional manager, forecasts the profit impact by substituting one brand with a cheaper version sourced  through the company’s own  supply chain.

Useful stuff, but how do we measure the organisation impact of this BPM system?

One approach, adapted from academic work on ERP system benefit, is to use a Balance Scorecard. Originally developed by Kaplan & Norton, Balance Scorecards are used to measure organisational effectiveness from the activities the organisation engages in - rather than simple financial metrics. The Scorecard framework is useful as it allows us to take a quixotic ideal like organisational benefit and break this into impacts across financial, customer, internal and learning perspectives. By reviewing the impact across various organisational areas and processes, you start to see some cause and effect on the bottom line.

In our retail planning example - from an internal business perspective - the faster (and more automated) information flows between Bill and Sue, the greater the collaboration and the more informed decision making can be. Transparent planning using numerically-based scenario analysis (rather than aerial extraction) with all historical forecasts instantly available improves learning as sales forecasts can be more accurately tracked. Ultimately, the customer receives benefit from lower priced goods – made possible through the accurate and useful information generated in what-if analysis by Sue.  

Hard numbers from soft concepts:

The nice thing about Balance Scorecard is that from when it is first implemented and ultimately used well by the organisation, the system itself creates a ready before and after Polaroid (measurement of success). Of course you should have a fair idea of the type of benefits you expect before you start implementing even if you don’t have a comprehensive measurement tool in place to benchmark against.

A well implemented BPM system will have a range of predicted benefits, but also holds great potential for unforeseen benefits as enhanced collaboration, flexibility and other soft benefits are explored by bright and motivated individuals throughout the organisation.

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Automatic Meter Reading, or AMR, is the technology for automatically collecting data from energy metering devices (gas or electric) and transferring that data to a central database for billing and/or analyzing. This means that billing can be based on actual consumption rather than on an estimate based on previous consumption. It also eliminates the need for each meter to be visually read by a technician, thereby cutting personnel costs.

Advanced Metering Infrastructure, or AMI, is technology to capture additional data. This can include detection of technical events such as leaks, or reverse flow (reducing the chance of power emergencies and blackouts), but AMI is also used to collect time of use data that can be used for energy use profiling, time of use billing, demand forecasting, rate of flow recording, flow monitoring, etc.

EnergyAustralia call this PowerSmart which they (and others) are progressively implementing throughout their electricity networks. With traditional "flat" pricing, the price you pay for electricity is the same, no matter what time of day or night you use it (with the exception of customers who have special off peak meters and rates, usually for hot water). With PowerSmart, your electricity rates are broken down into three different time periods - Peak, Shoulder and Off Peak. This means you pay for how much electricity you use, based on when you use it. A higher rate is charged during the Peak period, than the Shoulder and Off Peak periods. So your rate is less when the demand for electricity is lower, and more when it is higher. This means you have greater control over your electricity bill. AMI makes it easier for you to keep track of your energy usage which can help you reduce your energy costs and you are provided with an incentive to reduce your energy usage.

Apart from the consumer benefits, AMR and AMI technology is also a completely new source of data for energy retailers to analyse. They could gain unprecedented insight into demand and usage patterns, which could in turn provide enormous business benefits.

For example, the wholesale electricity market is typically characterised by relatively tight supply with huge discrepancies between pre-purchased and real-time prices and the absence of a predictable short-term (e.g., hour-ahead or day-ahead) forward market. With the benefit of AMR and AMI analytics, markets will mature and get more competitive, the level of discrepancy between pre-purchased and real-time prices will narrow and become more sophisticated.

Large wholesale customers, who are also retail suppliers therefore have the best opportunity to exploit and respond to short-term demand. With their new found AMR and AMI analytics, their ability to respond within one hour, or even five minutes with favourable prices highlights the significant opportunity for large, sophisticated customers that will support wholesale market timing and pricing.

These benefits however are only available to those who can overcome the enormous data management and analytics challenges.

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For Retailers, the ever increasing diversity and fragmentation of consumer demographics requires that they analyse customer data at a very detailed, granular-level. They need rigorous timely processes to respond to demand signals and segment customers in a way that's superior to their competition.

By properly aggregating and analyzing retail transactions, that would otherwise offer little insight into the business, data can be transformed into actionable information that can increase sales and profitability, provide competitive advantage and deepen customer and vendor loyalty.

The availability of sophisticated (transactional) data poses the challenge to find a way to effectively harness and leverage massive volumes of data. SQL Server 2005 provides a platform for enterprise-class performance and scalability for analytical number crunching of this nature. Even for writeback, Microsoft claim enhancements to data writeback include a ten-fold performance improvement. With the advent of X64 Servers, these solutions are now even more affordable.

To find out more, about our retail capability, please visit our retail solutions page.

Business Intelligence and Performance Management home.

We are often asked to explain what  BPM is and why it is so important compared to a non-integrated, non-unified approach to business intelligence, reporting, analytics, planning etc.

 

It struck me on seeing the image of the flock of birds below, that one way to answer this was to use pictures. As they say, a picture paints a thousand words.

 

The point of all the images that we’ve chosen is that patterns and meanings can be found and relationships and collaborations possible within the whole.

 

Nature, fractals, tessellations and origami are all fine illustrations of order out of apparent chaos. And so to with BPM, an organisation can gain greater insights through the observation of structures, relationships and patterns of the whole enterprise.

 

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Fig 1: During spring in Denmark , flocks of more than a million European starlings gather in incredible formations such as shown above.

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Fig 2: Origami tessellations take a simple crease pattern unit and repeat this across the paper. Example above by Alex Bateman (can you visualize the spiral pattern?).

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Fig 3: Horocycle 4 - Knots and dynamics - A collaboration between Jos Leys and Prof. Etienne Ghys (hmm, reminds me of fishing with my dad).

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Business Intelligence and Performance Management home.

1. It must effect a measurable change in performance.
2. It needs to be applicable to a broad spectrum of organizations.
3. It should be proven in practice.
4. It needs to exploit proven technologies.
5. It must ensure an acceptable level of control and risk management.
6. It has to match the skills and capabilities of the companies in which it is used.

Business Intelligence and Performance Management home.

1. Are you wrestling with poor information quality when making decisions?
2. Do your finance and business users spend a lot of time developing special reports?
3. Are you plagued with "multiple versions of the truth"?
4. Are your decision makers buried in too much information, unable to derive useful insights?
5. Is your Planning and budgeting information not realistic or is it outdated and has lost relevance relevance?

1. Better operating decisions faster.
2. Improved annual planning decisions.
3. Confidence in business process controls and reporting.
4. Improved decisions on strategic direction
5. Savings by reducing time users spend reworking information.
6. Reduce cost of complying with regulation and mitigate enterprise risk.

Business Intelligence and Performance Management home.