The Executive’s Guide to Embedded BI

Introduction

Yellowfin is a flexible and highly customizable analytics and business intelligence (BI) platform that is applied across a variety of industries and sectors. With different factors such as data compliance, governance, privacy and security requirements, our customers naturally have unique challenges and requirements that cannot be solved with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ BI solution.

Yellowfin’s vast suite of analytics tools is designed to be tailored around such needs. This guide compiles several customer stories aligned to major business industries to highlight Yellowfin's extensive ability to create a custom analytics experience for a wide range of use cases.

Can you transform your business with embedded BI? Here are the many possibilities on offer.

1. Technology Software

Challenge: One of the largest IT service management (ITSM) vendors needed to replace an outdated reporting module with a newer, more flexible analytics solution that can dramatically reduce costs and delight their customers. The analytics solution needed to support hundreds of customers, and any single customer may have thousands of users of their own who need to run a considerable amount of reports. In addition, data security and governance needed to be tightly synchronized between their core application and the new BI and reporting solution.

Result: Yellowfin delivered a completely white-labeled analytics solution, enabling the ITSM customer to integrate analytics in a way that retained the application look and feel, right down to the supporting documentation.

Key Business Outcomes

• Data governance &security
• Flexibility
• Low cost
• odern user interface (UX)
• Robust reporting

2. Fast Food Chain

Challenge: A large, global fast food chain wanted to transform their franchisee portal with new customer loyalty data. The project required reliable accessibility from anywhere in the United States and multiple international markets as a key requirement. In addition, this hospitality customer required 100% brand alignment and determined compelling data visualization capability was necessary to ensure rapid user adoption.

Result: Yellowfin delivered the required analytics solution faster than expected. Building on the early success allowed the customer to expand its embedded BI use cases from loyalty management to monthly reporting and forecasting. Yellowfin today is the backbone of this fast food chain customer’s franchisee portal.

Key Business Outcomes

• Brand alignment
• Flexibility
• Scalability
• Speed-to-market
• User accessibility

3. Transportation

Challenge: An innovative startup in the transportation sector saw an opportunity to build analytics solutions for large metropolitan transportation systems. The solution will manage critical metrics and will become the backbone of the decision systems that improve on time performance and other key performance indicators (KPIs). Because the customer wanted dashboards to be integrated and displayed in thousands of vehicle and dispatch stations, all requiring near real-time data management and analytics, they needed a BI solution that could deliver highly customizable and interactive dashboarding.

Result: Yellowfin partnered with the software company to deliver on their ambitious plan, its action-based dashboard capabilities matching the customer’s needs for complex deployment and high availability requirements.

Key Business Outcomes

• Data governance & securityModern user experience (UX)
• Robust reporting
• Speed-to-market

4. Banking

Challenge: A large ISV based in Europe and working in the compliance space for the banking industry needed to modernize their analytics and reporting solution. Over 200 of their clients demanded modern self-service dashboards and high-quality, easy-to-read reporting from the ISV’s software. The banking industry also demands uncompromising security and data governance capabilities to protect data privacy. Thus, this ISV customer required an analytics solution that delivered the robust dashboards and data security controls both their customers and sector expected.

Result: The ISV implemented Yellowfin in 3 months, and their new analytics immediately became a key value add to their core value proposition, eventually delivering an additional 10% to revenue to each of their deals.

Key Business Outcomes

• Cost
• Data governance & security
• Modern user experience (UX)
• Robust reporting
• Speed-to-market

5. Financial Services

Challenge: A prominent financial services software provider based in the APAC region wanted to build a new solution for wealth advisors. Thousands of practitioners spend many hours creating custom presentations for clients that vary in quality and format, and this software provider wanted to help these practitioners maintain consistency and create better presentations with a new solution.

Result: Using Yellowfin’s data storytelling presentation product Present, this customer completely reimagined the process of custom presentations, reducing preparation time to less than an hour. Each client received custom analytics in an easy-to-consume presentation format. Advisors were able to spend time on analysis, rather than on formatting, and are now able to adjust multiple parameters in real-time to ultimately deliver more value to their clients.

Key Business Outcomes

• • Data governance & security
  • Flexibility
  • Innovation
  • Modern user experience (UX)
  • Speed-to-market

6. Healthcare

Challenge: Running business intelligence solutions for hospitals is a serious business. Reliability and performance are critical in the healthcare industry, as customers depend on such data collection systems to assist in making life-depending decisions. There are also strict compliance, governance and privacy requirements in place, meaning this healthcare organization needed an BI solution that could deliver upon their specific requirements end-to-end.

Result: Yellowfin dashboards are used and visible throughout this healthcare organization’s hospitals across hundreds of monitors for real-time monitoring of data. Thousands of reports get generated daily. Yellowfin looks and feels like all existing hospital systems owing to its white-label analytics capability, providing the hospital and its staff with a seamless UX experience. Multiple NHS organizations have now turned to Yellowfin for their internal analytics solutions.

