About Inforay

• About Inforay

• Contact

• Product

• Training

• Partners

• Downloads

• Jobs

• Sitemap

1. Who is Inforay?

Inforay is distinctive on three important issues:

• Its user-friendliness for the end user and the administrator
• Its most advantageous Total Cost of Ownership for you
• Its combination of BI/CPM and workflow

Inforay users include medium-sized and large organizations in many industries, such as Fortis Bank, the Tax Office, Stork, and KVV. Inforay can be widely used in virtually any economic sector. At some of our customer sites, over 40% of staff use one or more monitors. Many of our solutions are created in conjunction with specialist partners.

2. What is the added value provided by an Inforay solution?

Business information is often hard to access and it takes a lot of effort to get the right information to the right person at the right time. The problem is that data is stored in multiple data sources and only some standard reports are available.

Inforay effortlessly combines data from disparate data sources. The metadata structure makes it easy to create and modify monitors and reports. Inforay solutions can be flexibly administered and widely distributed in any organization. As a result, every member of staff has quicker access to better information making it easier to assess and manage business processes as well as to localize and eliminate risks. The bottom line is that this results in a reduction of operating costs and fraud, and an increase in sales and profitability figures.

3. What is Corporate Performance Management?

Inforay develops and supplies software for Corporate Performance Management, the next step in the field of Business Intelligence (BI). Monitoring business processes adds an extra dimension to the well-known BI methods of reporting and analyzing because, instead of producing reports and analyses using a great deal of IT-related effort periodically and looking back, monitoring now focuses on the ongoing dissemination of information designed to initiate action. To put it another way, the right information is sent to the appropriate desktop. Web-based, updated, and personalized, so as to ensure that the user can do precisely what is required in order to achieve his objectives.

4. What is the major benefit of Corporate Performance Management using Inforay software?

Inforay is Business Intelligence for the masses. We retrieve operational executive information geared towards the various positions occupied in your organization, from sales assistant to general manager. In this respect, every position is assigned its own permissions, so as to ensure that each user only receives the information that is relevant to his area of responsibility. This can be taken rather far using Inforay software, with the result that valuable information can be widely distributed. In addition, the Inforay Monitors are as up-to-date as your source systems. Users will therefore always know precisely what their position is.

5. What is a business monitor?

Inforay ensures that everyone within an organization can work using better information. The means to achieving this takes the form of personalized business monitors which display a number of indicators. The latter are often referred to as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

An Inforay project therefore always starts with the definition of these indicators or, put another way, the questions to which you require answers. We insert this data into an X-Ray. This is a large grid (a two-dimensional view) containing the items that are to be monitored (for example, sales, risks and returns) and the perspective from which this is to occur (for example, the region, period or member of staff concerned). The information that can be retrieved is defined by creating connections between the items and perspectives. Then, we establish which field in which table in which database contains the data that corresponds to the information requirements. The link to the databases, tables, and field is also specified in the X-Ray. Finally, the monitors are created, in which the information is displayed in a table or chart in the monitors. In order to retrieve figures, queries are sent to the underlying linked data sources. Often, it is possible to create several monitors for your organization in 2-4 weeks.

The monitors are in fact dynamic reports; you can drill down and retrieve any contextual information for which you are authorized. If you want to extend the report or monitor, you can easily accomplish that yourself, if you are authorized to do so, or a centralized department can handle this. The monitors are entirely customized to your needs and your company logo. You can access the monitors on your laptop, mobile phone, handheld, etcetera. You can also sent the information in a monitor to someone by e-mail or fax. You can export data to Excel, to make your own calculations with it. And you can use the charts and tables in the most dynamic ways. Try it, and you will be surprised.

In short, this represents a good alternative to combining lists from various systems in a spreadsheet oneself. Inforay presents the complete information by default, prevents errors in reports, and saves a lot of time in system administration.

6. What is the difference between Inforay and a data warehouse?

In many organizations data sourced from different systems is stored together in a data warehouse, in which users obtain access to some of the information concerned. Often, these are lengthy projects which demand a great deal of IT work. Consequently, staff usually have to wait for a long period of time before they can obtain the information they require. Inforay adopts the reverse approach. First, it establishes what information is required, following which it links the sources containing it to the query. The procedure is faster and requires less effort on the part of IT staff.

