Torbay Council has selected business intelligence (BI) vendor Logi Analytics to replace its BI system, enabling it to cut costs and improve functionality.
The council's previous BI system was used to run a range of daily, weekly and monthly reports for senior managers by exporting data into a data warehouse and processing the reports overnight.
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However, Lorraine Woolcock, systems manager at Torbay Council, explained that a costly BI system upgrade was imminent, and so the council decided to review the market to find an alternative solution.
"We needed a system upgrade and with our existing provider this was proving too expensive and complex," she said.
The council declined to comment on the name of the previous BI system, but Simon Ryan, director of EMEA at Logi Analytics told Computing that it was "one of the traditional mega-vendor BI stack players". He said that they could be found in Gartner's Magic Quadrant and are "one of the mega-vendor platform guys".
Woolcock explained that the council was impressed by Logi Analytics' ability to run reports from live systems, eliminating the need to export data every day.
The council was also impressed by the cost savings, claiming that the project to switch vendors would give Torbay Council a return on investment (ROI) of 123 per cent in the first two months.
Logi Analytics' Ryan claimed that most of the ROI would come as a result of not having to pay for the licence of the previous vendor.
The council will use Logi Analytics to provide financial information for about 100 budget holders, giving them access to information to support top level statistics. The vendor said it would also give the budget holders a view of information through personalised dashboards.
"Even in these early stages, we can see lots of opportunities for Logi Analytics within the council," said Woolcock.
"In fact, our payroll system is currently being upgraded and deploying Logi Analytics with this new system will give us a substantial saving in licence fees. Making cost savings such as this, and improving efficiency in this way, are really important to the council," she said.
Ryan added that no external people from the analytics firm or a consultancy are needed in order for the council staff to use the BI system. Instead, Logi Analytics provides a short training course either through online video tutorials or a four day external course for council employees to attend.
"After this, they are pretty much up to speed, so they can start building their apps within a matter of days, not weeks or years like it could take with a traditional BI vendor. We didn't get involved in building their technology at all," he said.
"As long as [the staff] have the skills it is very easy to implement. With a traditional BI vendor, if you want to make changes you have to change the underlying infrastructure, but this is a lot more agile," he added.