White Paper. BusinessObjects XI. Redefining How Information Empowers Users

Transcription

1 White Paper BusinessObjects XI Redefining How Information Empowers Users

2 Author: Contributors: Audience: Darren Cunningham Cortney Claiborne, Jen Meegan, David Townley CIO, database administrators, report authors, data warehouse managers, business intelligence managers Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users

3 Contents Executive Summary iv BusinessObjects XI: An End-to-End Overview Meet the Needs of All Users Reporting Universal Integration Report Design and Development Innovation Embedded Reporting Query and Analysis Extending Analysis and Interactivity Wider Adoption, Better (and Faster) Decisions Taking Advantage of Multidimensional Data Performance Management Performance Management Applications The Business Intelligence Platform The Semantic Layer Data Integration From Data Sources to Dashboards Conclusion Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users iii

4 Executive Summary The HR department wants to track turnover by geography and monitor monthly hiring costs Line of business managers want to track daily performance and analyze the efficiency of the supply chain Sales managers want to know which regions are offering the most discounts and how that affects their quota Business partners want to know which products are selling the fastest so they can guarantee deliveries Senior executives want to make sure the charts in their PowerPoint presentations don t result in meeting meltdowns because nobody agrees on the data provided Do any of these situations sound familiar? Can you deliver integrated and reliable information inside and outside your organization in a format that all users can understand? And are you able to do so from a single management console that allows you to support your reporting, query and analysis, and performance management end-user requirements? Introducing BusinessObjects XI. With BusinessObjects XI, you can go beyond the limits of traditional business intelligence (BI) suites. By extending the reach of information to all users in your organization, BusinessObjects XI redefines the way your organization captures and shares knowledge. Users get the information they need in a way they understand. And best of all, information is delivered within their current environment, where they work accurately and securely. BusinessObjects XI allows you to track key business metrics in real time; understand which actions to take based on timely delivery of trusted data; and manage your operations efficiently and effectively through better visibility and information transparency. iv Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users

5 BusinessObjects XI: An End-to-End Overview BusinessObjects XI delivers extreme insight through specialized end-user tools on a single, trusted business intelligence platform. BusinessObjects XI includes the industry s best reporting, query and analysis, and performance management dashboards, scorecards, and applications. These integrated end-user interfaces are supported by the most reliable, scalable, flexible, and manageable BI platform, and complemented by unified data integration. BusinessObjects XI delivers extreme insight on a trusted BI platform. End users have better business visibility with BusinessObjects XI. They can feel confident that they are achieving their goals on time, and they can easily align individual and group actions and decisions to the broader organizational strategy. Thanks to a unified view of enterprise performance, end users can measure what matters most and monitor individual and operational goals and metrics through intuitive, interactive, and visual displays of information. BusinessObjects XI allows the IT department to integrate BI into any infrastructure and embed secure components into virtually any application. With its adaptive, services-oriented architecture, broad data access, end-to-end metadata, and centralized, web-based administration BusinessObjects XI is the best platform to standardize on for all your BI needs and to embed into your existing applications. Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users 1

6 Meet the Needs of All Users Different user segments have different information needs. The cornerstone of an organizational BI strategy must address the requirements for operational reporting, the more interactive requirements of query and analysis, and the summarized view that performance management dashboards and scorecards provide. Authoring Requirements Reporting Query and Analysis Performance Management Offline design environment Banded report layout Pixel-perfect formatting Open developer standards Web-based query creation Rich semantic layer to mask database complexity Centralized business definitions and security Minimal IT involvement Graphical dashboard design Metric trees, analytic templates, and other graphical display options User and role-based dashboard security Access to third-party content within dashboards Role: Developer, designer, IT analyst Role: Ad hoc business analyst Role: IT/business analyst, executive, line of business manager Consumption Requirements Web-based thin client Interactive navigation and search Highly formatted information Ability to receive reports via any application ( , Outlook, within other software packages) Flexible prompting, filtering, and guided analysis Web-based thin-client Flexible ad hoc interactivity Ability to ask spontaneous, and iterative questions Access to historical data for trending Personalized dashboard and scorecard interface Ability to easily connect goals to strategy Link to root-cause reporting and analysis Automated, rules-based alerting Information relied upon to run and manage the enterprise. Information relied upon to understand how the enterprise is performing. Information relied upon to drive enterprise performance through alignment and visibility. BusinessObjectsXI End-User Tools Crystal Reports BusinessObjects Enterprise Web Intelligence OLAP Intelligence Dashboard Manager Performance Manager BI end users require either highly formatted reports that answer known and predefined questions, or interactive reports that allow them to ask spontaneous and iterative questions. For example, while many users will only need to receive reports, others will need sophisticated query and analysis capabilities, and some will need both. Some users will simply want a snapshot of enterprise performance and predefined analytic content. These requirements will not only influence how you deliver BI to your different user communities, they will also influence the information infrastructure that must be in place to support them. With specific requirements for production reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, and performance management, your organization needs optimized end-user interfaces for each specification in order to maximize both IT and end-user productivity. Additionally, as BI becomes more strategic and enterprise in scope, more and more organizations will begin providing graphical dashboard and scorecard information displays that consolidate and deliver actionable information critical to enterprise performance. These dashboards and scorecards deliver advanced visual components that can be easily personalized and linked to analytical or operational reports. This ensures that key metrics always map to underlying measures, and individual goals map to organizational strategy. 2 Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users

