From Oxford, England is Phocas

 

Phocas was founded in 1999 formed by Paul Magee out of the company CSB Steeple, and has developed a results oriented next generation Business Intelligence application. They have been able to create a complete out of the box but completely user definable solution to put information into the hands of users producing immediate results.

 

They have now increased its ease of use by greatly simplifying the BI interface which significantly improves performance. As an out of the box solution, possibly taking only a few hours but in reality its likely to be closer to a few days, but no longer than a week to fully implement without the need for building cubes or designing and developing data marts. Its extreme flexibility and customization enables organisations or individual users to customize the dashboard to suit their unique preferences and requirements. Microsoft SQL Server enables the highest levels of scalability, flexibility and security and a summarized database structure that offers remarkable speeds for end users. Benchmark tested alongside various world-class BI and reporting solutions, they have been able to show that they are more than competitive in returning fast accurate results.

 

The simplicity of the system is based around a series of alerts which are inbuilt to show the user whenever there is an opportunity or threat based on factual sales history/previous buying patterns and allows for effective cross and link-selling to customers. Additional benefits include a new customisable dashboard that enables the combination of alerts and graphs within one report, which can be exported into Microsoft products for collaboration and distribution to non-users.

 

Users have the added advantage of an underlying pre-built database that has been optimised to be phenomenally fast and to consolidate multiple databases into one trusted single source for all business users, from CEO to front line sales executives. The ingenuity and speed of installation coupled with the ease of use will generally give users a clearly obvious return on investment, fairly immediately.

 

Who should use Phocas?

 

Those companies who are small and require a simple BI solution that can be effective for all those who use it, the companies where there is a simple management structure and the reporting that the users will need is from sources with data warehousing structures that are compatible with Microsoft Dynamics. It works extremely well as a simple interactive tool, but this should not distract from the exceptional abilities of its dashboard for those who have a greater capacity with BI.