Blue Rhino Corporation Implements Metastorm e-Work
Blue Rhino Corporation, a leading national provider of branded propane cylinder exchange and complementary propane-fueled products, has selected e-Work software from Metastorm to improve its internal process controls, provide a more efficient work environment, and maintain a certain level of control and insight over how the business is running.
In addition to automating manual processes, Blue Rhino will rely on the Metastorm BPM solution to help control and document its processes in compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which requires public companies trading on U.S. stock exchanges to validate the accuracy of their financial reporting. Blue Rhino plans to be at the forefront of compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act since their fiscal year ends in July and compliance is mandated for June of 2004.
Some of the initial processes that Blue Rhino is automating include:
- Inventory Procurement Process – the system that keeps track of company- wide inventory that include millions of 20 lb cylinders. This process will give the company the ability to order and transfer inventory between its 52 distributors. This is a critical process to help manage control over its inventory. Each distributor is required to report on month end inventory counts, ultimately matching final numbers from that of the company.
- Ordering Process – Currently a manual effort, Blue Rhino distributors will be able to use e-Work to order cylinders and cages. e-Work also allows the company to set spending limits, and authorize approval codes.
- IT Change Control Management Process – An internal process that empowers Blue Rhino employees to request changes to internal systems. The main benefits of this process are to help satisfy Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act where all internal controls that have a direct affect on financial reporting must be documented. This process will also help to segregate duties of employees.
- Customer Care – The company's Customer Care department will have an automated process for the ordering of parts, replacement parts, shipping of parts, warranties, among other things. This process links up with the company's inventory system to track inventory numbers.
- Human Resources New Hire process – This process will enable Blue Rhino's Human Resources and IT employees to prepare for new employees including managing all required paperwork, network passwords and connections, computer equipment, etc.
Blue Rhino is anticipating a rapid deployment and expects that e-Work will help them reduce costs from the efficiency they expect to gain. The company is also expecting increased employee productivity with more job structure, better communication and a cohesive team environment.
Ultimately, e-Work will provide Blue Rhino management with visibility into critical information so that they can focus on the right areas. Information is immediately accessible in e-Work so key decisions can be made faster and more effectively than in the past.
Pharmaceutical Company Puts Cognos ReportNet into Production in Just Five Days
Fujisawa GmbH, European Headquarters of Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., a world class leader in the pharmaceutical industry with a focus on immunology and inflammation as well as infectious, metabolic and cerebral disease research, has deployed Cognos ReportNet. Today in a production environment, Fujisawa Europe benefits from Cognos ReportNet’s unrivaled enterprise reporting coverage, multilingual support and mission- critical performance.
After conducting an extensive competitive evaluation of leading reporting solutions, Fujisawa GmbH selected Cognos ReportNet to deliver a broad range of enterprise business reports without extensive custom coding and IT intervention. With offices around the world and a headquarters in Japan, European decision makers will use Cognos ReportNet in conjunction with Cognos EBI analysis to deliver multilingual, real-time performance information on research and development projects from Oracle transactional systems, as well as patient recruitment information for clinical trials. In addition, the finance department will use Cognos ReportNet to facilitate critical strategic planning and forecasting.
“Cognos ReportNet will allow Fujisawa to standardize all of our reporting requirements on a single solution, and significantly reduce the time to author key reports for business user consumption. The key for us was the 'self-service' nature of the Cognos ReportNet authoring environment. The drag-and-drop functionality will enable our business users to create the reports they need in minutes,” said Nicola Marangoni, business intelligence/data warehouse manager, Fujisawa GmbH. “Cognos ReportNet’s easy authentication and open security also set Cognos apart given the sensitivity of our data.”
The flexibility of Cognos ReportNet’s report authoring environment allows IT and business decision-makers to create highly customized and compound reports enabling active applications to be embedded. The result is an environment where business users can actively modify and consume reports that give them a 360- degree view of corporate performance, including integrated access into multidimensional OLAP cubes, enabling powerful drill-through capabilities.
“At Fujisawa GmbH, the business user feedback has been quite positive. While IT was active in the selection process, our business stakeholders were pleased about the selection of Cognos ReportNet due to its ease of use,” added Marangoni.
Designed to scale to 100s of 1,000s of users, Cognos ReportNet solution draws upon Cognos reporting and query leadership to deliver the next evolution of reporting. Cognos ReportNet is fully integrated with the Cognos Enterprise BI solution, including flexible scorecards, dashboards, powerful industry-leading OLAP analysis, event detection and alerting, and data integration.
“Global leaders like Fujisawa are turning to Cognos ReportNet as a solution that will allow for global-scale deployment. Driving to a production environment in less than one month, Cognos ReportNet continues to proves its exceptional enterprise performance and business user ease of use,” said Dave Laverty, senior vice president, global marketing, Cognos.
Xerox Improves Park University’s Admission Process
Park University, of Parkville, Missouri, is kicking off a digital school year and working with Xerox Corporation's Global Services division to enable Park's 40 campus centers located in 20 states to communicate more efficiently. Xerox is helping the university digitize and streamline financial aid, registration and admission forms to make it easier for Park to regulate the way admissions-related information is captured and distributed electronically across various departments and geographic university locations.