7 Reporting Reporting (or enterprise reporting) is the process of accessing, formatting, and delivering data as information inside and outside the organization. It serves as the foundation of a broader BI strategy by reliably and securely providing the most-requested pieces of information via the web or embedded in enterprise applications. An operational or enterprise reporting solution is ideal in situations where questions are predefined and the structure of each answer is fairly well known in advance. In this case, the majority of users are information consumers who want snapshots of business activity. Developers and designers create reports that answer the most regularly-asked questions and distribute them to hundreds or potentially thousands of users. Some examples of these reports include account statements, invoices, regulatory reports, inventory run rates, and standard internal reports. This information is ideal for sharing securely with customers, partners, and suppliers outside the organization. Universal Integration Crystal Reports XI delivers powerful authoring, extensive distribution, and flexible integration. With billions of Crystal reports (.rpt files) used in Fortune 1000 companies worldwide, it is the most proven reporting tool on the market. Crystal Reports helps you rapidly create flexible, feature-rich reports and integrate them into web and Windows applications. It allows you to access and format data, and embed reporting into Java,.NET, and COM applications using a comprehensive set of software developer kits (SDKs). In fact, Crystal Reports is already the de facto reporting standard with over 500 independent software vendors, and is embedded in leading software from Microsoft, SAP, Borland, BEA, PeopleSoft, and IBM. When delivered within the BusinessObjects Enterprise XI business intelligence platform, you can publish Crystal reports to the web, view them in portals and applications, and manage and deploy them using a standardized information infrastructure. With BusinessObjects Enterprise XI, organizations can deploy Crystal Reports on Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms. The highly productive Crystal Reports XI design environment gives you control and flexibility over how data is presented and formatted. Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users 3

8 Report Design and Development Innovation Crystal Reports XI lets report designers benefit from broader data access, enhancements to the design environment, and many new features focused on maximizing productivity. Updated XML, JDBC, DB2, and Microsoft Exchange drivers mean that you are always working with open standards and benefiting from the latest back-end innovation. Crystal Reports also allows organizations to leverage their existing investment in the patented Business Objects semantic layer by making the universe a native data source. This means that report designers can author and distribute highly-formatted reports based on metadata formerly only available to Business Objects client tools such as BusinessObjects Web Intelligence. The updated rich text format (RTF) exporting features in the Crystal Reports design environment make it possible for you to modify reports in any standard word processing application. It s even easier to create summary or organizational reports with improved hierarchical grouping, while new automatic chart generation based on self-selected variables helps take the guess work out of creating charts. With these enhancements, report designers can be as productive as possible. And a new workbench authoring environment helps designers keep projects organized. Designers can easily preview reports as they are designed and before they are published to the web, with one simple step. They can also build in new dynamic and cascading prompts that allow report recipients to easily pinpoint the information they need, when they need it. With Crystal Reports, designers can get the information they need from personal and enterprise data sources. They have control and flexibility over how data is presented and formatted. And they can quickly turn it into dynamic information without tedious, time-intensive hand coding. Embedded Reporting Crystal Reports XI continues to innovate in the area that it pioneered embedded reporting. Thanks to the support for open standards and extensible SDKs, Crystal Reports can fit seamlessly into virtually any IT infrastructure. With Crystal Reports, report developers save time on testing because they can now search for broken links, formula errors, and any existing dependency issues. This means easier report maintenance. The addition of dynamic and cascading prompts also benefits developers because they can create and distribute a single report for personalization by multiple users. With Crystal Reports Explorer, elements of end-user interactivity can also be added to reports that are viewed over the web. And we ve expanded the Crystal Reports exporting capabilities within the open SDKs, and added new Java reporting components to provide even better performance and flexibility. Crystal Reports XI allows you to build dynamic and cascading prompts for easier report authoring, distribution, and consumption. 4 Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users

