Noetix Analytics is the Key at KU Technologies

KU Technologies’ services are focused on delivering innovative business solutions to customers in the early childhood and school-age education and child care industries.  The company delivers a wide-range of IT services to the subsidiaries of Knowledge Universe, including KinderCare Learning Centers, serving 300,000 children across the U.S.  Their enterprise BI team is responsible for multiple products and projects that provide critical insight into financials and other operational metrics for more than 1,800 early education centers.

In the Fall of 2009, the BI team began examining methods that would enable them to better gather and access information from Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) for reporting and analysis purposes. For example, they wanted the ability to look at individual centers and analyze how annual revenue related to employee turnover, comparing those metrics with other facilities.  At the time, managers were using a variety of methods to come up with this information, from Excel to e-mail compilation.

The BI team determined they needed a new, robust reporting solution, and after much research, decided on Noetix Analytics.  “We could have spent 12 to 15 months and up to $2 million creating a customized data warehouse from scratch or we could have gone with Noetix Analytics,” said KU Technologies’ Director of Business Intelligence. “The end result was a solution that was 80 percent of the way to what we needed at go-live, shifting the focus of our implementation effort away from creating an architecture from scratch, and instead working on areas and business needs that are unique to Knowledge Universe business lines.”

As an added benefit, Noetix Analytics works with several existing BI platforms, enabling KU Technologies to employ its existing Cognos 8.4 reporting tool to view Oracle EBS information in a familiar format.  “The Noetix solution gives us a lot of flexibility and provides us with a true enterprise-class tool that is a key foundation of our BI environment.”

Initial ‘consumers’ in HR, Finance, Legal, and Procurement are now retrieving information from the new BI environment and creating their own operational reports—accessing information wherever and whenever they need it.  For example, the finance organization was able to launch a balanced scorecard in 30 days time.  “We could not have implemented this balanced scorecard with its systematized approach without the solution pieces provided by Noetix Analytics.  And when you imagine that this information will be available for the first time to 1,800 center directors and their staff, you can see that the impact on the business overall will be enormous.”