EC|Wise, Inc. - Analytics and Data Mining

Plan, design, and deploy Business Analytics and Data Mining
EC Wise personnel are experts at managing and analyzing large databases using OLAP and statistical, machine learning and visualization techniques. Our unique mix of business experience and skills is what you need to plan, design, and deploy analytic systems and turn your data into business decision support.

Business Analytics
The platforms we support are optimized for different types of solutions. Microsoft's Analysis Services platform supports front end tools like Excel Pivot Services and Microsoft Data Analyzer to provide a highly configurable desktop based OLAP development system.
Creating custom OLAP applications with Microsoft Analysis Services

Microsoft provides a comprehensive set of tools and process templates for custom analytic applications; their tools support both OLAP and data mining models. Through the Analysis Services included with Microsoft SQL Server 2005, we can create OLAP Cubes that represent data stored in any back-end data sources. Analysis Services incorporates several powerful technologies that enable us to build usable, high performance OLAP applications. SQL Server sports a data mining API which enables us to plug in custom data mining algorithms for the specific analytic task.
Oracle provides a broad technology platform, on which we can build completely custom solutions or build on top of sophisticated OLAP enabled toolsets.
Leveraging the Oracle Platform

The most straightforward approach to Oracle BI is to deploy Oracle Discoverer, which is a general purpose business intelligence product that comes in full desktop, web reporter, and web viewer flavors. For more special purpose solutions, we can easily deploy custom analytic applications using Oracle BI Beans components to create an OLAP based analytic environment. To develop custom applications based on Oracle's embedded data mining technology, we can use the Oracle Data Mining (ODM) Components and the ODM Browser.
Our strategy for selecting, prioritizing, developing and deploying effective analytic processes builds an agile process on top of your platoform.
Achieving Agile Analytic Systems
We build a consistent and robust process for the platform of your choice. With our agile approach, these activities are not necessarily sequential, but rather proceed in parallel iterations with a high degree of interaction between them.
- Identify data-driven business and operational processes We start by leveraging our agile requirements efforts, to identify key business and operational processes as well as the analytic tasks that drive them. We look for decision processes involving specialist expertise that involve similar, repeatable analytic tasks performed by multiple decision-makers. We can then prioritize analytic candidates based on ease of implementation, importance to a specific business process, overall value to the organization and the number of decision-makers who would benefit from the solution.
- Evaluate decision requirements For each decision-making process that a company chooses to implement, we need to carefully consider the decision-maker's needs. By closely examining specific information, visualization and analytic requirements, we can determine how to most effectively incorporate analysis techniques and information links into a decision support workflow.
- Perform information audit and evaluate information infrastructure A rigorous audit of the data and information that influence the decision-making process will determine necessary information links and surface underlying database infrastructure issues, such as normalization, curation, and ETL impacts. This evaluation will provide the basis for defining a consistent information base for the various analytics that will be produced.
- Define analytic and decision-making process In this task, we work with clients to map out specific decision processes and add or develop analytic tools.
- Test and refine This task involves rolling-out an analytic workflow either on a pilot basis or more broadly as a general deployment to a select group. There will be an ongoing process of revisiting and refreshing existing analytic workflows to ensure they remain relevant as business requirements and data availability evolve. Once a company reaches a certain comfort level with the application, a broader roll-out is appropriate. When the analytic application is deployed widely, we conduct a review to ensure it has met specific pre-determined business objectives. Success criteria may include measurable improvements in decision-making efficiency and accuracy as well as specific cost-savings attributable to decisions reached with the application. By following this straightforward approach, companies can easily build custom analytic solutions that provide them with significant value.
[Go to Top]

Integrated Analytics
In today's economy, integration challenges take many forms. Companies merge and need to integrate systems. Enterprises require relationships with business process outsourcing partners that can blend process and data integration expertise. Decision makers require access to information that presents a consistent view of the enterprise and how it plays in a variety of market spaces.
Our senior architects each have over 20 years' experience in solving integration challenges. Ours is a team that can work closely with your business managers and development team to keep goals on target and within budget. Our experience translates into everybody understanding the work process taking place.
One of the major problems facing decision makers is isolated data sources that need to be combined into a "single view of the truth". The number and complexity of these data sources has increased greatly, as enterprises have implemented disparate ERP, CRM, logistic and Web commerce systems. This proliferation of data collection points and storage systems has driven the adoption of data warehousing solutions as common information bases.
Meeting critical integration challenges

The Limitations of Data Warehousing There are several concerns with data warehousing solutions. First, they are usually designed to support multi-dimensional reporting rather than complete analytic applications. Second, they integrate data but don't preserve the process semantics associated with the data. Third, they often fail to include all of the relevant data. A number of other challenges arise when assembling data for analytic applications. Typically, there exists a wealth of available data generated outside of your organization. However, it's up to you to create the pipes necessary to bring in that data items, to correlate data that may have been collected, and to remove anomalies associated with the collection mechanism. Another challenge is the frequent usefulness of data that has been published in journal articles and other documentary sources, and not available at all in structured databases. Agile and Appropriate Extract, Transfer and Load (ETL) Processes EC Wise can design and develop a data or process integration strategy that addresses these type of business and analytic requirements. We have implemented business integration solutions at the process level in industries such as Human Resources management, finance, transaction services, retail and insurance. We also have a strong background in both basic and applied sciences.
Our "Fast Track Enterprise Integration" offers a combination of architecture, design, training, and implementation services.
Providing paths to Fast Track Enterprise Integration
- Option optimization analysis and implementation for existing integration challenges when higher performance and fine-tuning are required
- Leverage experience in SAP Enterprise Integrations
- Design and develop simple or complex high performance maps
- Build a single data integration platform to access, transform, and design process flows while integrating data from a wide variety of systems
- Support CRM, ERP, accounting and messaging technologies with pre-built functions that enable formatting data from different systems
- Build and cleanse data stores on the fly
- Quickly deploy business to business data exchange projects
- Convert unstructured data to structured standards-compliant data structures
- Synchronize data in batch, event-driven and real-time feeds as needed
- Maintain comprehensive support of EDI and XML-based standards
- Use data services for SOA that eliminate low-level interface coding. Leverage legacy data and systems with new SOA-based ESB, BPM, Application Servers and J2EE-based systems; includes SOAP, JMS, XML, HTTP, email, FTP, ESB, message queues, etc...
[Go to Top]

Engagement Options
EC Wise offers a full spectrum of BI services, including a number of ways for you to kick-start BI success in your business.
Choosing Analytic Start-up Services
- Custom BI Workshop Could your team use help in assessing how to leverage data mining and Business Intelligence to accelerate customer acquisition and increase customer retention? How about decreasing sales or production costs? We can facilitate a half or full day workshop to help your team identify and articulate needs.
- Requirements Workshop A requirements workshop can be a half or full day session that brings together managers, analysts, and IT personnel. It can be used to identify a range of requirements, or to drill down on the details of a few requirements.
- Opportunity Identification and Assessment (OIA) First we work with you to articulate your organization's objectives, capabilities, data and development resources. Together we identify and prioritize opportunities. Deliverables include written assessments, recommendations and a preliminary plan of action.
- Facilitated CRM workshop - Getting practical and tactical Who are the most profitable customers? Who are the best prospects? How should prospects be approached? How can you increase your profitability across market segments? You probably already have a list of questions. We can show your team how to get the answers using your existing data and Business Intelligence capabilities.
- Proof-of-concept implementation In a proof-of-concept implementation, we implement an analytic process in a limited manner, with the objective of demonstrating measured value and proving that the process provides the expected utility for the cost, and that it scales to support all of your data, and all of the anticipated users.
- Pilot Project We use a pilot project to demonstrate, in a short time frame, the suitability of new initiatives or toolsets to achieve your objectives.
- Architecture for Analytics Our consultants can work with your analysts and database people to develop an architecture that will support ongoing analytic development.
- Outsourced Analytics We can build analytic reports and implement analysis and mining programs and deliver the results to you through a secure web site.
[Go to Top]

Analytics

Creating custom OLAP applications with Microsoft Analysis Services

Leveraging the Oracle Platform

Achieving Agile Analytic Systems

Meeting critical integration challenges

Providing paths to Fast Track Enterprise Integration

Choosing Analytic Start-up Services