Traditional paper documents such as student transcripts, sports information and recommendation letters are now stored on a central network – allowing multiple departments within Park to view and process student information simultaneously. As a result, Park has achieved increased enrollment processing time and improved communication with prospective students.
Xerox Global Services will work with Park to help the university achieve the larger goal of becoming nearly paperless on all of its campuses by 2004. "We needed a business partner to help us process the paperwork associated with more than 21,000 enrolled students dispersed across numerous Park campus centers, in addition to managing thousands of incoming applications," said Beverley Byers- Pevitts, president, Park University. "Xerox designed and implemented a document management system to bring the varying paperwork processes together. We now operate as one entity despite various locations."
Johns Hopkins Standardizes on Verity Ultraseek
Nearly 1,000 Web sites operated by various departments in The Johns Hopkins Institutions are today using Verity Ultraseek, a powerful, downloadable enterprise search engine from Verity Inc.
The Johns Hopkins Institutions, a highly regarded university and health care facility, first deployed the Ultraseek technology a few years ago after an ABC News television program profile of the Johns Hopkins’ medical facility generated a dramatic rise in queries to its main external medical systems Web site. The Ultraseek technology was formerly known as Inktomi Enterprise Search prior its acquisition by Verity in December 2002.
“That sudden onslaught of traffic generated by the ABC News television program made us realize we needed a better and more powerful search engine. After extensive evaluation of several vendors’ search technology, we found the Ultraseek product to be the best way to meet our immediate and long- term needs,” said Brian Cole, a senior systems software engineer with The Johns Hopkins Institutions’ Enterprise Services. “Ultraseek not only was able to solve our pressing challenge, but we saw it as an effective search solution for all of the different Web sites across the Johns Hopkins organization. The product’s ease of deployment was as important as finding information easily and quickly.”
As part of a drive to optimize IT resources within the two entities, Cole sought to standardize the search engine by encouraging the use of Ultraseek on the external and internal sites operated by different Johns Hopkins departments. Within a short period of time, administrators and users of the different departments’ Web sites at The Johns Hopkins Institutions recognized the effectiveness of the Ultraseek search technology. Today, Verity Ultraseek is the de facto search engine for the hundreds of Web sites at Johns Hopkins.
There is considerable crossover content between the academic and health care operations. For example, the university’s faculty and students in the schools of medicine, public health and nursing search content residing on sites maintained by The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Verity Ultraseek permits searching across multiple sites quickly.
“Searching across multiple sites is particularly appealing as it allows users to access information from different repositories with a single click,” Cole said. “Verity Ultraseek brings the content together easily and accurately without having to navigate across many sites.”
“The Johns Hopkins Institutions’ Web presence represents a fantastic educational and health information resource,” said Anthony J. Bettencourt, Verity’s president and CEO. “The institutions’ system-wide use of Verity Ultraseek allows researchers, educators, students and the general public to make the most of significant intellectual capital assets.”
The content repositories at Johns Hopkins consist of hundreds of document formats that are spread across Web servers, file systems, secure systems and other repositories. Verity Ultraseek’s intelligent, adaptive spider indexes all of these into a common Ultraseek Index that makes them searchable with a single query, permitting manuals, journals, abstracts or research papers to be stored in the format in which they were created. Users and administrators have found this feature to be useful in enhancing their search experience.
The use of Verity Ultraseek institution-wide has proven to be one of the most successful aspects of Johns Hopkins’ drive to optimize IT resources.
Chick-fil-A Jumps Ahead of the Industry by Using PopChart + OptiMap to Better Visualize Data
Chick-fil-A, Inc., the third-largest chicken restaurant chain in the U.S., has purchased Corda Technologies' PopChart + OptiMap solution that provides a powerful way to monitor real-time data centric aspects of their organization through interactive charts, graphs and maps.
Corda's interactive data visualization products and solutions allow organizations to easily translate their business data into useful and intuitive graphics. Information that might have required days or weeks to clearly comprehend, can now be seen and immediately understood by management at Chick-fil-A using Corda's interactive charts, maps and dashboards.
"Corda's fast and flexible graphing and mapping software was a very appealing solution to us," said Chris Taylor, senior manager of Technical Architecture at Chick-fil- A. "PopChart + OptiMap provides the capability to quickly generate dynamic views of sales information that previously required our restaurant Operators to scan through pages of numbers. Now the data is presented in formats that our Operators can quickly act on."
The open architecture of PopChart + OptiMap, accessible via a wide variety of programming interfaces, also appealed to Chick-fil-A. "The very rich JSP integration interfaces closely matched our application development approach and skills," said Taylor. "We can embed PopChart + OptiMap reports seamlessly in our J2EE applications, or call those same reports from other environments. Very powerful, very flexible."
A PopChart + OptiMap system can contain a variety of map and graph images. On-demand dynamic data, including explanatory text boxes, callout notes, or popup text that appears as a viewer rolls over certain parts of the map or graph. The system can even include interactive drill-down effects, such as linking to another map or graph when a user clicks on a particular data item. The information contained in the charts, graphs and maps is made accessible to blind and low vision individuals through automated descriptive text that is created at the time the chart or map is created.
This piece is brought to you by the Information Management editorial staff.