Key Business Outcomes

• Brand alignment
• Flexibility
• Innovation
• Modern user experience (UX)
• Speed-to-market

7. Gaming

Challenge: An online iGaming platform sought to create more engaging experiences for customers, due to their existing metrics and dashboard solutions lacking flexibility and proving too time-consuming to configure. Its previous custom solution looked good, but was too rigid to be customized further. Thus, this customer wanted an end-to-end analytics solution that was both extensible and easy-to-use, increasing customization opportunities and reducing time-to-insight.

Result: Yellowfin provided a platform that was seamless to embed analytics, business users could easily customize, and it scaled with the 1000s of daily users. Customer engagement on the platform increased by 30%, and the company realized savings from reduced custom development.

Key Business Outcomes

• Cost
• Data governance & security
• Flexibility
• Modern user experience (UX)
• Robust reporting

8. Software Development

Challenge: A global low-code software development platform wanted to modernize and expand its product offering. They had a legacy OEM with SAP Crystal Reports which was outdated in both UX and functionality, limiting the platform’s potential to provide the latest analytics capabilities in a seamless, attractive user interface.

Result This customer turned to Yellowfin to create a new white-label BI and analytics module that can be “shipped” with their core low-code software platform with very little customization. The offering could double ASP and deliver immediate market differentiation. The joint team delivered the required BI solution in less than six months, with immediate market momentum.

Key Business Outcomes

• Accessibility and scalability
• Business model
• Brand alignment
• Flexibility
• Speed-to-market

9. Logistics

Challenge: A logistics software company developed a powerful enterprise resource planning (ERP) product used by hundreds of companies in its segment. However, the user experience was becoming dated and new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings were rapidly taking their market share. This customer required a powerful SaaS interface for their dashboards, analytics, and reporting.

Result: Choosing Yellowfin, this customer drastically accelerated the development of the new online portal and delivered it in a fraction of the quoted alternative custom development time. They also created a roadmap that delivered new functionality in an agile approach that ensures continued improvement.

Key Business Outcomes

• Business model
• Flexibility
• Innovation
• Modern user experience (UX)
• Speed-to-market

10. IT Software

Challenge: A leading data warehousing automation vendor needed to deliver new functionality to differentiate its offering and create new SKUs. They determined they needed to build a BI and analytics module that would advance basic reporting into a modern self-service analytics product, able to be consumed both on-premises and as a SaaS offering.

Result: Choosing Yellowfin, joint experts from both teams articulated the solution, including new data visualizations specific to their use cases. Yellowfin leveraged its open API architecture to seamlessly integrate and deliver the new components as part of its standard offering.

Key Business Outcomes

• Innovation
• Modern user experience (UX)
• Open architecture
• Robust reporting
• Speed-to-market

Embedded BI: 5 Steps to Success

1. Business Use Case

Analytics and dashboards can be a compelling capability to provide to customers as part of your software product offering, but often form and content does not contemplate business outcomes. The business value that you aim to deliver should be the first thing on your mind.

2. Powerful User Experience (UX)

Now that you know what challenges, pain-points and problems to solve with a new analytics solution, the how is just as critical to articulate. Fortunately, BI solutions can deliver infinite data visualizations. Imagine and prototype using the solution until the UX you envision is just right - after all, “seeing is believing.” Don’t assume that an idea alone is enough.

3. Executive Sponsorship

Aim as high as you can to get your sponsorships. Most good embedded BI solutions are CEO-worthy material. You are likely touching the product and customers, and you will need full support across the business for a successful implementation of the solution in question.

4. Plan for the Future

Imagine what it will be not only tomorrow, but beyond. Scalability and performance can break even the best-looking analytics solution. Unexpected costs can also hinder adoption and ROI. Cover all your bases, and model your analytics solution for the next 5 to 10 years.

5. Win Early, and Often

While true for most projects, embedded BI is particularly tricky as it is part of your product, even if internal. Creating a modular approach that evolves with time is a must, and one of the most easy problems to solve.

Getting Started with Yellowfin: How We Can Help

In the past, most BI software was designed around data scientists and technical personas in specific industries, limiting its ability to be customized and tailored to specific use cases.

Now, modern BI solutions, such as Yellowfin, offer sophisticated analytical capabilities and tools that are specially tailored for both regular users and trained experts, and extensible for whatever industry requires the latest BI features.

The Yellowfin platform currently provides several types of tools, leveraging sophisticated Al, machine learning and natural language technologies, that enable anyone to create reports, from the experienced data professional to everyday nontechnical business user, in whatever industry or use case required. Even people who have no prior experience with analytics can begin using our suite, helping open up data-driven analysis and decision-making to more people.

1. For business users (consumers): Guided Natural Language Query (Guided NLQ)

2. For intermediate analytics users (explorers): Assisted Insights and Quick Charts

3. For data analysts (experts): Advanced Report Builder and Yellowfin Signals

Get started with Yellowfin today - contact us for more information and a free demo walkthrough.