Published on 05-Dec-2011
"We wanted an affordable solution that would give us timely results, and IBM Cognos Express technology, implemented by our trusted advisors at LPA Systems, helped us achieve that. Both IBM Cognos Express and LPA were integral in implementing a versatile, easy to use, reporting platform, completely set up in only two weeks." - Gavin Rasco, Director of Marketing, Mentoring Minds
Customer:
Mentoring Minds
Industry:
Education
Deployment country:
United States
Solution:
Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Optimizing IT
IBM Business Partner:
LPA Systems
Overview
Founded nine years ago by an assistant principal who wanted to give teachers quicker access to state standards in Texas, Mentoring Minds has become a noted educational publisher. Since then, the company has grown significantly, today doing business with educational institutions around the world. With a team of exceptional teachers, curriculum coordinators and administrators, Mentoring Minds is dedicated to developing quality educational products designed to help teachers instruct children to think critically for effective problem-solving.
Business need:
Texas-based educational publisher Mentoring Minds was struggling with the cost and complexity of its reporting process. Its IT and marketing departments were spending 12 working weeks per year generating reports, which drew upon data collected from a number of different sources.
Solution:
With help from LPA Systems and IBM® Cognos® Express, Mentoring Minds consolidated, accelerated and automated its reporting process, significantly increasing productivity by reducing reporting time from a minimum of one week to instantaneous results for faster decision-making.
Benefits:
Empowers end users to generate their own reports at the click of a button, saving marketing and IT departments approximately 12 weeks per year previously spent manually creating reports. Uses up-to-the-minute data generated by the IBM Cognos platform to better analyze business projections to make better business decisions. Saved on the cost of upgrading multiple reporting platforms by implementing one versatile and easy-to-use BI platform.
Case Study
Founded nine years ago by an assistant principal who wanted to give teachers quicker access to state standards in Texas, Mentoring Minds has become a noted educational publisher. Since then, the company has grown significantly, today doing business with educational institutions around the world. With a team of exceptional teachers, curriculum coordinators and administrators, Mentoring Minds is dedicated to developing quality educational products designed to help teachers instruct children to think critically for effective problem-solving.
Challenge
Mentoring Minds previously relied on a manual spreadsheet-based system to generate individual reports, but as the company grew, the cost and complexity of the reporting process were increasing significantly. Mentoring Minds’ marketing and IT departments spent the equivalent of 12 working weeks each year on generating reports for end users, with each report taking at least one week to complete. In addition, data was starting to come from a variety of different sources, and needed to be combined in order to deliver actionable insights.
Mentoring Minds wanted to merge its data with a fast, automated and intuitive platform so it could be more easily analyzed by end users – freeing its marketing and IT departments from the time-consuming process of developing and presenting reports and allowing other users to gain more insight into the business. In order to achieve this, the company needed to implement a professional business intelligence (BI) solution.
Approach
Leverage LPA’s experience and expertise to implement an upgraded and automated BI platform in just two weeks.
Purchase the affordable and effective IBM Cognos Express Reporter module.
Consolidate all reporting sources onto one easy-to-use program that automatically generates the numerous reports required by business users.
Impact
- Merge data from all sources onto one easily managed platform for faster analysis and action.
- Significantly upgrade reporting capabilities with the automated and versatile IBM Cognos Express technology.
- Empower all end users with the ability to generate and analyze specific reports enabling actionable insight.
- Reduce report generation from one week per report to a few seconds for any number of reports that can be generated immediately by end users.
- Save marketing and IT team the 12 weeks per year they would have spent creating and analyzing reports, saving $20,000.
- Significantly save on funds that would have been spent to update several reporting platforms.
- As its business has grown, Mentoring Minds now has reports for all aspects of its business from one source of data to better analyze the data and to make better business decisions, faster.
About IBM Business Analytics
IBM Business Analytics software delivers actionable insights decision-makers need to achieve better business performance. IBM offers a comprehensive, unified portfolio of business intelligence, predictive and advanced analytics, financial performance and strategy management, governance, risk and compliance and analytic applications.
With IBM software, companies can spot trends, patterns and anomalies, compare “what if” scenarios, predict potential threats and opportunities, identify and manage key business risks and plan, budget and forecast resources. With these deep analytic capabilities our customers around the world can better understand, anticipate and shape business outcomes.
For more information
For further information or to reach a representative please visit ibm.com/analytics.
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software:
Cognos Express Reporter
Legal Information
IBM Corporation Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 US Government Users Restricted Rights - Use, duplication or disclosure restricted by GSA ADP Schedule Contract with IBM Corp. Produced in the United States of America. November 2011 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, and Cognos are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol (® or ™), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at: ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml. Other product, company or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates.