BlueGranite's clients are diverse, ranging from mid-market to large enterprise organizations across multiple industries and markets including automotive, consumer goods, retail, education, manufacturing, healthcare, and wholesale/distribution.  The following is a set of solution briefs for projects we have delivered for our clients.  If you'd like more information please contact us and we'd be happy to share more examples and details.

$500M division of Medical Device Manufacturer

• Solution:  Executive dashboards, management reports, and performance analysis for senior business unit executives.  The solution delivers up-to-the-minute visibility of key sales and financial metrics, such as orders ($), quota attainment, year-over-year growth, discounts, and profit margin.  Targeted analysis reveals insight around top and bottom performing sales regions/territories and product categories.
• Result:  Previously, to gain a comprehensive view of business performance, the team needed to access a variety of reports from multiple operational and reporting systems.  Reports were cumbersome to build, requiring specific domain and technical knowledge, resulting in a significant report backlog, and many "one-off" reports which cluttered the reporting portal.  The new solution consolidates performance data in a single repository, and the mix of dashboards, analytical views, and structured reports, provides a seamless experience from monitoring key metrics through advanced data analysis.  The flexibility of the solution facilitates "self-service" BI, which reduces the reporting backlog on IT.
• Technologies:  SharePoint 2007, PerformancePoint Server 2007, SQL Server 2005, Office Excel 2007
   

 $2B Healthcare organization with 200 facilities nationwide

• Solution: Financial dashboard for corporate operations, divisional vice presidents, and facility managers.  The solution collects information from source systems such as Lawson, and combines that information into a central data warehouse.  Analytical cubes then power a series of scorecards, charts, and reports that managers can use on a daily basis to get up-to-date results.
• Result: The solution helps "close the gap" for month-end financial performance, giving information on a daily basis that executives and managers can respond to.  Managers can now see the correlation between good clinical performance and good financial performance.  The solution saves leaders time in their facilities, so they can spend more time with facility patients and their families instead of hunting down reports.
• Technologies: SharePoint 2007 Enterprise, SQL Server 2005 Enterprise, Office Excel 2007

$7.5B Retail-based organization, 25 regions and 2200 stores

• Solution:  Reporting and analytics solution for sales services groups for a "big box" retailer organization with multiple regions, stores and brands.  Dashboard pages show key sales and inventory metrics such as comp sales, units, COGS, GM%, and WOS with year over year comparisons for week-to-date, month-to-date, year-to-date, and rolling 52 week results.
• Result:  The team used to sort through hundreds of reports, and contact IT to develop new reports for every new question/need.  Now, sales specialists and operational brand managers utilize monitoring & analysis tools integrated with point-of-sale data, providing consolidated views of product sales, margins, and inventory across all product brands, regions, and store locations.  What used to take a day to track down now takes 15 seconds.  Information can then be easily shared through the collaboration portal, or extracted directly into Excel.
• Technologies: SharePoint 2007 Enterprise, SQL Server 2005 Enterprise, Office Excel 2007

Charter school education organization with 35,000 students

• Solution:  Reporting and analytics solution driven by the need for improved insight into school performance. One of the most significant is an increased expectation for accountability. The stakeholders in education — from parents to teachers to administrators and even taxpayers — need to know how their school is performing.
• Result:  Accurate, timely and integrated data helps administrators and superintendents see and understand correlations between expenditures and student performance.  Analysts now have a more efficient workflow.  Instead of spending the majority of their day assembling data from a variety of different sources, they are able to focus energy on tackling important issues related to student learning using a single source of truth. 
• Technologies:  SQL Server 2005 Enterprise, Office Excel 2007