Finalists to Present at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit in Los Angeles, May 2-4

Gartner, Inc. announced today the three finalists of the Gartner Business Intelligence Excellence Awards. The finalists are Elie Tahari, Yahoo! and UPS.

Each finalist will be asked to present their BI/PM use case to summit delegates at the Gartner BI Summit 2011 on May 3, 2011 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, Los Angeles, CA. Summit participants will have the ability to vote for the finalist demonstrating the best example of BI excellence. From this feedback the winner will be selected and announced at the summit.

The award recognizes the most successful recent BI implementations by organizations that demonstrate high levels of business impact and overall excellence in the integration of business, decision, analytical and information processes.

"As business becomes increasingly more complex, the right combinations of information, coupled with the next generation of business analytics, will provide the means for faster, smarter and more consistent decision making, continuous improvements to business performance and greater efficiencies across the organization.,” said John Hagerty, vice president and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. “The strategies put forth by these finalists not only showed a consistently high level of benefits in terms of dollars saved, but also improvements to performance and efficiency across the organization. These case studies are great examples of the best practices needed to pursue successful BI objectives.”

These three companies will present their case studies during the BI Summit:

• Elie Tahari: Elie Tahari is a New York-based global fashion brand. Operating in a fast changing market, the company needed faster and more actionable information to speed decision making. Elie Tahari used IBM BI products such as Cognos, TM1 and SPSS to create a seamless reporting framework and BI dashboards that provide granular, real-time information from the sales floor to its supplier’s inventory and production schedules, reducing operational costs and increasing business process efficiency.
• Yahoo! : Yahoo! brings personal meaning to the web by connecting over 640 million users to the digital content that matters most to them by processing massive amounts of data to deliver personalized experiences to consumers. To deliver the most relevant advertising, Yahoo!'s data and analytics team developed the largest known MOLAP using SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services. This is a comprehensive, enterprise scale analytics solution used to drive ROI for Yahoo!'s advertisers and yield for Yahoo!'s publishers. It leverages Yahoo!'s large Hadoop grid clusters to do data processing to prepare data to load into the cube.
• UPS:Thanks to the effective use of BI, UPS developed a technology suite, Package Flow Technology, which has enabled the company to realize significant business benefits in its U.S. small package operation. The company has shaved 30 million miles annually off the miles driven by its U.S. fleet, saving 3 million gallons of fuel each year while eliminating 30,000 metric tons of Co2 as well as reducing training time for new employees from three weeks to one day. UPS has also improved customer service by enhancing a customer's visibility into package delivery and by deploying innovative new services that wouldn't be possible without excellent BI..

Runners Up were also selected:
Semi Finalists:

Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc: The Product Quality Assurance/Technical Support business unit at Toyota has teamed with IS to introduce BI technology (Endeca Latitude) that has enabled the capability to perform analysis across ragged hierarchies of both structured and unstructured data. Delivered at a fraction of the cost of typical data warehouse/reporting solutions, data from multiple internal and external systems is combined in a common interface to assist engineers in their analysis of potential quality defects. Analysis is enabled across more than75 dimensions against more than 50 million records, allowing the engineers to quickly navigate from alerts to individual transactions correlated across input systems. The solution is expected to save 800,000 hours annually in query processing time.

Southeast Texas Medical Associates, LLP: The company adopted IBM’s COGNOS’s BI solution to advance the SETMA Model of Healthcare which tracks quality metrics on each patient seen, auditing of the provider performance on populations of patients, analyzing of that data to discover leverage points for improving care; public reporting by provider name at www.setma.com of performance; designing of quality initiatives basis of this data analysis. This has allowed SETMA to improve mean Hemoglobin A1Cs from 7.65 percent in 2000 to 6.54 percent in 2011 and standard deviations from 1.98 to 1.2 in the same period, while eliminating ethnic disparities of care.

The Boeing Company: The Boeing Defense, Space & Security Finance Data Warehouse deployed IBM’s COGNOS 10 reporting to 4,000 users around the world. The company used Trigger-Based Scheduling techniques and “helper applications” from Cognos partners to facilitate security, content, and licensing administration, plus simplified web portal design and advanced user training & support techniques facilitated rapid user adoption and minimized training & support costs.

Honorable Mention: Con-Way

The identification of a Gartner Award winner or finalist is not an endorsement by Gartner of any vendor, product or service. More information on the Gartner BI Excellence Awards is available at http://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/na/business-intelligence/excellence-awards.jsp or on the Gartner BI Summit Web site at www.gartner.com/us/bi.

About Gartner Business Intelligence Summit
The Gartner BI Summit, being held May 2-4 in Los Angeles, provides the insights, frameworks and best practices to implement BI, analytics and performance management initiatives that drive better decision-making and business performance across the organization. Through a unique mix of analyst and peer interaction, it helps make the case, drive adoption, create and sustain successful BI strategies. Members of the media can register by contacting Christy Pettey at christy.pettey@gartner.com. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/us/bi.