Kapow Katalyst Blog

Data assembly is now the biggest barrier to good analytics

Business Intelligence continues to become more and more strategic to companies in order to compete in today’s global economy. Every department is now using analytics to better understand financials, business processes, customers, competitors and market trends – critical understanding needed to optimize execution.

As we all know, analytics is no better than the data behind it, and thus discovery and assembly of data has become an ever more important part of successful business intelligence.

As your company ecosystem grows beyond your firewall into partner apps, competitor websites and social networks, data rapidly spreads and more and more data assembly is now tied up in manual harvesting methods or the purchase of dubious data from vertical information providers.

This means that the knowledge worker spends more time with Data Discovery and Data Assembly, leaving less time for analysis of and execution on the results.

I often see scenarios where knowledge workers spend more than 50% of their time on just data assembly, time which takes away from analysis, reporting and execution.

This is not good.

And it’s exactly why more companies rely on automating the data assembly process. Finding methods to easily and scalably instruct which data to get from where and how to transform it into the needed format – basically they look for a solution to do automated data delivery.

The good news is that this solution already exists. The Kapow Katalyst platform is proven by more than 500 companies all over the world.

Here’s a concrete example. Fiserv, a large financial services company, needed to understand the value of their assets in real-time for compliance reasons. To solve this problem the treasurer hired a group of people to manually log-in to Fiservs accounts spread over more than 300 banks in more than 20 countries. This was expensive, error-prone, and data was often outdated.

Consequently, Fiserv looked for an automated solution and found Kapow Katalyst. Within 3 months they had built Kapow ETL robots that could automatically log-in to the web front-end of Fiserv accounts at all 300 banks and pull out the required information. Not only did this relieve the knowledge workers from manual data assembly it also gave the treasurer real-time data for point-in-time regulatory compliance.

Needless to say this created a lot of value for Fiserv.

I recommend you read the whitepaper, Hyper Management of Working Capital, written by Thomas W. Warsop, Group President for Fiserv.

By: Stefan Andreasen

Together with my product management team, I am currently out speaking with our customers to gather input for future product roadmap priorities.

It’s always great to meet up with our customers, but in particular, what’s been so rewarding this time is hearing one amazing story after another from our customers on the huge time and cost savings they’ve achieved with the Kapow Web Data Server.

Let me share two of their stories.

First, I talked to a large telecommunications company, a long time customer of ours, who has been using Kapow on 80 data automation projects. One project, with expected revenue of $4.9 million over 3 years, included the assembly of 129,000 listings into a directory, all to be finished within 6-8 weeks.

Performed manually, one listing took 15 minutes to complete, so one person was expected to complete 30 listings per day, or 1200 listings in 8 weeks. Basically 100 employees were required to finish the project on time using traditional manual order-entry methodologies.

Using Kapow they successfully built data automation “robots” that took 44 data fields from the source application, transformed it into 69 target fields, and then automatically loaded them into the target system. The Kapow robots completely automated the interaction with the source and target application Web front-ends, as well as automatically performed all the advanced transformations to convert the source data format to the target data format. With robots they were able to complete 5000 automatic listings per day with a 95% success rate and finish the project in only 4 weeks.

This resulted in an astonishing total savings of $1.3 million and at the same time eliminated the risk of the project not getting done in time.

The second company, a business information provider, was extracting energy related data from a dozen government web sites using manual cut-and-paste. With Kapow they built automated data acquisition robots that saved 2868 hours per year of manual labor for each data source. For 12 data sources this resulted in an astonishing savings of 34,416 hours per year.

I love to hear these stories and it’s always very satisfying to hear a customer tell you directly how much they like and benefit from your solutions.

By:  Stefan Andreasen