Calumo - Business Intelligence and Performance Management Blog

One of our clients recently showed me this report. Names and numbers have been changed, but in my conversation with them, they were very excited about it and it was clearly an important source of information for them. Their Revenue Analysis Dashboard gives them an immediate window and insight into their top performing regions, clients, products and sectors.

Look at the drop-down lists to see how they can drill deeper into any region, product or sector (I need to ask them why they don't need to dig deeper into client, but if they wanted to, a client drop-down could be added to the dashboard in 5 minutes). Other variables on the report can also be changed (time, currency, etc), so each country can see their data in local currency and head office can consolidate in any currency. They can also look at current or prior period performance or any aggregation of time (eg last quarter, or last year).

Every CALUMO report that uses drop-downs is in effect many reports. In this case, this single report represents thousands of potential combinations.

The data is securely stored in SQL Server, while the dashboard is a simple CALUMO web page for fast, secure, scalable reporting available anywhere. Being a dynamic report, when any variables change, the top ten results are updated and sorted on the fly. Naturally they also have a bottom-ten report for badly performing and unprofitable regions, clients, products and sectors.

Our client also uses CALUMO for convenient and rapid data collection during their planning, budget and forecasting cycles. Furthermore, CALUMO is used for guided self-service analytics. With its excellent query performance, analysis can be refined produced immediately, leading to even clearer insights and smarter actions.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME’s to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

Controlling the Cost of Compliance with CALUMO

The National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007 was passed in September 2007 establishing a mandatory reporting system for corporate greenhouse gas emissions and energy production and consumption. The first reporting period under the Act commenced July 2008 with reports due in July 2009.

Key features of the Act are:

• Reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption and production by large corporations.
• Public disclosure of corporate level greenhouse gas emissions and energy information.

The Calumo and Elwyn groups in conjunction with CIO’s and Sustainability Experts from front running organisations have collaborated to develop an environmental reporting platform to enable corporations to meet the initial reporting requirements.

While the specific detail regarding the format and substance of the reporting requirements have not yet been fully locked down, it is clear that organisations will be required to capture, analyse and report on those operations of their organisation that have significant energy consumption or generation.

We expect that as the new legislation evolves over the introductory period organisations must be able to quickly adapt to the inevitable iterations that will flow from both global and local imperatives. This reality informed the design of our Environmental Reporting platform to offer;

1. quick and highly adaptable implementation to minimise the cost of expected changes to the Act during the introductory period 
2. a one-stop shop for data capture and all environmental reporting
3. flexibility to enable data to be collected from existing ERP and operational data sources
4. multiple hierarchy reporting platform to enable look-through transparency of information and accountability
5. qualitative (via commentary and traffic light reporting) capability to allow management to better interrogate the information.

About the Elwyn Group
Elwyn Group is a boutique consulting firm specialising in reporting solutions to medium and large organisations utilising pre-existing or custom developed solutions.  

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

SYDNEY,- 3 November, 2008 — After taking the difficult commercial decision to substantially change their Business Intelligence technology stack in February of this year, University of New South Wales have taken out a little time at the conclusion of their annual planning process to celebrate what has been achieved.

Reflecting on the process the UNSW Finance Division stated “This project has and will continue to be the catalyst for very positive change at UNSW. The UNSW team, with CALUMO’s expert guidance, are delivering a platform that enables us to maximise the financial resources available to support our teaching and research priorities more effectively and in minimal time.”

“The time frame from commencement to yielding real business value was astonishingly short.  The University environment is very demanding and complex; the flexibility and performance of CALUMO has been excellent.  It’s a breath of fresh air for the user community and the University was proud to be supporting world-class Australian innovation in Business Intelligence.”

CALUMO Group CEO Dominic Parsons said “As an academic institution there is a great deal at stake for the future in laying a platform that will enable the institution to effectively deliver on its vision.  Working with the University has been a special opportunity for us and the combination of their staff, senior sponsorship and our delivery teams has produced a benchmark result.”

