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Plus Relocation Services, Inc. and International Car Operators Realize ROI Upwards of 424 Percent With BI and Integration
KISSIMMEE, FL – June 7, 2010 – Information Builders, the independent leader in operational business intelligence (BI) and integration solutions, today unveiled financial returns and future savings metrics on two recent customer implementations, Plus Relocation Services, Inc. (PLUS) and International Car Operators (ICO). As a result of each project, both PLUS and ICO have improved productivity, reduced costs, gained new customers, and more easily retained existing customers.
"One of the consistent success factors in each implementation is how the companies made data available to a wide number of users, not simply back-office analysts with BI capabilities," said Gerald Cohen, CEO and president of Information Builders. "When companies make BI part of their DNA, and in the case of PLUS, spread to external users, the implementation payback time is extremely quick. And as we've seen with ICO, the use of iWay helping workers become more productive and accurate in responding to customers creates up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.
"It's best to spread the BI investment over a broader number of users, raising the ROI for each user. Focusing only on analytical users is expensive and wasteful," continued Cohen.
Plus Relocation Services, Inc. (PLUS)
In early 2009, Information Builders partnered with PLUS to develop a customer-facing portal, InformAgilty, which provides the company with a significant competitive advantage in the mobility and relocation industry. PLUS chose the WebFOCUS BI platform because it was powerful enough to revamp its information systems, yet flexible enough to create easy-to-use dashboards for internal and external users.
Today, PLUS customers access information online without the assistance of staff, with much of this information in real time. InformAgility's reporting capabilities allow customers to see their information the way they want to, with filtering options and active reports. Self-service reports and dashboards enable customers to track the status and cost of relocations, estimate future costs, track expenses against estimates, and keep on budget. The content and formatting is very dynamic and can meet the needs of a diverse client base.
- As a result of the revenue gains and reduced costs, PLUS will gain a projected, cumulative three-year net benefit of $3,423,600, an ROI of 196 percent, and a payback period of nine months
Real-time dashboards and predictive analytics provide a variety of online, standard, and ad hoc reporting in the areas of relocation activity, expenses, home sale, and invoice history – creating an environment for strategic collaboration and informed decision-making for customers to carefully monitor service and costs across the world. This helps the company gain new customers and increase customer loyalty.
"WebFOCUS has given us tremendous benefits. It helps us deliver on our vision statement to be the world's best relocation company," said Mick Lee, PLUS Chairman, founder, and CEO.
WebFOCUS has also helped PLUS improve productivity and reduce costs. Staff no longer has to spend time creating custom reports for clients because they can create the reports themselves. They also no longer have to answer as many customer questions because information is available in self-service dashboards and reports.
- As a result of increased productivity, PLUS will see a cumulative, projected reduction of $1,440,000 over three years
- Building self-service dashboards and reports for customers will net PLUS a projected, cumulative $3,726,600 in additional revenue over three years
ICO
In 2008, ICO turned to Information Builders to help it more effectively manage transporting vehicles, communicate with its customers via EDI, reduce costs, and improve operational efficiency. It chose iWay Software for its ability to facilitate the smooth integration of data coming from multiple platforms and help dramatically increase the use of EDI. ICO chose WebFOCUS for its ability to easily manage multiple sources of information and simultaneously serve a large number of users' operational and reporting needs.
"iWay and WebFOCUS perfectly answered our business requirements," said Alain Guillemyn, ICO's IT manager. "They were precisely what we needed for operational and statistical reporting, business intelligence, communicating with customers, and improving operations."
With iWay and WebFOCUS, ICO has improved operational efficiency and produced more timely and useful reports, improved communications with customers, reduced costs, and increased revenue. iWay and WebFOCUS have become central tools for running ICO's entire operations.
- As a result of the deployment, ICO will gain a three-year net benefit of €2,978,015 (USD$,556,220). The project has a six-month payback, and a return on investment of 424 percent (These results calculate the benefits of WebFOCUS in concert with a Terminal Operation System [TSO] compared to a purely manual system without WebFOCUS, a TSO, or EDI.)
Using iWay, EDI has become the central way that ICO gets information from customers about the vehicles they are shipping. Before iWay, thousands of these manual messages were exchanged every day, leading to inefficiencies and potential errors. Workloads at the terminal gates have been reduced, and there are fewer input errors. iWay has dramatically reduced the need for manual input, increasing efficiency and accuracy. It also reduces the time it takes to process each car by four minutes, which will lead to a reduction of 100,000 hours of employee time by the third year.
Once the data is in its tracking system, ICO uses WebFOCUS for key operational aspects of running the terminals and managing the vehicle transportation process. WebFOCUS is used to track every step of the process of loading and unloading vehicles onto and off of ships, and to make sure that every vehicle is handled in the appropriate way. This reduces time wasted on non-productive manual efforts that would otherwise be required to handle each car.
- The combined increased efficiencies of iWay and WebFOCUS will net ICO a projected, cumulative three-year reduction of €3,500,000 (USD$4,180,908) in operational costs
"We have seen dramatic operational savings using iWay and WebFOCUS They have helped us reduce costs, improve our efficiency, and helped us develop closer relations with our customers," continued Guillemyn.
In addition, ICO uses WebFOCUS to create custom reports providing key information for cross-selling and up-selling current customers and gaining new customers.
- As a result, ICO will see a cumulative, projected three-year increase of €180,000 (USD$215,015) in operating income
About iWay Software
iWay Software's integration methodology is simple: it uses a single, integrated set of graphical design tools to assemble powerful pre-built components for enterprise-class business-to-business (B2B) integration, business process automation (BPA), or enterprise information management (EIM) integration scenarios - without the use of custom code. Integration configurations can be deployed in a stand-alone manner to any environment supporting a JVM - or to Web application servers from any vendor. iWay delivers the fastest, most cost-effective, and simplest way to integrate and streamline critical business processes. iWay Software's vendor-, platform-, and protocol-neutral solutions achieve the promise of SOA: true reusability.
About Information Builders
Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders’ iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets. The company’s comprehensive enterprise product offerings give Information Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.
Information Builders' customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners.
