Air Canada, Bell Canada, Elie Tahari, Pershing LLC, and State of Missouri Department of Social Services Honored for Their Exemplary Use of WebFOCUS and iWay Software
New York, NY � April 4, 2005 � Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, today announced the winners of the 2005 Customer Awards of Distinction. Five companies are being honored for their outstanding use of WebFOCUS and iWay Software:
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Air Canada for Best Operational Business Intelligence
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Bell Canada for Overall Excellence Using iWay Software
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Elie Tahari for Most Innovative Application
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Pershing LLC for Best Enterprise Business Intelligence
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State of Missouri Department of Social Service for Most Humanitarian Application
Information Builders and iWay Software will honor these customer achievements at the Summit 2005 User Conference held in Las Vegas, May 15 through 18.
“Information Builders’ awards program is an opportunity to acknowledge our customers’ outstanding use of technology,” said Gerald D. Cohen, president and CEO at Information Builders. “By creating integrated business intelligence applications for their organizations, our users are adding immense value for their customers, partners, suppliers, and employees, while delivering value to the bottom line.”
Air Canada � Best Operational Business Intelligence
Some problems that occur with an aircraft may prevent the sale of a seat or negatively impact customer satisfaction. At Air Canada, Canada’s flag carrier, identifying and resolving these problems, called “deviations,” is the job of Air Canada Maintenance. Deviations are reported either by flight crews onboard or by aircraft mechanics at the destination. WebFOCUS is used to match known deviations with the availability of parts required to fix them. For example, one WebFOCUS report reveals all open deviations by aircraft, its destination, and the station where it will overnight to be available for maintenance, as well as deviations that must be addressed and the availability of required parts � anywhere in the Air Canada system. These reports help planners ensure that deviations are corrected as soon as possible, at the first station where the parts and crews will be available, to avoid customer inconvenience and costly delays. WebFOCUS also produces a scorecard of key metrics to show how well each maintenance crew is performing. These metrics are used to measure the effectiveness in identifying, Classifying, and closing deviations; identifying and providing the required parts; and planning for subsequent maintenance. With this information in hand, Air Canada is able to improve aircraft reliability and enhance customer satisfaction.
Bell Canada � Overall Excellence Using iWay Software
Competition is fierce in the telecommunications industry, and no company is immune to the threat of customer attrition. Bell Canada keeps its customers dialed in with an unwavering focus on customer service. Using iWay Software and WebFOCUS, the telecommunications giant has developed, from their enterprise data warehouse, a business intelligence application that enables customer service reps (CSRs) to maintain a current view of all interactions with customers, regardless of which channel customers use to contact the company. It wasn’t easy given the requirements: Senior managers wanted reps to know about any update to the customer data repository within five minutes of any customer interaction. Achieving this vision involved developing Web services that consolidate information from several legacy systems into an integrated data repository, along with a real-time window into the data to help the CSRs stay up to date on the history of each account. With customer information maintained in numerous legacy systems – some of which have been around for decades � delivering current information to the right people at the right time is an ongoing challenge. Bell Canada is meeting the challenge with a custom-developed Web portal that provides up-to-the minute customer information to over 4,000 customer service reps.
Elie Tahari � Most Innovative Application
Since its debut in 1974, the Elie Tahari Collection has been a force to be reckoned with in the world of upscale women’s fashions. The philosophy of the company mirrors the personality of the man behind it. Mr. Tahari has successfully created companies based on his incredible instincts that enable him to predict what is going to happen in fashion before it actually does happen. This, coupled with an astute understanding of what women really want, have made the company a tightly focused enterprise that continuously shows clarity, vision, and intelligence � with growth of 70 percent in 2004 alone. To stay the course, Elie Tahari sought a business intelligence solution that could help managers spot buying trends and quickly take advantage of business opportunities. “InSeam,” Tahari’s WebFOCUS business intelligence system, links legacy production systems with retail sales systems, allowing users to easily monitor inventory, order status, shipments, sales, and finance. Innovative use of photos and graphic imagery allows InSeam users to explore performance by clicking on pictures of each garment in their reports.
Pershing LLC � Best Use of Enterprise Business Intelligence
Managing risk, complying with industry regulations, and increasing the efficiency of core business processes are ongoing challenges for a global financial services company such as Pershing LLC. As a member of BNY Securities Group and a subsidiary of The Bank of New York Company, Inc. Pershing is a leading global provider of outsourcing solutions to more than 1,100 financial services organizations who represent over 6 million individual investors. The company is a member of every major U.S. securities exchange and its international affiliates are members of the Frankfurt, Irish, and London Stock Exchanges., Pershing is known for its innovative use of technology, which extends to every facet of its operation. In order to help its customers improve their business analysis and bolster corporate decision-making capabilities, Pershing needed a highly scalable enterprise BI and reporting environment that could deliver ad hoc reports on demand. WebFOCUS had the capabilities they were looking for, and also offered Pershing’s customers the benefit of seamless integration with the firm’s existing security framework and NetExchange Pro online brokerage platform � all for a low total cost of ownership.
State of Missouri Department of Social Service � Most Humanitarian Application
One measure of a civilized society is the extent to which it cares for its needy citizens. In the state of Missouri, the Department of Social Services (DSS) coordinates a variety of programs to keep families together, prevent abuse or neglect, and encourage self-sufficiency. The department provides public assistance to children and their parents, access to healthcare, and specialized assistance to troubled youth, among other services. It has an annual budget of $6.2 billion and employs approximately 8,800 people. To better serve Missouri citizens, the DSS built a WebFOCUS business intelligence system that seamlessly integrates many different child welfare databases. The self-service environment lets caseworkers access complete client histories on demand, so they can tailor their services to the unique and documented needs of each individual. The end result is faster response and better care for people throughout the state of Missouri.
About Summit
Summit is Information Builders’ annual user conference. Established in 1985, it is the leading product education conference for Information Builders’ WebFOCUS, FOCUS, and iWay Software. Summit provides an extensive educational forum on Information Builders’ business intelligence and integration solutions, and is a showcase for Information Builders’ future products. For more information, please visit www.informationbuilders.com/summit.
About iWay Software
iWay Software, an Information Builders company and the world’s leading adaptive software vendor, accelerates business integration by providing tools that make service-oriented architectures easy to implement. Clients achieve short-term ROI by using iWay to reduce custom programming and to solve problems quickly, while incrementally creating an architecture that supports long-term projects. The biggest names in software, including BEA and Microsoft, use iWay adapters to simplify access to ERP and CRM systems, messaging, legacy systems, e-business protocols like AS2 and ebXML, and more. Additional message transformation and data integration make iWay a natural integration choice � standalone or with other middleware.For more information visit www.iwaysoftware.com.
About Information Builders
Information Builders, a $300 million company, is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time Web reporting. The company’s WebFOCUS product � the industry’s most secure and flexible � is able to meet all the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundreds of thousands of users. Additionally, WebFOCUS’ empowerment of organizations seeking to leverage all their data by accessing it all � from legacy to data warehouse � is unmatched.
Information Builders’ award-winning technology has successfully provided quality software and superior services for 30 years to more than 12,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,750 people and has over 350 business partners. For more information about Information Builders and its products and services visit us at www.informationbuilders.com
