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Business Intelligence / Data Warehousing
Today's competitive business landscape necessitates
companies to seek better ways to manage and monitor
their data and information assets to derive Business
Intelligence (BI). However, quite often the seamless
flow of information is inhibited by silos of information
present in heterogeneous formats and lack of elegant
reporting solutions. The decision makers have
been unable to use this data effectively because
of its sheer volume. It's important to unlock
the hidden knowledge behind the data lying in
segregated systems to get a true picture of organization's
health.
Business Intelligence is the enabling technology
that provides organization an end-to-end solution
for managing, organizing and exploiting data throughout
the enterprise. These enabling technologies provide
tools to bring all the pieces of your business
together in a single organized data repository
that is driven by common set of business definitions.
Sonata's BI Practice:
Sonata's BI practice is 11 years old & the
team has to its credit numerous successful Data-warehousing
/ Business Intelligence projects in India as well
as overseas. The 150+ BI team consists of a mix
of dynamic technical and functional professionals
providing technical and business insights required
for providing a comprehensive BI solution. Their
vast experience in executing BI solutions equips
them with the knowledge, skills and confidence
to provide the right solution. Over the years,
the team has gained an experience of over 500+
person years of experience and executed projects
using various tools and technologies including:
» Oracle Sales Analyzer
» Oracle Financial Analyzer
» Oracle Express Server
» Business Objects
» Cognos
» MS SQL 2005
» MS Performance Point Server (including
Office Business Scorecard Manager & Proclarity)
» Microstrategy
» Geac/Comshare
» Ascential Datastage
» Informatica etc etc
BI related services offered by Sonata include:
- Business Intelligence Consulting Services:
Business requirement definition, Data acquisition,
Information gap analysis, Data Warehouse Architecture,
Data Quality, Data Warehouse management, Metadata
management, and Data access.
- Development Services: Development of Extraction
& Cleansing tools, Conversion tools, Developing
custom OLAP applications
- Implementation services: Business intelligence
tools integration & configuration, Data
Warehouse design & build, populating the
Data Warehouse.
BI Optimization Consulting Services
The dynamic business landscape, high levels of
competition and ever demanding customers have
forced organizations to look at ways of ensuring
availability of actionable information on the
business decision makers desktop. The woes of
CIOs and IT managers are compounded with companies
resorting to inorganic growth and thereby inheriting
widely disparate systems. While some organizations
are still exploring an optimized way to consolidate
data and earn some intelligence out of it, many
are static at a "rear view" stage relying
on historical approach. This leaves different
organizations at different stages of their BI
maturity lifecycle of managing, controlling aligning
and transforming enterprise data to intelligence.
The BI consulting practice at Sonata started in
1996 has been involved in guiding enterprises
progress through various stages of BI maturity.
Rather than looking at short term 'quick-fix'
solutions, Sonata helps organizations align their
business intelligence roadmap to organizational
goals. Constraints of cost, time and resources
are kept in perspective while arriving at this
roadmap.
A typical enterprise BI and data warehousing infrastructure
environment may include data marts, operational
data repositories, enterprise data (reported out
from ERPs, financial systems, CRM etc). This is
assessed across multiple dimensions including
data, information, intelligence, technology and
time. The interests of the stake holders that
include executive management, business users,
IT department are taken into consideration at
this juncture.
The gaps between the desired state and current
state are identified clearly and a phased approach
is suggested to gulf the chasm. A road map aimed
at enhancing the BI maturity of the organization
is developed. Impacts of various related technologies
like SOA on the architecture are evaluated to
suggest the best-fit solution that fits the constraints
of resources. The BI optimization consulting services
engages the customer through a workshop and Proof
of Concept (PoC) based approach there by reducing
the risks and bringing more predictability into
the entire process.
Methodlogy
Sonata's BI methodology goes through an iterative
and a phased approach where functional prototypes
are built to demonstrate the requirement specifications
and fine-tuned for the application construction
Business Requirement Study [BRS]: Define and
clarify the scope, analyze information Gap, identify
source data.
Strategy Phase [SP]: Technical Architecture design,
Identify Warehouse and metadata management processes,
Define implementation road map, identification-selection
-and / design end user access tools.
Implementation & Integration [I&I]: Extraction,
Transformation and cleansing source data, developing
Custom OLAP applications, up-loading data, testing.
Maintenance Phase [MP]: Data consistency, Metadata
SonnetBI :
SonnetBI - Sonata's suite of Business Function
Analyzers - provides centralized data management,
specialized analysis, seamless data integration
and multi-level sophisticated visualization. This
framework acts as implementation accelerators
& empowers decision makers with complete,
accurate views of business processes and resources.