The UNSW system is serving 250 users with critical information in frequencies ranging from daily and monthly to quarterly and annually.  It allows for collaboration across that broad range of users both for reporting and contribution to future financial and academic resourcing plans.

Summing up from the teams’ perspective MIS Manager Alister Cairns added “We are saving considerable time in administration compared with other products in the market. CALUMO’s simplicity of design and openness allows us a flexible system that we can use for data collection, analysis and reporting on a wide range of data. There are no unnecessary administration programs, and thus native Analysis Services, SSIS and SQL Server are used to develop and administer applications (Cubes, fact tables, data sources, dimensions etc.)”

“The CALUMO reporting frontend is intuitive and flexible in that we have a range of options for delivery to our wide ranging user community. We can use a web portal, Excel, deliver PDF's or hard coded excel reports. It is open for us to decide on our options for the data we choose to analyse, the user experience and administration.”

UNSW is using Microsoft and CALUMO Business Intelligence solution for their annual budgeting cycle, management reporting and forecasting.  The value return from BI increases exponentially with deployment.  Over the next 12 months UNSW are planning to further expand their BI platform to incorporate additional reporting and scorecarding.

About the University of New South Wales
UNSW was established in 1949 and now has close to 40,000 students, including more than 7000 international students from over 130 different countries. UNSW has an annual turnover of $1 billion and employs over 5000 staff. UNSW is a founding member of the prestigious Group of Eight research intensive universities in Australia and a member of the Universities 21 international consortium

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

On Feb 14, 2008 New York City unveiled a new online performance management system they called "Citywide Performance Reporting" (CPR). CPR takes 500 key performance indicators, which are updated monthly, and makes them available to the public online. You can visit the New York CPR site here.

With an annual budget of US$58.5 billion, NYC is many times larger than Australia's largest council; however the performance management challenges faced by NYC are still comparable to those faced by Australian local government agencies.

The New York City press release said: "CPR is the culmination of more than two years of work coordinated by the Office of Operations, and involving more than 40 City agencies." The three key benefits of CPR can be summarised as follows:

1. CPR uses a standardized reporting format across all agencies and all data types, and provides a single point of access for all users.
2. CPR aggregates data across agency into "citywide themes," which represent groups of related services such as infrastructure, education, or public safety.
3. CPR will identify problem areas and improve service delivery. It is another step in improving transparency and customer service for New Yorkers.

You can read the full press release here.

Notably, these 3 benefits are very similar to the challenges faced by Australian Local Government agencies. The stated 3 key benefits of the CALUMO Local Government Performance Management Solutions" are as follows:

1. Integrate and transform multiple data sources into highly informative metrics and KPI reports for performance management of diverse and competitive Council operations.
2. Provide open and transparent reporting for improved governance and stakeholder management.
3. Provide planning and reporting from a single reliable source, satisfying a council’s strategic, organisational and compliance requirements.

The following is a screen shot of one of NYC’s online performance reports:

Whilst I have several criticisms of how the CPR data is presented and ultimately therefore it's value to the end-user, I only want to point out two flaws in CPR, which are specifically claimed in the press release as benefits.

1. "CPR is trend-based, not target-based. It compares current performance to performance during the same time last year providing a short-term performance trend or "snapshot", intended to be used for real-time decision-making."
   In our opinion, comparing current performance to the same time last year does not provide a meaningful trend and I doubt it could be used for real-time decision-making.
2. "CPR will offer graphical representation of performance, including pie charts to make performance trends easy to identify."
   CPR includes only pie charts. Pie charts are not typically used to identify trends. Pie charts are also often criticized for taking up too much space on a page and that it is not easy to visually compare the size of each slice.

I have provided below an example of the equivalent CPR report from CALUMO Local Government Performance Management Solutions.

(click on image to enlarge)

CALUMO Local Government Performance Management Solutions deliver the functionality Councils need to achieve their many internal planning and reporting objectives. It delivers open and transparent reporting for improved governance and stakeholder management.