Halo

Prior to having a BI solution we were like many other companies I am sure. Exporting data straight from our ERP system into mostly Excel based reports. This was not only time consuming but also led to many errors in reporting, often having more than one version of the truth. That is why we decided to explore what our options were with BI. During our evaluation of many different BI vendors/software we quickly saw Halo rise above the rest. Halo Source is everything you need from a data warehouse, and cube creation perspective. On top of that, it is using full Microsoft based technology which makes the learning curve extremely fast, even for those non-developers. A deciding factor for Halo was the data quality module. Everyone has some form of dirty data, but Halo has a solution for that. It was the only company that offered this sort of feature and was a major reason we selected Halo as our business intelligence solution. You absolutely do not need to know how to write SQL to spin up your own data warehouse and cubes for use with Halo Prism. On the topic of Prism it is very streamlined visualization tool. Drag and drop with as many visual options as you would need. Prism has allowed us to gain insight into our data that we have struggled see. We truly believe that this will be one our most successfully projects that has the largest impact since our ERP implementation, and even then this is really the icing on the cake for our complete ERP suite.

It has taken a long time to implement, much of that is on us because of the way we decided to implement. I don't believe we were given sufficient advise in the beginning. We have since transferred to new account and project managers and things are moving along nicely. My advise would be to understand the software using simplified data first, once you have a good understanding of the extractions, transformations and how those translate through SQL to the BI tool, you are on your way to building a user friendly BI tool.

Great for a small companies making their first step into BI but maybe will be quickly outgrown, avoid if a mid to larger size company.

We are spinning up cubes left and right to get at the data under JDE. We had no analytics/bi department prior to Halo. Now we are acting like a very advanced department with many subject areas being deployed each month. In just 6 months time, I now have Inventory, Account Ledger, Open Orders, and other things visualized and refreshing automatically everyday. Super excited about the future with this tool.