Overview: We call our Insight Cube technology an "MRI for business" because it gives the same kind of granular, complete view of a dataset that an MRI scan yields of the human body.
Opera's Insight Cube technology yields a multi-dimensional relational database, powered by proprietary software that allows virtually instantaneous filtering, re-cutting, and granular analysis of a huge dataset – up to 350MM records – across thousands of dimensions.
For more information on Opera’s Insight Cube technology,
please contact Geoff Farrell, Principal
Opera’s Insight Cube technology combines a powerful automated data structuring and mapping capability, an advanced RT-OLAP engine, and an interface that’s as fast, easy, and intuitive to use as a spreadsheet program. It brings “mouse click” analysis of very large datasets right to users’ desktops. There’s no need for IT department or vendor intervention; users can rapidly go where their hypotheses and “what-ifs” take them.
What’s Different: Insight Cube benefits include:
END-TO-END CLOSED SYSTEM: A single integrated system streamlines entire process data – aggregation, cleansing, manipulation, classification, mapping, viewing, and analysis
FAST: We can create a clean, integrated, n-dimensional Cube in a matter of 4-6 weeks – integrating data from many different sources, languages, nomenclatures, and systems
ALIVE: Mapping logic allows new data to be automatically classified and coded correctly, so data can always be up-to-date
EASY: Intuitive, point-and-click system empowers business analysts to perform sophisticated data structuring and analyses without need for IT support
POWERFUL: Custom in-memory roll-up engine yields new answers virtually immediately, even if dataset is very large
FLEXIBLE: Users, themselves, can modify entire data structure and logic rules to refine and extend analyses on the fly, with point-and-click ease
EFFECTIVE: Granular drill-downs and “what-if” modeling is user-driven and very rapid, supporting fully informed decision-making and novel, powerful breakthroughs
Where They’re Useful: We have used Insight Cube technology in many industries and many different functional areas. In fact, whenever we face a challenge that should be addressed by rapidly bringing together large, disaggregated data reserves and gaining deep, granular insight, it plays a critical role.
Case Studies
We have used Insight Cube technology in hundreds of client projects.Below, we present a few examples of the types of Cubes we have developed and the challenges Insight Cube technology has met:
Turning enormously fragmented data into a single view:
Challenge: Develop a single, integrated view of 18 months of total spend by an international hotel chain with 140 different hotels (owned, franchised, owned in partnership) across 40 different languages, different financial systems (some spreadsheet-based), different nomenclatures for the same items, thousands of suppliers, hundreds of thousands of items, millions of invoices.
Result:Opera developed a fully functional Insight Cube in 10 weeks. With its deep visibility into purchase volume, fragmentation, and pricing disparities, identified millions of dollars of savings through vendor rationalization, price reduction, and demand management.
Gaining a single view of operations and personnel:
Challenge: Find opportunities to reduce overlaps and rebalance the organization for an international media company with many acquired operations, inconsistent job descriptions, and no enterprise-wide view of people or job functions. Challenge was compounded by international regulations regarding the exportation of personnel data.
Result:Opera developed, for the first time in the client's history, an enterprise-wide view of the organization and its people, with associated expenses by function, person, operating group, and more. The Insight Cube allowed us to identify several major areas of functional overlap, opportunities to consolidate operations regionally, ways in which offshoring and outsourcing might be used to improve efficiency and effectiveness, and ways to cut personnel expense and improve performance by rebalancing the organization and reducing expensive middle-management layers. We found opportunities to reduce headcount by 10% and simultaneously create a nimbler organization.
Gaining actionable insight into non-SKU-based expense (advertising agency fees):
Challenge: For a major global marketing organization, find savings in advertising agency fees and pass-through expenses. Task was complicated by the “non-standard,” difficult-to-compare services and specific expertise of the different agencies, as well as very different pricing arrangements from agency to agency and market to market. In addition, client lacked detailed data on actual activities, hours worked, and results.
Result:Opera went to the agencies themselves to obtain detailed activity data; then we married the agency information with internal feeds and our external benchmarking database. We pulled all this information into a single “Precision Cube” – a deep drill-down into a single category – and found significant opportunities for savings. For example, we identified many instances where the client was using Tier 1 agencies for Tier 2-appropriate activities, or where rates for comparable agency/activity pairings were significantly out of alignment. Impact: we were able to save the client 10-15% per market on their agency fees and expenses.
