Data Analytics Solution for Enterprise Performance Management

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http://www.kavaii.com

Data Analytics Solution for Enterprise Performance Management

Automated. Easy to Use. Quick to Deploy.

Kavaii Analytics Team

Democratizing Data Analytics &

Providing High Return on Analytics A Kavaii White Paper

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Introduction 3

Problem Statement 4

Previous Options 5

Kavaii EPM Solution Benefits 6

Deployment 7

Summary 8

About Kavaii 9

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Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) system is a set of analysis metrics and dashboards, which allows an enterprise’s management team and decision makers to monitor, plan, and predict drivers for overall company performance.

These include forecast tracking, drivers of revenue and costs, human resource planning, geographic and business unit performance measures, customer profitability measures, performance by the competency, among many other important metrics. This applies to most types of for-profit business enterprises looking to improve revenues, profits, margins and overall company productivity.

According to Gartner, CIOs continue to view business intelligence (BI) among their top priorities for improving decision making and the operational efficiency that drive top-line revenue and bottom-line profitability. Most classic BI

capabilities are at par (reporting, ad-hoc analysis, OLAP), what customers are missing is the link of BI to decision-making or action orientation. To resolve this gap customers are increasingly turning to innovative solutions to fill usability and time-to-value needs unmet by the larger vendors.

Kavaii EPM solution provides an automated easy to use, quick to deploy solution that leverages and complements existing business intelligence deployments, providing high ROI for customers. Traditionally, these activities are carried out by analyst teams who work with disparate data sources, different departments within the organization, and use data transformations often in cumbersome

spreadsheet analysis which presents data manually. This is slow, error-prone and is unable to gather and deliver the required roll-ups and drill-downs for efficient organizational management, on a real-time basis. The complaint from management often is that “We don’t get the answers we want, but the data they’ve got”.

Kavaii is a pure-play analytics shop that provides automated solutions to analyze data and make decision-making informed and timely. Kavaii brings the expertise and experience of business intelligence and analytics technology, design of dashboards, and an analytics design framework to offer a complete solution, across many verticals. Kavaii delivers actionable insights at 1/10^th the cost and 1/10^th the time than comparable approaches. Kavaii automates data analysis traditionally done with Excel, which is manual, cumbersome, error prone and often a bottleneck in effective and timely decision-making.

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There are several areas where decision makers are not able to get to actionable analysis when they need it. This has been a common refrain, over the past 10 years at least, ever since the advent of business intelligence solutions, and their popularity since then in large enterprises. Often, large ERP and CRM

implementations are mistaken for providing effective analytics, where their main function is to provide streamlining of operations, and help the business do its regular chores. Also, some BI implementation that is offered is often an

afterthought, without thought given to the data needed or the key performance indicators (KPIs) important for the decision makers. This is where we hear complaints from CxOs not getting what they want (strategic insights), but getting what’s available (operational data), which are very different.

How does one approach an analytics implementation for enterprise performance management? Perhaps the following dialogs are familiar to you.

I’m building my own Business Intelligence (BI) or data analytics group?

 Wouldn’t it be nice if I could get started with a solution by in-sourcing skills and a solution stack built on open source which I can myself support or get supported.

I’m a business having problems in managing and analyzing data, and data is growing?

 Can I get some help set up a simple automated solution, quickly and at low cost, for data analytics. Who would I approach with the necessary solution and expertise?

I’m growing out of spreadsheets as a tool to access and display strategic data and metrics on demand, and my key stakeholders rely on me to provide them timely data

 Can someone help automate, organize, and display key performance indicators and dashboards in aiding strategic decision makers and my stakeholders?

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SimpleAnalytics^TM Solution, and Kavaii ScalableAnalytics^TM Solution. These solution blue prints are offered as a complete automated solution stack for enterprise performance management (EPM) – Key performance indicators (KPIs), data design, analytics portal, platform deployment. A right-sized

commodity hardware platform is also optionally available for high performance.

Previous Options

Several vendors provide enterprise performance management, corporate performance management, or business performance management solutions.

These have been highly customized solutions, often offered as add-ons to a much wider enterprise wide ERP implementation. As part of mega-projects, the scope of the key performance indicators used to monitor and report on the

performance of the business, are greatly diversified. This results in the inability to provide actionable insights to management on a real-time basis. The service arms of the product companies or consultants bring in a long lead time focus, with deployments that do not yield specific end-results, which a business analyst within the firm is expecting. There is some post-processing to be done to present the results to decision-makers. This negates the scalability of the implementation, where actionable finalized results can be shared across a wider body of planners and executioners in an agile organization.

For mid-market companies and departments within large organizations, it is hard to fathom the enterprise performance management offerings from the big

vendors, apart from the cost of deployment, and long lead times being prohibitive. There is a transition happening in the BI industry, where the

traditional players are at a disadvantage from their monolithic stacks. This is an opportunity for some pure-play data analytics companies to offer tailored

solutions providing actionable insights that are easy to use, quickly deployable, and low cost, offering a high ROI. According to a report on the use of analytics by mid-market companies –

“In many cases, mid-sized companies have already implemented traditional data warehousing offerings that may or may not provide the value they had hoped for. With the broadening of solutions targeted specifically to these organizations, the mid-market can now replace what isn’t working, add to their current environment, or look at new and emerging technologies as a way to stay ahead of their competitors.”

