Plotting A BI StrategyPlotting A BI Strategy

Indeed, the most severe pain point Heverling expects to encounter is the complexity of its data sources. QlikTech will send a few consultants to Bonita Bay to help with the deployment, Heverling said. "They tell that us in most situations, they can get in and out in a couple of days, and their clients are happy with the results. But in our estimation, privately, we're looking at three weeks of consulting because we believe we have a difficult assignment in front of us."

This is the result of Bonita Bay's assorted business lines. On the real estate end, the company buys land, plots it, puts in roads and landscaping, and sells off the lots to homebuyers, who take care of construction on their own. But the company also operates the communities, which include restaurants, shops, golf courses and country clubs. Combine this with an IT policy that seeks out best-of-breed applications rather than whole integrated enterprise suites, and you have an eclectic soup of data sources not easily fed into a BI analytics tool.

Bonita Bay's disparate data sources include one used for financial forecasting and budgeting, and one that tracks prospective buyers from the moment they walk into the real estate office, all the way up until they sign a down-payment check. A point-of-sale application for golf courses serves as a data source, as does a general ledger system designed specifically for the construction business. Another source is a clock-punching system for restaurant and store staff; and finally there's a homegrown application that tracks property lots all the way from Bonita's purchase of acreage up to the sale of the last parcel. This way, the company can see which lots sold the quickest -- southern exposure or northern, lake views or fairway views, for instance. Bonita also wants to put in place an imaging system, which will take documents -- a canceled check, say, or a vendor invoice -- and scan or digitize them, thereby rendering a number less abstract. Using QlikTech, a user will be able to click through on a dashboard and actually view the canceled check.

In its proof-of-concept demo, QlikTech was able to demonstrate that it could connect to all these sources by using a piece of its technology called a "Data Cloud." QlikTech's primary selling point, Data Cloud is designed to eliminate the need for warehouses and OLAP cubes by pulling information from the original data sources, aggregating it, compressing it to one-tenth the size, and representing it in a flat proprietary file that can be read only by the QlikTech app. "We just can go right at data sources," Heverling said, "and reach as much or as little data as we like without all of that back-of-the-house plumbing."

Heverling says Bonita will measure the success of its BI initiative through executive reaction to the system, a more timely closing of monthly financial statements, and by simply seeing if it can improve itself in terms of efficiency and sales turnover in each of its business lines.

Heverling said his company paid about $85,000 for what he estimates will be about 100 seats. Services will come in at around $15,000 a year, he said, speaking from QlikTech's North American users conference, in Raleigh, N.C., where about 40 of the Swedish software maker's customers gathered earlier this week.