Today, businesses have to manage multiple types of data from multiple sources, all while managing a myriad of business processes. To meet these challenges, businesses rely on software to support their accounting and process requirements. In this article we will discuss the differences between software choices; specifically, Accounting software and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, as well as how this relates to the difference between “reporting” and “analytics”. Accounting software simply provides core financial information; basically, a snapshot of “what happened”. This software is tailored specifically for accounting, to be used by the Accounting and Finance departments. Enterprise Resource Planning … Read More
Healthcare Research Firm Uses Enhanced Reporting to Improve Service Delivery
A healthcare research organization needed to better track invoices from project awardees, along with research metrics from multiple groups. Their manual data collection and analysis were disjointed, prevented the timely allocation of resources, and cost too much time. Out-of-the-box Salesforce reports and tracking were not meeting their needs. Our team built a custom application within Salesforce to track invoices and pull together other key data from across the organization. With their data now being logged within Salesforce, reporting became supercharged. The process that previously required multiple email approvals and attachments, now is automated, making critical financial and research reports readily … Read More
Creating Useful Reports by Combining Salesforce and Financial Data
Problem Solved: short stories about helping our customers solve their IT challenges. A wireless telecommunications provider uses Salesforce as their CRM platform and requires a high degree of sophistication in order to meet their reporting needs. Out-of-the-box reporting capabilities in Salesforce were not able to combine Salesforce and financial data in a way that executives needed on a regular basis. Our implementation of Tableau is able to integrate the data their leadership needed out of both systems, enabling robust reporting with simplified views that are exported to Microsoft PowerPoint and delivered to executives on a weekly basis. As a result, … Read More
Develop a Better Data Sharing and Integration Strategy
Today’s higher education institutions are facing a multitude of challenges around data analysis, security, and increasingly hybrid architectures. The issue of how to balance ongoing security challenges while connecting cloud and on-premises applications is common across institutions. These challenges may lead many organizations to develop an integration strategy to help in the alignment of these increasingly complex architectures. However, limiting the focus to only integrations can become overly technically focused. Instead of developing an integration strategy, institutions should instead take a holistic approach to data sharing and develop an information strategy. As information is a valuable asset for organizations and … Read More
A Guide to the Changes at the Analytics and Data Summit 2018 (Formerly BIWA Summit)
What a year for the BIWA User Community and Oracle Spatial & Graph Special Interest Group (SIG)! Both groups have expanded their leadership teams, as well as rebranding and moving the date of their flagship event, the Analytics and Data Summit (formerly known as the Oracle Business Intelligence, Warehousing, and Analytics (BIWA) Summit. As a new member of the board of both BIWA and the Summit, we wanted to let you in on the exciting changes, and what they mean to you. The BIWA User Community was founded in 2006 as a special interest group (SIG) of the Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) … Read More
Yes, We Have World Cup Fever Too
It seems like everywhere you go these days, there is someone talking about the FIFA World Cup. Here at M&S it’s no different. Whether we’re discussing the way Spain went out in the 1st round or how heartbreaking it was to tie Portugal (which is weird to see typed out because before the tournament that would have been a great result), we’ve got a fever and the only cure is more soccer/fútbol/footbal/whatever you call it. There are so many fantastic story lines at both the personal and national level that it seems hard to not get sucked in by it … Read More