9 Query and Analysis Query and analysis capabilities empower users to autonomously answer questions as they arise. This ad hoc query capability is ideal for data analysts and other business users who need selfservice information access with moderate-to-high amounts of interactivity. With tools designed primarily for enterprise reporting, the scope of information delivery and interactivity is typically based around the scope of data contained within a given report. Query and analysis solutions expand the scope of analysis and interactivity to the entire data management system. This can potentially include terabytes of data stored in a centralized data warehouse, data marts, or a multidimensional OLAP cubes. Query and analysis tools allow users to answer their own questions by creating queries and iteratively and spontaneously interacting with business information. BusinessObjects XI query and analysis tools enable users to identify trends and find root causes in data from relational and OLAP data sources. A range of users from experienced analysts to mainstream business users can easily create queries and perform calculations without understanding complex database schemas or SQL. Because these clients share the single, trusted BusinessObjects Enterprise BI platform, users can share and even have threaded discussions about this information with others across the organization, and beyond. Extending Analysis and Interactivity BusinessObjects Web Intelligence XI enables users to easily create ad hoc queries through a zeroclient, web-based interface. The robust semantic layer lets users drag and drop objects that mask underlying data complexity by presenting information in business terms. Web Intelligence relies upon a powerful SQL generation engine that provides a multidimensional perspective of data on the fly, so users can edit and author reports as well as slice, dice, and drill into data to gain deeper insights. Secure, self-service information access means that powerful querying and integrated analysis capabilities are available to more than your organization s traditional power users or data analysts. With Web Intelligence, ad hoc query creators can define nested query filters and view the SQL generated behind the scenes. A new Windows-style interface and menu options allows Web Intelligence XI to extend the reach of interactivity and analysis capabilities to more users. This interactive interface makes it easy to quickly format and edit. Users can right-click on a report and do simple things like sorting and filtering, as well as resizing columns, rows, and charts. And deeper analysis is only a click away. Users can create variables, edit formulas, create new reports, tables, and charts as well as change the graphical display of content. Best of all, you can enable and disable these features with security commands, allowing IT to retain control of user rights and information access. Web Intelligence XI extends the reach of interactivity through on-report analysis and extreme ease of use. Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users 5

10 Wider Adoption, Better (and Faster) Decisions Web Intelligence XI is built on the BusinessObjects Enterprise BI platform. As a result, both end users and IT benefit from extreme scalability, fault tolerance and fail over, load balancing, and mature caching capabilities. Web Intelligence users can take advantage of new features like the ability to save historical instances of a document, and threaded discussions between document authors and information consumers. Web Intelligence XI also gives users increased trust in their data by exposing the metadata upon which the report is based. On screen options allow users to look at the information in their reports and understand its lineage object definitions (e.g. profit), applied filters and formulas, and production details about the query and the report. Increased trust means wider end-user adoption. Increased data transparency and integrity means better and faster decisions. Taking Advantage of Multidimensional Data In order to standardize on a single, trusted BI platform, users must be able to access and interact directly with both relational and multidimensional data sources. And if your organization has invested in multidimensional OLAP servers, you probably have a group of users who need to perform powerful ad hoc analysis. BusinessObjects OLAP Intelligence XI is a powerful and easyto-use query and analysis tool for today s leading OLAP servers. It uniquely satisfies the OLAP analysis requirements of power users as well as traditional business users and management. Power users can perform speed-of-thought ad hoc OLAP analysis that allows them to interactively slice and dice, drill, rank, sort, and filter on data, create calculations, and more. Business users and management can interact with OLAP workbooks using highly intuitive, summarized graphical views of business activity, guided navigation, and straightforward data exploration. OLAP Intelligence is seamlessly integrated with BusinessObjects Enterprise, providing OLAP drill-through to relational detail and shared security and administration. This tight platform integration and the ability of OLAP Intelligence to deliver both ad hoc and managed OLAP analysis make BI standardization possible and ensures that you are getting the most out of your database investments. OLAP Intelligence XI delivers best-of-breed ad hoc and managed analysis for today s leading multidimensional OLAP servers. 6 Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users

