Giving your customers a load of BI |
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By Barney Beal, News Writer
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Maybe you wouldn't eat sausage if you knew how it was made, but Odom's Tennessee Pride Sausage
Inc.'s retail stores, sales force and cost accounting want to know what's making their
business.
That's why the Madison, Tenn.-based company extends its business intelligence beyond the
firewall, specifically, its sales and revenue data to its outside sales force, said Michael Hader,
IT manager. However, the company has also begun doing more with its retail store customers and its
brokers.
Odom's is beta testing new features in the e.Spreadsheet application from South San
Francisco-based Actuate Corp. Available in the first quarter of 2005, the product includes a
cell-locking capability that prevents users from changing predefined fields in a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet and a Matrix Script tool that allows users to display hierarchical performance data in
Excel. Both tools are aimed at improving visibility and regulatory compliance.
"Excel is public enemy No. 1 from a compliance officer's standpoint," said Michael Thoma, vice
president of product marketing for Actuate. "The solution we're providing is a managed Excel. We
think there's a huge opportunity for companies to go to users outside the firewall."
That's just what attracted Hader. Odom's selected Actuate because of how it could extend
reports, he said. The company has provided customers and suppliers with Actuate reports as .pdf
files as requested or through a Web portal. Now customers and salespeople can run their own
analysis on an Excel spreadsheet, without the danger of changing important numbers and throwing the
spreadsheet out of whack.
"The grander picture with spreadsheets is there's a certain level of abuse that results from
using them," said Philip Russom, principal analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research
Inc. "It's pretty easy to alter a formula or a value either on purpose or accidentally. It's a
widespread problem and has been for years. If someone alters a value or formula in a spreadsheet,
suddenly that spreadsheet is inaccurate. Public statements made from that can lead to significant
legal ramifications."
Another pitfall with the traditional method of sharing a spreadsheet and e-mailing it around the
office is that it is difficult to track changes and determine where the most current document
is.
If organizations truly want to share BI throughout the enterprise, and with customers and
partners, they need a collaborative method that allows users to share information with one
another.
"Typically, just getting data in is a one-way trip," Russom said. "If you don't give users
controlled access, they're going to hack their way into the database and get that data any way they
can. I've done this myself."
Thoma cites a recent report from Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Corp. that said by
2005, half of the Global 9000 companies will be doing extranet reporting, with users made up of 44%
customers, 31% partners and 25% suppliers.
Current efforts to extend BI are homegrown extensions that create a query or a report and then
extend that to a file for customers, Russom said.
"It's pretty low-end or manual," he said. "A lot is being done in an ad hoc manner by business
users. It's not repeatable or consistent."
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