Case Studies
PushBI Mobile
Client: Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division
The Business Situation:
Improve Access: In order to increase employee productivity, improve customer service and maintain a competitive advantage, Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division needed a new way to deliver key performance indicators and business metrics related to its Xbox Live video service, to users across the organization.
Existing methods for distributing performance data were cumbersome, time-consuming, and failed to meet the needs of end users. The lack of access to real-time metrics made it difficult to provide their customers with the level of insight necessary to make informed decisions.
Technical Challenge:
Impaired Access: Key stakeholders with frequent travel demands were impaired by the lengthy process of starting up their laptop, connecting to the Internet, initiating a remote access (RAS) connection and ultimately searching for time-sensitive data required to do their job efficiently. The bottleneck created a lack of access to the rhythm of the business data needed for measuring and monitoring key metrics on the fly. In addition, the data sharing process was not user friendly or reflective to a customer’s natural ability to process and manage data.
There were two distinct requirements in solving the technical challenge:
- Leveraging our customer’s existing BI infrastructure (empathizing cost control measures) and
- Understanding how to deploy intuitive, quick and easy to adopt, Personalized Business Intelligence.
Solution:
Ignite Access: Entertainment and Devices’ Business Intelligence team reached out to Extended Results to provide a naturally intuitive solution that would dramatically improve upon the cumbersome process in which business information was distributed, consumed and shared.
Working collaboratively, we proposed PushBI Desktop, a near real-time Windows-based gadget that would support the existing backend databases and adopt a more personal approach, right from the customer’s desktop. Leveraging existing metrics as defined within SQL Analysis Services and simplifying the data delivery process was core to our focus for the customer. PushBI Desktop immediately fulfilled their needs.
Understanding what end users really needed was a BI tool that worked the way they worked – mobile and available on-demand, Extended Results developed PushBI Mobile to deliver key business metrics, in a personalized format, directly to the employee’s mobile phone.
The PushBI Mobile solution provided Entertainment and Devices users with the ability to utilize their existing key performance indicators, already defined within their SQL Server 2008 database and deliver the actionable metrics to the customer via their mobile device.
Leveraging existing data, simplifying the delivery process and delivering it to the end user in a format they could understand was core to our focus for the customer. PushBI Mobile immediately solved the need for near real-time access to:
- User-selected metrics/KPIs
- Drill-down to view historical trends
- Quick and easy performance summaries
- Actionable insights to rich data easily accessible
Additional Benefits:
- Easy-to-use Interface
- Leverages existing data warehouse solutions
- Immediate ROI
Customer Encore:
"Now I don’t have to call or e-mail someone to find out what is going on in the business."