11 Performance Management Performance management dashboards and scorecards help users track and analyze key metrics and goals via graphical information displays that are driven by powerful underlying analytic engines. In many organizations, BI initiatives have grown organically based on tactical and departmental demands. Over time, BI has gone from a nice-to-have, to a mission-critical application used to sharpen organizational focus on key metrics and transform information into a competitive weapon. In order to make BI strategic, you must move towards a single standardized platform that delivers a consolidated view of the business (i.e., one truth). The next step is to introduce dashboards and scorecards to enhance visibility into organizational strategy, align actions with that strategy, and allow your users to track KPIs, assign goals, and collaborate and share knowledge. BusinessObjects XI delivers these capabilities through integrated performance management solutions powered by sophisticated analytic engines. The BusinessObjects XI performance management dashboards and scorecards make it possible for individuals at all levels of the organization to take corrective action sooner and feel confident that their decisions are based on trusted information. Users, depending on their roles, can also access underlying reporting and query and analysis capabilities to perform root cause analysis. Dashboard Manager XI allows you to manage by exception by providing users with personalized views of key metrics and alerts. BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager XI delivers metrics, alerting, and performance management capabilities that help organizations monitor and understand their most critical activities. Analytic content can be displayed in personalized and secure visual displays that allow users to easily track metrics over time and identify trends, anomalies, and exceptions. Dashboard Manager allows you to roll out personalized dashboards that may contain analytics, metrics, and alerts in order to present a consolidated view of the business without the need for programming. Dashboard Manager also includes a catalogue of analytic templates and a codefree, graphical design environment over the web. These features help to accelerate deployment so users can begin to monitor their priorities a lot sooner. Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users 7

12 BusinessObjects Performance Manager XI helps organizations communicate strategy and manage group decisions through scorecards and collaborative features. Performance Manager can add significant capabilities to your dashboard environment. It is certified by the Balance Scorecard Collaborative and lets you map strategies with cause-and-effect outcomes for a balanced view, cascade goals throughout the enterprise, and assign accountability for goals achieved. Performance Manager also lets groups of users have threaded discussions about metrics, and will even recommend next steps based on goal status. And because Performence Manager allows you to capture and share best practices when correct actions are taken, the entire organization can learn what appropriate actions to take in order to improve performance. Performance Management Applications BusinessObjects XI delivers focused applications designed to meet specific business requirements. Prepackaged insight and analysis allow users to take immediate action to address key business issues. Built on the trusted BusinessObjects Enterprise business intelligence platform, these applications provide built-in best practices, the ability to link analytics to internal processes, and the flexibility to extend your analytic deployment to fit your unique requirements. The BusinessObjects XI includes applications focused on customer profiling and campaign management, store assortment optimization, sales and marketing effectiveness, trade promotion spend, vendor performance, brand assortment optimization, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. With BusinessObjects XI, your organization will benefit from subject matter expertise that is applied across all analytics and enterprise coverage of your organization s key functional areas. BusinessObjects XI delivers prepackaged analytics and built-in best practices that help business users address key organizational issues and take immediate action. 8 Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users

