Giving BI the Greenlight, A.S.A.P!

Why Wait for Business Smarts?

Business Intelligence (BI) is relevant to all businesses—no company can improve operations without visibility into what’s going on. Yet implementing analytics can require significant upfront hardware, software and personnel investments that many businesses can’t realistically make. GoodData Partner EmeraldCube wished to provide their customers with a quicker route to INSIGHT.

Starting out as a Managed Services firm that removed overhead and administrative headaches associated with maintaining JD Edwards Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions for their clients, EmeraldCube wanted to remove those same headaches for BI. They desired to find a scalable way to mine JD Edwards data.

“We wanted to really revolutionize the BI game for JD Edwards users, because on premise BI can be heavy and requires build time, and demands huge capital investments,” said Craig Kelly, Co-Founder and Partner, of EmeraldCube.

With a straight-forward vision to provide business clarity free of technology hassle, EmeraldCube’s main goal was to make BI more affordable, approachable, usable, and scalable. Their task was to introduce an easy SaaS-based solution customers could start using right away.

Instant SaaS Buisness Intelligence

• GoodData Cloud BI provides a mash-up of external data sources creating reports, analytics, metrics and best practices—all rolled into one.
• It requires no initial capital investment; just a low cost monthly subscription.
• It empowers better strategic decisions that turn insight into dollars, faster

From JD Edwards to All Data Analytics

With insight to relevant metrics available in an intuitive, interactive, and easily digestible form, EmeraldVision customers can now excel phenomenally—simply by connecting to and mining the data in their JD Edwards ERP systems. However, EmeraldCube is working to push the envelope further and make BI even more useful.

“Many of our customers were stuck in the stone age with their on-premise solutions being the only data sources they could access,” says Kelly. “Because of GoodData’s ability to constantly add to and integrate new data sources into a subscription-based revenue model, JD Edwards is now only our customers’ initial data source.”

Currently expanding their offerings to promote a truly 360° view of business, EmeraldCube is bringing additional data sources into their platform—like external data from social media and internal data from Salesforce and Silverpop. EmeraldVision also successfully integrates data from EmeraldSensor, their end-to-end Internet of Things solution, providing insights previously unimagined.

“GoodData is the perfect partner because their Open Analytics Insight SaaS consolidates all structured and unstructured data from every possible source – internal systems, cloud applications, social environments and public databases – so we can continue to provide our customers substantial competitive edge via access to ALL their data,” said Kelly.

How GoodData Steps Up Business Insight

Mining Emails to Automate Processes: For one client, EmeraldCube has mined unstructured data from emails to revolutionize Lead Management. “We essentially automated a very manual and time-consuming process so our customer would not lose hot prospects. They used to manually read emails from potential customers who contacted them via their website; pull contact info into a spreadsheet; then follow up with a sales rep. Our system constantly reads the emails on an ongoing basis, feeds the contact info into an appropriate model, and sets up scheduling directly with reps.”

Delivering Visibility into Performance vs. Goals: Superior Industries, a heavy equipment and machinery manufacturer in Minnesota with 20+ branch plants reports through EmeraldVision. “Now they can measure JD Edwards data and see trends and averages over time,” said Kelly. “We were able to apply quarterly goals to those metrics and gauge performance against those goals.” Superior is now collaborating better by using the dashboards in executive meetings, holding people accountable, and accessing data on demand.

“We’re able to get quicker access to our data via a live web link at any time,” said Paul Schmidgall, VP of Manufacturing at Superior Industries. “Today, it’s a much easier and more intuitive for our production managers to interact with data and have constant visibility into operations. BI is more dynamic with the ability to roll up more than one report, summarize metrics, pare them down, or drill down to the underlying data.”

Improving Internal Analytics: Internally, EmeraldCube uses GoodData to mine their own data and continue to add new internal and external data sources. “It’s important to us to not just preach 360° All Data BI, but to live it ourselves,” said Kelly. “When employees become more aware of what’s possible through GoodData, they cross-pollinate and help our customers grow their INSIGHT, too.”

Additional resources

If you’d like to discover more about embedded analytics and the GoodData platform, we have a number of additional resources available.

Visit GoodData’s embedded analytics website to learn more about different types of embedded analytics, solutions, benefits, and additional customer success stories.

With the embedded analytics trial, you can see GoodData’s analytics platform embedded in an application’s user interface so you can get a clear example of what embedded ad hoc data discovery looks like. Explore a demo application enhanced by analytics visualizations, then create analytical insights using an intuitive drag-and-drop experience.