Customers

RapidAdvance"Most SMBs lack the necessary resources to hire full-time developers or report writers, and with crystalreports.com, you don't need to. As a business user, I automated meaningful BI in a matter of days."

Scott Cohenford, Senior Analyst, RapidAdvance

Challenge

RapidAdvance is a leading direct provider of cash advance services for small and mid-sized businesses. The company has a business-friendly model for merchants to convert their future credit card receivables into immediate cash, quickly and easily.

As a quickly growing business with thousands of customers, RapidAdvance recognized the importance of gaining fast and easy access to reliable, "real-time" corporate information and the need to migrate towards automated reporting. Scott Cohenford, Senior Analyst at RapidAdvance, elaborated on how previously unmet data needs impacted their business: "Due to time and bandwidth constraints, achieving the amount or level of reporting we required became a considerable challenge using Excel spreadsheets and other static analytical tools. Inefficiencies inherent in our highly manual reporting process ultimately led to fragmented communications, data integrity concerns, and limitations in the depth and breadth of the analysis we could perform. This was especially difficult when we needed visibility into our direct and partner channels as well as the performance of our portfolio."

What made solving this situation particularly challenging for RapidAdvance is that they didn't have a large IT department that would, traditionally, manage the technical requirements involved in accessing the data, reporting, and broad-based information sharing. RapidAdvance looked to its business analyst - who had never worked with databases or business intelligence (BI) technologies - to solve its critical business challenge.

Approach

RapidAdvance chose Crystal Reports and crystalreports.com to access, report, and share its company data, which included salesforce.com. "Crystal gave us a level of reporting that was far superior to the other solutions we evaluated, including salesforce.com itself. I downloaded a free trial of crystalreports.com and found it extremely intuitive and easy to use," says Cohenford.

In addition to Crystal Reports and crystalreports.com, Cohenford quickly added the data visualization tool Crystal Xcelsius and the on-demand development platform Nsite to his library of BI tools, taking advantage of the Business Objects suite of on-demand offerings. "Business Objects provides a complete on-demand solution that allows us to continue growing our BI strategy as we grow our business," says Cohenford.

crystalreports.com is a web-based report-sharing service that allows organizations to instantly share Crystal Reports over the web, with nothing to deploy, no additional costs, and no dependence on IT. "A key feature in crystalreports.com is its direct integration into the salesforce.com interface," says Cohenford. "All Salesforce users are in the application every day as part of their daily routine. All they have to do is click on a tab and they have all the reports they need, instantly."

Results

A business-user-driven BI solution

Cohenford, a business analyst at RapidAdvance, has created the company's BI strategy from the ground up and runs it on an ongoing basis. Cohenford explains the uniqueness of this business-user-oriented approach: "We are a company that has rolled out a comprehensive reporting package without reliance on IT, which is a new concept in any technology implementation. Most SMBs lack the necessary resources to hire full-time developers or report writers, and with crystalreports.com, you don't need to. As a business user, I automate meaningful BI in a matter of days."

Quick implementation time

Cohenford had his BI solution up and running in little time: "With the free trial and the help of some textbooks, I was able to recreate – and improve – all of our reports in a matter of weeks. For someone to walk in without report creation experience and create such a large library of business reports speaks to the user-friendliness of the products."

Access to critical company information

RapidAdvance currently has hundreds of users who view more than 400 reports, with users expected to continue to grow. Cohenford can control and manage access by user, with different types of users getting access only to their relevant reports. All reports are hosted on crystalreports.com.

Cohenford states that "now we can look at and build intelligence from an infinite number of data points." Information that RapidAdvance delivers to its end users includes:

Other users include the Risk Management, Finance, and Marketing departments that each view relevant reports hosted on crystalreports.com.

RapidAdvance also hosts its Crystal Xcelsius dashboards on crystalreports.com, providing its direct and partner sales channels with an interactive pricing calculator to quickly and easily create quotes. This allows the company to keep its proprietary model hidden while addressing key sales needs.

In the future, RapidAdvance will be using the Business Objects on-demand development platform, Nsite, to facilitate its proposal process, helping speed its sales cycle.

Concluded Cohenford: "crystalreports.com has changed our business. It's made a tremendous difference in our ability to communicate with our partners and managers, and it's made it immeasurably easier for us to focus on running a profitable and growing business."

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