Our mission is to create good BI applications. What do we mean by it? A high-quality application must reflect following aspects.
Covering business information needs - Is your business using custom KPIs to measure the success ratio of your sales reps, performance of your logistic processes, sickness rate of your employees or fault rate of your devices? Or do you need operational reports showing data from multiple source systems combined? Satisfying all these information needs is the top priority at design and implementation of any BI application – here we don’t compromise.
Stable and robust - Average BI application usually combines data from multiple source systems, performing their reconciliation, transformation and cleansing, even generates new data and applies some business logic to deliver a useful information to end user. Many problems can occur on this way – from source system downtimes, network failure to inconsistent user input or corrupt source data. With us, an analysis of possible risks is an inherent part of design and prototyping phase. The best way to a robust application is a clean and simple design of it’s components and elimination of dependencies between them. For us, the application is perfect, if you cannot eliminate any part of it without compromising business requirements. We always seek to incorporate fallback mechanisms and alerts for any exceptional states which can be anticipated at design time direct into the processing logic of your application.
Performant and scalable - The performance of a BI application has been one of the biggest issues in respect to user’s acceptance for long years. Even if these issues have mostly been solved with in memory technologies (SAP HANA), we still consider performance aspects as a central factor of success. Thanks to many implementations we can design optimal data model, prepared for future growth in data volume. We make extensive use of semantic data partitioning and methods if information life cycle in BI. At the heart of business logic, we use modern programming approaches for optimal data access and logic pushdown to in-memory database. We can support the application with a detailed telemetry which gives as detailed overview of application performance in real time.
Flexible and maintainable -It is a well-known fact, that the biggest portion of overall cost of a BI application is not generated at initial development phase, but rather during productive operation, maintenance and further development. Life goes on after application go-live, brings changes on daily bases, new users, new use cases, business or legislation requirements. Therefore, we always strive to hand over an application, which doesn’t work as black box, but rather an open system of well documented parts. We design the individual components to be reusable in other applications and processes. At design time we analyze, which parts of business logic are likely to undergo future changes and make these parts customizable. However, the most important factor for future maintainability are you – your IT administrators and key users. Therefore, we involve them right from the beginning and we stay online for them after application handover and go-live.
Modern, simple and responsive - Every product is partially sold by it’s design. The overall look-and-feel must be fine-tuned for a particular type of user – whether it’s a high-level dashboard for top and middle management, ad hoc analysis tool for an analyst or operational report for the controller, all these types of users have special needs and usage patterns. Thanks to our front-end specialists we can deliver state of art solutions for web, mobile and desktop, either based on SAP or open source technologies, keeping a uniform corporate design throughout different tools and environments.
Well integrated - A new BI application becomes a part of your system landscape, it’s parts will be used by other application and managed by your personnel. Therefore, it is very important to respect your existing rules, guidelines, documentation requirements, your existing best practices for data exchange e.g. an existing middleware or a broader cross-system authorization concept.
Safe - Application security is a complex topic which needs to be addressed globally within the overall landscape architecture. For your BI application we can tailor the authorization concept inline with your general guidelines. We can build highly personalized authorizations for users based on their position assignments, cost center responsibility or any custom business logic and automate the role provisioning based on these rules.
Automated, requiring minimum of manual activities - We often see legacy applications requiring a long list of manual periodical activities, performed by highly trained a narrowly specialized staff – e.g. manual data loads, archiving runs, closings or informing users about system. We think most of these tasks can be taken over by the technology itself and we consider the automation of them to be one of our responsibilities. We see the administrator’s role in monitoring, performing system upgrades and solving unexpected situations.
Created with passion - The most important point at last – we do our job with passion. It shows in small details as well as on overall result.