13 The BusinessObjects XI Business Intelligence Platform BusinessObjects Enterprise XI is an adaptive, services-based BI platform that supports the reporting, query and analysis, and performance management end-user interfaces of the BusinessObjects XI suite. It is a componentized architecture designed for extreme extensibility, scalability, reliability, fault-tolerance, and 24/7 availability. BusinessObjects Enterprise allows IT to securely manage and control all users in a BI deployment. It delivers industry-standard support for security entitlement databases, portal integration frameworks, and Java and.net platforms. As the use of BI grows inside and outside your organization, BusinessObjects Enterprise scales to meet the specific information and interactivity needs of all users. Multi-server support, fault-tolerance, and intelligent load balancing ensure you can extend information to all users when and how they need it. This BI platform also delivers multi-level caching, cross-platform support, and comprehensive system administration, management, and security. BusinessObjects Enterprise consists of separate, yet interconnected, tiers optimized for specific tasks. These tiers include the end-user interaction layer, developer services, platform services, and data services. End users create, edit, and interact with specialized tools. System administrators manage and monitor the system through the central management console, central configuration manager, import wizard, publishing wizard, business views designer, and universe designer. BI Tools & Content User Interaction Tier Crystal Reports Web Intelligence Portal & Web Applications Dashboards & Scorecards Rich Client Applications Microsoft Office OLAP Intelligence Excel Powerpoint Word Adobe Acrobat Programs Hyperlinks Web & Application Services Platform Services Security J2EE SDK Scheduling & Alerting Microsoft.net.NET SDK Publishing & Distribution Web Services Repository Storage & Retrieval Caching & Failover BusinessObjects Enterprise XI is a reliable and proven BI platform that allows you to deliver extreme insight throughout your organization. Management Tools Management Tools Migration & Importing Business Rules & Metrics Data Services Performance Management Engines Auditing Collaboration Management Metadata Design Metadata ODBC, XML & Native Drivers OLAP Servers ERP/CRM Data Integration BusinessObjects Enterprise also lets you deliver secure, up-to-date business intelligence information within Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. With Live Office, you no longer waste valuable time cutting and pasting formatted content from one environment to another. And the ability to confidently and securely present up-to-the-minute information helps you avoid presentation time bombs. The BusinessObjects Enterprise XI BI platform includes a core set of shared services used across the product line. Commonly referred to as a services-oriented architecture, this platform has many advantages including flexibility, scalability with failover and fault tolerance, and extensibility, so you can add new services without requiring a release of the entire platform. Innovative features, such as discussion threads, allow for collaborative decision making. Integrated scheduling and distribution make it easy to deliver information based on events, business calendars, or intervals. Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users 9

14 For IT management and administration, the platform provides a central repository for all content and user profiles, access to security entitlement databases for user, role, and document security, metrics management and performance management applications, and portal and dashboard integration components. BusinessObjects Enterprise also includes other key features such as robust scheduling and auditing and the ability to save and store historical instances of documents and reports for financial reporting and compliance purposes. BusinessObjects Enterprise also provides SDKs for enterprise application developers to build application and portal integrations on top of the platform. We recognize the need for comprehensive support of different development environments, so BusinessObjects Enterprise XI provides.net, Java, COM, and Web Services SDKs. Integration kits for SAP, PeopleSoft, SSA Global/Baan, and Siebel deliver custom portal integration, powerful data drivers, and tight integration with application security. And portal integration kits for IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, SAP, and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Services help deliver insight in virtually any enterprise information portal environment. The Semantic Layer Part of the BusinessObjects Enterprise XI platform, the semantic layer is a business representation of corporate data that helps end users access data autonomously using common business terms. BusinessObjects Enterprise XI supports Business Objects universes and Business Views and includes a graphical design interface for each part of the metadata layer. The patented Business Objects semantic layer is the foundation for empowering end-user query and analysis. It simplifies the complexity of business data by using common business terms, rather than data language, to access, manipulate, and organize information. These business terms are stored as objects in a Business Objects universe. Web Intelligence uses the universe to simplify the user creation process required for simple to complex end-user query and analysis. All universe objects and connections are stored and secured in the central management console and require a BusinessObjects Enterprise user login for access to the universe designer interface. With BusinessObjects XI, Crystal Reports designers can now author universe-based reports. Upon presenting a query panel for graphical query generation, Crystal Reports designers can access universes as a data source, create queries graphically through the query panel interface, and generate rich SQL that can be highly formatted and delivered throughout the organization. Business Views simplify the report creation experience and interaction by abstracting the complexity of data for Crystal Reports developers. Business Views also help separate the data connections, data access, business elements, and the overall business definition giving report designers granular rights access control. Business Views not only simplify data access for Crystal Reports designers and developers, they also provide detailed view-time security. Each universe is a partial representation of a database and is delivered to users in business language. 10 Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users