7. What business processes can one monitor using Inforay software?

In principle, any business process about which information is stored in systems for ERP, CRM, HRM, SCM and the like, is suitable for monitoring purposes. Inforay even makes it very easy to present data taken from different source systems in an integral, personalized form within a single business monitor. In practice, our customers use Inforay software within their organizations in the following sectors.

• Commercial business lines
  From sales assistant to sales manager to business manager, all of them have their own information requirements, which are linked to their position, for example, broken down by product category and distribution channel and then extracted from the overall view according to sector, region, district, place and so forth. This makes it possible to compare sales with the relevant budget, but also to produce cross and up-selling monitors. At any moment a user can quickly view the current situation and also see where any change in direction is required. In this way the commercial executive information produced by the Inforay business monitors guides an organization to more sales and returns. Inforay has created commercial monitors for many industries, which are available as packaged solutions.

• Finance & Control
  The responsibilities involved in internal and external reporting – from those of a controller to those of a financial director – are increasingly subject to stricter regulation, such as Base II, IFRS and Sarbanes. This renders it necessary to assess and monitor risks better. Inforay makes it possible to view these risks clearly in the form of figures. Using this information, it is possible for one to modify processes to limit these risks. But also for other labor-intensive processes, such as purchase order verification, budgeting, and forecasting in organizations with many departments and offices Inforay has proved to be an indispensable and strategical instrument for many customers.

• Procurement, HRM and Facility services
  Inforay has packaged solutions for each of these departments. The procurement monitors of Inforay have received the highest awards and saved millions. Also, the TelRay solutions for monitoring and saving on telephony have attributed greatly to cost reduction in large organizations. Every process or role can be monitored. Performance can be improved throughout an organization, but knowledge is essential.

8. How user-friendly is Inforay software?

End users do not require any training in order to be able to use Inforay software. They can log on to the Inforay server through their web browser, after which the monitors in respect of which they have received authorization, will be displayed. When a monitor is opened, the server loads the most up-to-date information taken from the underlying data sources with the aid of queries defined in the monitor. Every monitor is a mini-application through which a user can navigate dynamically. In the case of those indicators for which drill-down paths have been defined, the user is able to zoom in with a click of his mouse and thereby proceed to increasingly detailed levels. In this way Inforay software provides every user with easy access to the information which pertains to his position in concrete and clearly defined terms.

But it is at least as important to know how user-friendly Inforay software is for the administrator who must, in the years to come, authorize users, modify reports, link new data sources, keep the system up and running, etcetera. This is where Inforay wins from all competition. For example, Fortis has 10 operational applications for 200 offices and headquarters, with over 1000 users throughout the country. And just one FTE performs the Inforay software administration. Each organization can administer the Inforay software by itself. The most extensive administrator's training takes only three days. Because power users can modify business monitors by themselves, the administrator's task is limited to linking Inforay to the data sources. The administration environment in Inforay is makes that an easy task to perform.

The above mentioned arguments are decisive with regard to Total Cost of Ownership. Conduct comparative research and you will be surprised.

9. How flexible is Inforay software?

Organizations are constantly changing: new products, staff and sales channels. Information requirements are also dynamic. Users require additional columns, drill-down paths or information presented in the form of a diagram instead of a table.

This is not a problem. A trained power user will himself find it easy to modify the monitors which he is authorized to use, in his web browser on the fly. This aspect of user-friendliness makes Inforay software suitable to be rolled out widely within an organization. You can become a power user in just one day!

10. Why is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Inforay software so advantageous and distinctive?

In terms of TCO (license fees + yearly maintenance + implementation costs + training + yearly operational internal and external support) Inforay software is more advantageous than any other Business Intelligence solution. Together with its flexibility and easy administration, this is an important issue for an organization that wants to widely distribute a solution.

If you want to make one or more CPM solutions available to a large number of users (at most of our customers 20% - 40% of staff) the scalability and flexibility of the CPM tool must be combined with a powerful authorization function. Of course, the license fees also count, but in that case the time spent on software administration and the hours that you need the supplier to modify an maintain the applications really make the difference in terms of TCO.

Inforay is competitive on al five elements of the TCO. With regard to TCO, comparisons with other suppliers in 2004 and 2005 were all in favor of Inforay software. With our focus on your TCO (and related to that, the user-friendliness) Inforay Product Development is continuously targeted to making working with Inforay software ever more advantageous for you. This has become our second nature.

Download the brochure 'About Inforay'