PDF File: 

crm7_2_82_sp_businessobjects.pdf

Business Objects

For many organizations, 2007 is the yearto address core issues and take their CRMdeployments to the next level.

For many organizations, 2007 is the year to address core issues and take their CRM deployments to the next level. Poor data quality, and the lack of an enterprise information management (EIM) strategy that ensures trustworthy data, continues to plague many CRM deployments. The need for integrated reporting and business intelligence (BI) for flexible analysis and delivery of insights is becoming evident. And the benefits of dashboarding and scorecarding, as powerful tools to support enterprise performance management (EPM) and optimize CRM strategy and execution, are starting to become clear.

More and more, companies around the globe are realizing the exponential opportunities that could be uncovered by integrating enterprise information management, BI, analytics and enterprise performance management with their CRM installations.

Business Objects, the world’s leading business intelligence software company, is the only company that delivers the full suite of core BI, enterprise performance management, and EIM and data quality solutions. We enable customers around the globe to fully maximize their CRM deployments, create a trusted foundation for decision making, gain better insight into their business and optimize performance.

A Trusted Foundation for Decision Making

Business Objects enterprise information management products and services quickly and flexibly integrate and improve your information to provide the most trusted foundation for your business decisions. Our EIM solution includes the data integration, data quality and metadata and life cycle management products you need to trust your intelligence.

• Data Integration: enterprise-class data integration for batch-oriented extraction, transformation and loading (ETL). Business Objects also provides data federation capabilities for on-demand information access that combines data across data marts, data warehouses, operational data stores and transactional systems.
• Data Quality: market-leading data quality solutions that allow you to profile, cleanse and continuously monitor your data. Business Objects’ data quality solutions allow organizations to ensure their business data is correct, consistent and complete.
• Metadata and Life Cycle Management: metadata management tools consolidate, integrate and audit metadata from disparate tools and data sources. Business Objects also provides a graphical tool to accelerate ETL design and implementation.

Gain Better Insight Into Your Business

People at all levels of your organization are responsible for making decisions that can impact overall business success. They need to access, analyze and share business information with suppliers, partners and customers. With Business Objects, you can track, manage and understand your company’s information on a single BI platform.

• Enterprise Reporting: Allows you to access data, format it and deliver it as information inside and outside the organization.
• Query and Analysis: Give anyone the ability to interact with business information – without having to understand complex database languages and structures.

Our innovative business intelligence suite, BusinessObjects™ XI, offers the BI industry’s most advanced and complete solution for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. BusinessObjects XI includes the award-winning Crystal line of reporting and data visualization software.

Optimize Your Business Performance

Enterprise performance management is a strategic approach to improving performance. The ability to answer questions such as “How is my unit doing today? Which campaigns are showing success? Which ones are not, and how can we get them back on track? How can I optimize sales activity?” is critical to accurately monitoring and delivering high performance. EPM delivers the answers to these questions and more.

When you adopt performance management, you’ll be able to:

• Plan for success and align people around common goals;
• Measure current performance of teams and individuals against plans and targets; and
• Adapt to changing business conditions with trusted information.

Business Objects’ EPM solutions include industryleading Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting, Consolidations, Dashboard and Scorecard solutions that allow you to monitor critical business metrics, be alerted about issues, manage goals and track performance across the organization.

Solutions in Action: British Airways Improves CRM With Business Objects

In the fiercely competitive airline industry, leading U.K. airline British Airways is underpinning its strategic operations with Business Objects. The airline wanted to support excellent customer relationships with both business and leisure travelers and maximize revenue on each route globally.

Using Business Objects BI, British Airways has been able to deliver strategic information across the business, worldwide. BusinessObjects is used throughout the airline, with dozens of applications taking information from a central data warehouse. These cover all aspects of the business from CRM applications supporting the frequent flyer program, through yield management and revenue management, catering supply chain management, flight punctuality and baggage handling.

“BusinessObjects supports our long-term planning, analyzing the number of flights per day, routes and aircraft types that are most appropriate. This drives our negotiation for capacity-constrained routes,” asserted the lead British Airways Knowledge Strategy Manager. “BusinessObjects enables us to better understand booking and customer profiles, and use that information to maximize yield on each flight by creating the right promotional offer to each customer group.”

Now British Airways has improved customer relationship management and promotional offers both to frequent flyer and occasional passengers. They have been able to improve baggage handling and are now one of the leading European airlines in punctuality.

The Proven Leader in Business Intelligence

Business Objects is the acknowledged standard in business intelligence. Gartner Inc.’s Q1 2007 Business Intelligence Platform Magic Quadrant places Business Objects in the Leaders Quadrant. According to Gartner, “leaders” are vendors who are performing well today, have a clear vision of market direction and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market. Gartner also names Business Objects as the worldwide market share leader, IDC ranks Business Objects as the clear BI tools market share leader and Forrester cites Business Objects as a leader in BI reporting and analysis platforms.

Our customers represent a broad cross section of different industries, ranging from small to very large organizations, but they all have one point in common. They are all applying business intelligence to become information-centric organizations, transforming the way they operate and compete on a daily basis and improve their organization’s performance.

Customers include some of the best-known, best-managed companies in the world, including Abbott Laboratories, AETNA, American Red Cross, Ben & Jerry’s, Boeing, BP, Capitalia, Cingular Wireless (AT&T), Dresdner Bank, FedEx, Fox Filmed Entertainment, Home Shopping Network, MasterCard International, PepsiCo, Prudential Insurance Co., Shell International, Tesco, Wal-Mart, and top universities, healthcare organizations, government agencies and ministries around the globe.

Business Objects has helped more than 42,000 customers worldwide, including over 80 percent of the Fortune 500, to improve customer relationships, cut costs and make more money. To learn more, visit our website at www.businessobjects.com.