15 Data Integration To ensure that BI users are always working with accurate and trustworthy information, BusinessObjects XI includes tightly integrated, industrial-strength data integration technology. Designed to deliver extreme productivity and scalability, BusinessObjects Data Integrator XI simplifies and accelerates data extraction, transformation, and loading to and from packaged applications, real-time message queues, mainframe systems, and relational databases. Prepackaged data warehouse solutions for enterprise applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Oracle help accelerate BI project deployment and reduce total cost of ownership. Data Integrator extracts data from source systems and transforms it into a BI-ready format. Once the transformations are complete, the data is loaded into a target database or application, and accessed by your end users for reporting, querying, and analysis. Data Integrator is the next generation of extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) technology. It provides real-time and batch data movement capabilities and native interfaces to the metadata of packaged enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) applications. Data Integrator also provides a highly-productive single environment for all of your data integration needs. It incorporates data previewing and profiling capabilities, and easily integrates with market-leading data cleansing tools. Data Integrator XI enables organizations to easily explore, transform, and move data anywhere at any frequency. For your IT department, this means that the right data is easily available to users without the need for custom coding. This results in dramatically accelerated development times, reduced maintenance costs, and a greater ROI from your existing packaged applications. Data Integrator also provides native interfaces to enterprise application integration (EAI) tools and extensive support for other sources such as relational databases, mainframe and legacy systems, and technologies such as web services and parallel performance architecture. Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users 11

16 Data Integrator provides extensive business metadata imports from ERP and CRM systems. It can read data dictionaries, import live metadata (including custom tables and other objects), and graphically represent this data organized by business process. This lets you easily create data marts and warehouses from transactional data. Data Integrator also extracts data stored in proprietary formats, such as hierarchies, and provides prebuilt, reusable transforms in a single, cohesive environment regardless of source and target. What s more, the built-in Data Integrator real-time engine can pass alerts to end-user management dashboards and intelligently broker data between the ETL process and the end-user interfaces of BusinessObjects XI. From Data Sources to Dashboards Because Data Integrator unites data integration with BusinessObjects Enterprise XI, end users can rely more on the information they access and analyze in their reports. Data Integrator lets you automatically create the Business Objects universe within its ETL design interface, so you save significant development time and get the most out of the work already done in the data warehouse or ETL process. Data Integrator also enables ETL developers to perform net updates that will pass data lineage, mapping, and other technical metadata to the semantic layer so underlying source changes do not require you to recreate universes, associated documents, and reports. Data Integrator delivers impact analysis reports that allow developers to follow the data lineage from the ETL process right through to Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence documents. End-toend metadata analysis and the ability to automatically create and update BI metadata help to insulate downstream users and reports from source changes and data reorganization, resulting in significant productivity gains and enhanced data credibility. Built-in data validation and auditing features help ensure that developers are always working with credible data. 12 Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users

17 Conclusion BusinessObjects XI delivers information that works the way you do and empowers individuals at every level of the organization to make better decisions. Now you can turn massive data volumes into both a company asset and a competitive weapon. Thanks to BusinessObjects XI, organizations around the world can increase their insight, agility, and enterprise performance. With the industry s best reporting solution, the HR director receives detailed daily information that allows him to monitor hiring costs and track turnover by geography Sales managers can perform discount analysis over time by using market-leading query and analysis technology to see which regions are discounting the most and understand how that affects the bottom line Line of business managers are able to monitor sophisticated dashboards that allow them to track their KPIs, understand production cycles, and manage seasonal change based on better control over all parts of the supply chain The IT department can deliver secure, trustworthy, integrated, and accurate data inside and outside the organization With the help of BusinessObjects XI, your organization achieves compliance and the CFO is happy The CEO receives a weekly PowerPoint via the corporate portal showing the financial data that she securely accesses and refreshes in real time BusinessObjects XI redefines the way information empowers users and delivers extreme insight through a single, trusted business intelligence platform. With BusinessObjects XI, you can become a high-performance organization. Business Objects BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users 13

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20 Americas Business Objects Americas 3030 Orchard Parkway San Jose, California USA Tel: Asia-Pacific Business Objects Asia Pacific Pte Ltd 350 Orchard Road #20-04/06 Shaw House Singapore Tel: Europe, Middle East, Africa Business Objects SA rue Anatole France Levallois-Perret Cedex France Tel: Japan Business Objects Japan K.K. Head Office Yebisu Garden Place Tower 28F Ebisu, Shibuya-ku Tokyo Tel: For a complete listing of our sales offices, please visit our web site. Business Objects owns the following U.S. patents, which may cover products that are offered and licensed by Business Objects: 5,555,403, 6,247,008 B1, 6,578,027 B2, 6,490,593 and 6,289,352. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Crystal Enterprise, Crystal Analysis, Web Intelligence, RapidMarts and Business Query are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects SA or its affiliated companies in the United States and other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. Copyright 2004 Business Objects. All rights reserved. PT# WP2092-A Printed in France and the United States December 2004.