Business Intelligence and Reporting Services

Business Intelligence (BI) and Reporting Services is a focus area for Thinksoft. Thinksoft's view of the BI challenge, our approach to BI, and our services and experiences are presented below.

The Current BI Challenge

Organizations are struggling with key business decisions due to lack of information when and where needed. BI can provide answers to critical questions facing executives today:

• Customers - What are my most profitable customers and segments? How can I increase revenue and profitability from them over time?
• Products - Which products in what markets are contributing the most toward profitability and how can I enhance them? Which products have excellent partner potential?
• Markets - What channels and geographic markets contribute most to revenue and profitability? How can I grow these markets over time?
• Employees - Are my employee costs higher than my competition and how over time can I manage this while maintaining employee retention and loyalty?
• Suppliers - What is my total overall spend by category and what are my strategies to lower these costs? How can I reduce cost while improving delivery and quality?
• Profitability - Which business units, product lines and geographies are contributing most toward overall corporate profitability and which strategies (customers, products, markets, channels, partnerships) will drive greater profitability?

The Thinksoft Approach to BI: Maximize Results, Minimize Cost and Time

BI involves much more than simply defining reports and analytics and the underlying data cubes and models. Thinksoft has found that successful BI projects need to include Reporting, Performance Management and Analytics for successful delivery of BI to end-users, managers and executives.

However, Reporting, Performance Management and Analytics is just the tip of the BI iceberg for a successful BI project. Successful BI projects will also need to address several other major considerations:

• Supporting Application, Collaboration, Discovery and Integration and Data Cleansing requirements as well as Delivery (SaaS and/or On-Premise) options
• Delivery Approach options, Infrastructure, Quality Assurance, Governance, and Methodology

Thinksoft examines all these factors to create a successful BI project approach designed to maximize results and minimize cost and time.

Thinksoft BI Insight - Microsoft SQL Reporting Services

Thinksoft offers services for Microsoft's BI and SQL Reporting Services. Microsoft's SQL Server Reporting Services is a comprehensive solution that enables the creation, management and delivery of both traditional, paper-oriented reports and interactive, Web-based reports. An integrated part of the Microsoft Business Intelligence framework, Reporting Services combines the data management capabilities of SQL Server and Microsoft Windows Server with Microsoft Office System applications to deliver real-time information to support daily operations and drive tactical and operational insights and decision-making.

Microsoft's BI and reporting services offering is well integrated with SQL Server, PerformancePoint for rich GUI, OLAP engine, SharePoint Server, .NET framework, and Visual Studio, an integrated development environment.

Microsoft's SharePoint Server provides a single, integrated portal application to host a variety of business reports as well as related applications to perform what-if analysis, and manage and share document. It also supplements your collaboration and decision making process through the ability to search through organization-wide content.

Thinksoft BI Reporting Spotlight

Thinksoft has also worked with other BI and reporting solutions and products such as:

• Crystal Reports
• Business Objects
• HTML & Ajax based reports
• Hyperion – Web Analytics
• Actuate
• Cognos

Thinksoft's Expertise in Business Intelligence and Reporting

Thinksoft has helped many of its clients by building secure and manageable reporting solutions for a wide range of companies and users. Some of the key features of these solutions are:

• Solutions architected for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services
• Comprehensive reports, dashboards and scorecards
• Data cubes/Data warehouse: Powerful data mining capabilities
• Seamless integration with legacy and modern enterprise systems
• Automated work flows – report requisitions, generation and delivery
• Drill down features – based on organizational hierarchies
• Highly customizable reports delivered via web in a variety of forms(PDF, Excel, HTML, Charts)