Sonata's methodology based highly scalable approach
to deployment provides error-free implementations
and faster time to value. SonnetBI has preconfigured
KPI's for analysis having over 180 KPI's covering
the functions for Sales, Marketing, Purchase,
Inventory, Finance, Production & Supply chain.
These KPI's are arranged in a persona specific
role format within SonnetBI
SonnetBI is a solution framework based on the
suite of Sonata Functional Business Analyzers.
The approach used in SonnetBI enables companies
to analyze and monitor business processes across
geographic locations and business units. SonnetBI
supports this enterprise-wide analysis by extracting
data from several sources, loading it into a centralized
operational database, and using the data to populate
customizable dashboards.
In SonnetBI, SQL Server 2005 provides centralized
data storage capabilities that enable companies
to consolidate functional and financial data.
The solution also provides sophisticated reporting
and analytical services that support forecasting
and analytical tasks. Microsoft Office Business
Scorecard Manager 2005 provides a reliable and
pragmatic approach through persona-based scorecards
and dashboards that provide information access
to all employees, and show how projects align
with KPIs and objectives. SharePoint Portal Server
2007 provides the collaboration platform that
supports executive dashboards and enables easy
data monitoring and sharing across the enterprise.
The framework comprises of a data warehouse built
on SQL Server 2005 with a Unified Dimensional
Model (UDM). The UDM contains industry / function
specific KPI's. The business Scorecard Manager
uses these KPI's to render the persona wise Scorecards
/ Dashboards. The supporting reports / Drill Downs
utilize a combination of SQL Server Reporting
Services (SSRS) and office web components. Sonata
has developed preconfigured KPI framework using
powerful Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager
in the form of BSW templates that organizes all
and different types of data behind the scenes
and provide a user-friendly web-based interface
in users desktop through powerful dashboards.
The predefined BSW templates help reduce implementation
time and cost through defined set of KPI's and
dashboards evolved over years of varied industry
experience. Besides, the framework offers Rich
functionality and flexible data model and targets
reports for all functionalities and multiple personas
at all levels.
.
Microsoft BI Centre of Excellence
Sonata's established Microsoft BI Center of Excellence
has been leveraging on the Microsoft platform,
including SQL Server 2005, Office Performance
Point Server2007, Office2007, SharePoint Server2007
and a highly skilled team of technical and functional
consultants to provide solutions that collate
multi-source data and build customized, user-centric,
decision-enabling solutions. Highlights of our
competency center include:
- Expertise across the entire Microsoft BI
stack - including SQL Server 2005, Office Performance-Point
Server 2007, Office 2007, Microsoft Office Share
Point Server 2007, Microsoft BSM & ProClarity
through various early adopter programs
- Value-added solutions that leverage the
enhanced capabilities of Microsoft BI stack including
analytics & reporting, dashboards and scorecards
- More than 150 skilled technical and functional
consultants
SonnetBI for CRM
Sonata's Role based layered Sales, Service and
Marketing analyzers offer "out-of-the-box"
KPIs leveraging the Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation,
Office 2007, MOSS2007 and Microsoft Office Performance
Point Server 2007 to enable business users to
make informed choices and hence drive customer-focused
business. Sonata's data mining models, built using
the Universal Data model, extract information
from Dynamics CRM and perform analyses to provide
insights into leads, opportunities, customers
and service requests across multiple dimensions
of geographies, customers, timelines etc. Dashboards
powered by Microsoft Performance Point Server
2007 helps organizations perform tiered, drilled
down analysis through various levels of KPIs,
allowing executives to go beyond a broad overview
of organizational health. In fact it helps them
to zero in on specific issues and their potential
root causes. This enables swifter decision-making
and greater information visibility across the
corporate hierarchy.
Analytics based on predictive data mining helps
business users prioritize the leads, opportunities
etc.
SonnetBI for AX
This suite of business analyzers, pre-configured
to Microsoft Dynamics™ AX , transforms data
into intelligence to help Line of Business/Operational
managers to gain contextual insights into their
respective business performances. SonnetBI for
AX delivers more than 150 Key Performance Indicators
(KPIs).
Some of the indicators include Sales Variance,
Competitive discounts, Budgeted Sales quantity/value,
Inventory handling costs/budget, inventory carrying
cost/budget, Promotion discount costs, targeted/actual
sales per person.
SonnetBI for AX is a perfect fit for customers
who are looking at deriving extra mileage out
of their Microsoft Dynamics™ AX implementations.
SonnetBSM for AX
These Business Performance Management Scorecards
for Microsoft Dynamics™ AX are built on Microsoft
Office Business Scorecard Manager. Designed to
provide intuitive persona-specific interfaces
to senior executives and Line of Business managers,
SonnetBSM allows organizations to perform tiered,
drill down analysis. It helps executives zero
down from a broad overview of organizational health
to specific issues and their root causes through
various levels of KPIs
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