Alpharma Expands Use of iQ4bis BI Solution

Published: April 22, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Alpharma has decided to expand the use of iQ4bis' Windows-based business intelligence tools to pull more actionable information out of its back-office systems, including the System i-based JD Edwards World ERP system, iQ4bis announced recently.

Based in Bridgewater, New Jersey, Alpharma develops, markets, and manufactures drugs for humans and animals, including morphine-based pain pills and anti-inflammatory patches for humans, and medicated feed additives and water soluble therapeutics for farm animals.

Supporting this global operation is a collection of back office ERP systems, including JD Edwards World, which is used at company headquarters, as well as JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, which was used in support of the company's European offices (and was moved to an outsourcer in November 2006).

While the data was safely housed in the JD Edwards systems, Alpharma needed a way to more easily extract meaningful and actionable information for its sales team, which is what led it to iQ4bis, explains Glenn Pinnel, director of business applications at Alpharma.

"We knew we wanted an easy-to-use business intelligence solution that integrated seamlessly with our JD Edwards ERP system," Pinnel says. "iQ4bis met those requirements, and in very short order we had detailed views into our business and sales reporting data, which our sales group has since been able to use to their advantage. The benefits were quickly apparent--strong user adoption, better and timelier access to information, and decision making based on data, trends, and facts."

With that initial iQ4bis implementation in the sales department now complete, Alpharma looked to expand the use of the BI tool to other offices and business divisions located around the world, including its supply chain management and inventory management groups, Pinnel says.

That will extend iQ4bis beyond JD Edwards, which has historically been one of iQ4bis' focuses, along with Microsoft Dynamics ERP systems. "We are working to bring together multiple data sources, not just our JD Edwards data, and use iQ4bis to deliver the information to our business users and management teams, regardless of the backend data source," Pinnel says. "iQ4bis will allow us to do that quickly, and the end result--an easy to use, global view of our business--is very compelling for Alpharma."

iQ4bis is a collection of Windows-based BI tools, including an OLAP server that runs atop the SQL Server database, an ETL tool called iQ4bis DataServer, and a Windows desktop solution called iQ4bis Analysis that is used by end-users to create and manipulate their "views" of BI data.

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