Kavaii EPM is a solution born out of experience in offering trusted advice to management on key business metrics, and actionable input on a daily or a

weekly basis. This means data is fresh, the intelligence is sharp, and the insights are actionable. This truly democratizes the power of EPM analytics by making it accessible to the masses, who can utilize its power to get more efficient and productive.

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software, advances in commodity computing and storage performance, and years of expertise in business intelligence, data mining, and high performance and distributed computing.

Kavaii EPM Solution Benefits

By being able to monitor performance through metrics that are meaningful for decision making, with internal benchmarks, and external industry averages, Kavaii’s EPM solution provides the following benefits

1. Provides critical KPIs and performance dashboard to top management for executive decisions in real-time

2. Benchmarks performance against industry standards and/or internally set organizational goals

3. Provides basis for strategic business planning

These benefits are realized by being able to see past trends and future trends across a variety of critical parameters, including – Top customers, sales pipeline vs. revenue shortfall, Revenue/Resource utilization, Customer value, Profitability, Billing, and Resource management, among others.

An example of the revenue contributions of the top 5 customers, accounting for 65% of the company revenue is given below. Charts in this category quickly are able to tell you the bulk of your revenue and margin contributors, and also how long the tail is of customers who contribute for less than 20% of the revenue, nonetheless important to have, to grow the next major contributor from, by growing penetration in a few of them.

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Figure 1. Dashboard for revenue showing top 5 customers account for large chunk (65%) of company revenue

Deployment

The Kavaii EPM solution can be deployed very flexibly with many platform options. First, a Kavaii SimpleAnalytics^TM Appliance is a complete hardware and software offering right-sized for the deployment. The hardware is offered with a choice of commodity x86 servers, with quad-core or oct-core processors, 32GB- 256GB of memory, 1TB – 8TB of disk, enough to host most mid-market

requirements for data analytics. This reduces the risk of deployment, and further improves ease of use for the customer through an integrated offering from Kavaii.

Among other options, in a departmental solution setting, the Kavaii EPM solution can be hosted on a workstation, provided as a data center or a private/ public cloud hosted solution, running either Linux or Windows. This platform flexibility is essentially obtained by having the solution interface with the customer through a web portal. For smaller implementations it can also be hosted on a laptop.

There’s of course a performance right-sizing that needs to be done before

suggesting the correct platform that meets the performance requirements -for the number of users accessing the reports on the solution platform, and the profile of the queries that put stress on the database, the compute cycles, memory size, and the disk or flash storage resources. Kavaii models this for you in the early phases of development of the statement of work.

For larger deployments, where data sizes are huge, in the orders of several tens of terabytes, a cloud hosted option, with the appropriate compute and storage resources associated, and paid on demand become more viable. This offers a compelling price performance and includes cloud bursting, where private cloud deployments can rely on public cloud resources for additional compute in the back-end. The Kavaii ScalableAnalytics^TM solution blueprint is an appropriate option for the Kavaii EPM solution. This uses distributed technologies in the cloud like hadoop, but offers the same user interface as would be with a non- cloud based, single-machine hosted solution. In other words, the scale needed to crunch data in real-time comes at no extra learning curve for the user, truly

democratizing the access to large compute and storage resources for everyone, without ever building their own datacenter with its associated high costs.

In essence, the deployment models of the Kavaii EPM solution is very flexible, and is right-sized to the requirements and the implementation constraints on hand.

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If you’ve been looking for a results and actions oriented metrics from your

business analysts team, and have often have had to wait for results, or not been served the business insights you’re looking for, the Kavaii EPM analytics solution is right for you. This solution is an essential tool for the business analyst team, which can use it to get to key results in real time, and also use it to be the single version of the truth, i.e. use it as a single repository of the raw data from multiple sources in the company.

Going further, the solution provides insights for your company’s performance against the industry averages, helping you to set strategy to increased market segment share, or better operational efficiency, growing both revenue and margin, or using your resources more efficiently. It’s an essential solution to increase your productivity as a leadership organization.

Kavaii EPM Solution is a very flexible solution to deploy and can be used in a wide variety of environments from a laptop to an installation of cloud computing.

Our focus is to approach the pain point you’re having, and simplify and integrate the technology, often based on open source, to make it easy to use, quick to deploy, and low cost, while solving your problem.

Kavaii EPM Solution

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Figure 2. Dashboard for Revenue showing top and bottom revenue customers and revenue charts by region and quarter.

About Kavaii

Kavaii Analytics captures the power of open source in its two end-to-end state-of- the-art analytics solution blue prints - Kavaii SimpleAnalytics^TM Solution, and Kavaii ScalableAnalytics^TM Solution, applied across various industries. These solutions deliver ease of use, quick time to deployment, and low cost, to provide high ROA for mid-market organizations.

Kavaii’s analytics solutions utilize the best of breed technologies, and are offered in multiple industries to improve operational efficiency, enterprise profitability, and employee productivity. Some examples industries are - IT Services sector,

Technology companies, Consumer electronics, Retail, Telecom services, Healthcare, and Banking.

Get our perspective on analytics by visiting http://kavaii.com or send email to [email protected]

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Data Analytics Solution for Enterprise Performance Management

Data Analytics Solution for Enterprise Performance Management

Kavaii Analytics Team

passion for data