KU Technologies
A Noetix Case Study
KU Technologies’ services are focused on delivering innovative business solutions to customers in the early childhood and school-age education and child-care industries. KU Technologies partners with Knowledge Universe, its largest customer, to create and deliver more manageable computer network environments that cost less to operate and deliver more value to the business and the customers that they serve.
The Challenge
KU Technologies delivers a wide range of IT services to the subsidiaries of Knowledge Universe, which include KinderCare Learning Centers and CCLC, serving 300,000 children across the US. The company’s enterprise business intelligence (BI) team is responsible for multiple products and projects that provide critical insight into financials and other operational metrics for more than 1,800 early education centers.
In the fall of 2009, the BI team began examining methods that would enable them to better gather and access information from Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) for reporting and analysis purposes. For example, they wanted the ability to look at an individual education center and to analyze how annual revenue related to employee turnover and then to compare these metrics with other facilities. They also wanted to be able to determine food costs at facilities so they could negotiate lower prices with vendors. At the time, managers were using a variety of methods to come up with this type of information, from Excel sheets to email compilation.
The Solution
The BI team determined they needed a new, robust reporting solution, and after much research and due diligence, the team decided to purchase Noetix Analytics. The solution would be used to augment the existing data warehouse and to do so in a way that enabled the team to quickly and accurately deploy a complementary solution, thereby reducing time to market and costs that would have been involved with a “from scratch” approach.
The new system is built on a module-based approach, which allows KU Technologies to select modules specific to what they use in Oracle EBS (general ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable, fixed assets, project accounting) and to expand to additional modules as the need arises. The information is consolidated in near-real time, standards-based Operational Data Store (ODS) and a Kimball approach (fact table, dimensions) data mart.
“We could have spent 12 to 15 months and up to $2 million creating a customized data warehouse from scratch,” said Wade Anderson, director of business intelligence. “The end result was a solution that was 80% of the way to what we needed at go-live, shifting the focus of our implementation effort away from creating an architecture from scratch and instead working on areas and business needs that are unique to Knowledge Universe business lines.”
The BI team was live within 90 days of the initial implementation. A few months later, it had a data warehouse populated with 1.3 terabytes of data available for operational reporting and analytics.
The new system works in conjunction with existing BI platforms from a wide range of vendors, enabling KU Technologies to employ its existing Cognos 8.4 reporting tool to view information from Oracle EBS in a familiar format. The BI team built a series of dashboards and has conducted extensive training to empower the end users to use the solution to create their own operational reports.
The Result
Today, initial “consumers” in human resources, finance, legal and procurement are retrieving information from the new BI environment and creating their own operational reports—accessing information wherever and whenever they need it.
The finance organization in conjunction with the BI team recently launched a balanced scorecard for one of KU Technologies’ major business lines. The information provided from the analytics system played a key part in achieving this in 30 days time. Center directors and field management now have the ability to log in and retrieve a common set of information unique to their business area.
“We could not have implemented this balanced scorecard with its systematized approach without the solution pieces we employed,” said Anderson. “And when you imagine that this information will be available for the first time to 1,800 center directors and their staff, you can see that the impact on the business overall will be enormous.”
A Q & A with Noetix: Evaluating BI for Oracle E-Business Suite
1. Will we need both real-time reporting and analytics? Most customers do and you probably will, too. You will want to look at solutions that provide access to real-time transaction data as well as data warehouse models for more complex analysis.
2. What functional areas will we need coverage for? Don’t focus on just financials or human resources simply because you need to implement those modules first. Look at your more complex (and less obvious) applications such as enterprise asset management, time and labor or depot repair. Try to find a solution that provides coverage for everything needed now and in the future.
3. We already own a few BI tools—can we continue to leverage those? You might have users who are familiar with Oracle Discoverer. Maybe you have a department that is experienced with IBM Cognos BI or SAP BusinessObjects. It’s possible that you just purchased OBI EE from Oracle and are looking forward to using it. Many organizations have more than one of these platforms. It makes good business sense to look at options that allow you to get value from your existing investments, while providing a common “data model” that remains consistent across the tools used throughout your organization.
4. How will an Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade affect my BI reporting? Whether you’re currently on R12 or still on 11i, you are almost certain to go through an EBS upgrade at some point—probably multiple times. You will want a BI solution that makes those upgrades easier—something that will protect your reports and dashboards (and customizations you may have made) when you do the upgrade, so you don’t have to redo all of that hard work.
5. What experiences have others gone through? Look for a solution that you know will work—something proven, something currently in use by organizations like yours (similar size, similar industry, similar user requirements), and something mature enough to have gone through a few upgrades. It’s also a good idea to try to network with other Oracle EBS customers to learn firsthand of their successes and challenges.
Noetix provides instant operational reporting and packaged analytics for Oracle Applications. More than 1,400 customers worldwide use Noetix to quickly and cost- effectively access the enterprise application data necessary for critical decision-making.