Educational institutions face a survey course of challenges these days. As resources diminish, how can they make every penny count? As legislators add requirements to assess how teachers are doing, how can this be accomplished fairly and accurately? As drop out rates increase — particularly in community colleges — how can teachers and administrators identify at risk students early enough to change their course? Opera's education services offer innovative, analytics-grounded approaches to all of these problems.

Here's a better lesson plan for procurement. Opera is a recognized leader in Procurement Optimization, combining superior technology with deep knowledge of more than 100 spend categories. We provide end-to-end services, and work under a gain-share compensation model that means you don't pay until we save. We start with rapid savings opportunity identification, gaining deep visibility into your spend dynamics in just 4 to 6 weeks. We move to capturing those savings for you. And we end by embedding the technology and the best practices in your own organization so you can continue to capture savings and effectively manage your spend. Our track record speaks for itself. For one institution of higher learning, we found $6.2MM of savings opportunities on a baseline of $50MM by renegotiating rates, consolidating spend, and optimizing payment terms. And for another institution, we identified savings of 20% for office supplies and 15-20% for printing.

"A" is for "apples-to-apples." Evaluating and improving individual teacher performance is a critical part of "Race To The Top" and other state and local initiatives — but it's also a very challenging problem. How can teachers be fairly compared when there are so many differences — in student populations, school resources, socioeconomic factors, and others — to take into consideration? How can each teacher find new methods that address his or her specific improvement opportunities?

Opera's Performance Accelerator for Education provides an answer. It's a Web-based application that enables teachers and administrators to receive apples-to-apples comparisons of their performance, pinpoint root causes, and receive customized recommendations on what they — and their students — can do to improve. First, Opera's proprietary clustering models create "true peer" groups — cohorts that really are similar and therefore form a valid basis of performance comparison. Then, Opera dissects the performance of each teacher to understand what the best ones in the cohort are doing differently from others. And it can then serve up specific recommendations to teachers for each individual student — lesson plans, exercises, classroom approaches, and more. So students learn better, teachers teach better, and overall school performance improves.

Get the drop on drop-outs. Schools are losing students at an alarming rate, particularly in the nation's high schools and community colleges. But if these at-risk students can be identified sooner, there's a better chance to head off a drop-out. Opera's Attrition Reduction analytics use powerful predictive and pattern recognition models to identify the first faint signals that someone is thinking of leaving school — so teachers and administrators can take actions to keep the student in the classroom.

Click here for more about Opera's procurement expertise for educational institutions.

Click here for more about Opera's analytics for performance evaluation and improvement.

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If you're managing a large legal department, you know there are many opportunities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your organization's legal spend: better and easier ways to ensure that your organization is getting what it's paying for, that you're matching assignments with the most efficient and effective personnel and methods to deliver them, and that you're taking the right actions on the cases you face. Opera has the advanced data management and analytics capabilities you need.

Discover a better discovery process. Opera's sophisticated Legal Text Mining capabilities can strip costs, time, and omissions out of pretrial preparation. Our sophisticated analytics support provides:

• "No Risk" Accelerated Review
  • Merging of near-duplicate, similar and predictive tags
  • Reducing cost of review of all documents by 70%
  • Agnostic hosting, can be used on Concordance
  • Improving quality control, consistency on relevance, and Priv Review output
• Search Term Selection Assistance
• Ranking of Opposing Party Data
• Prioritization for Time-Sensitive Deliverables
• Correlation of Deposition Material to Document Sets
• Cross-Library Correlation of Expert Testimony Transcripts to Issues
• Specific Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Entity Extraction — including Metadata and Content Entity Matching
• Metadata Temporal/Person/Topic Communication Pattern Analysis
• "Hot Doc"-to-Email Party Analysis
• Legal Hold Compliance Monitoring

Win the case against run-amok data. If you're a general counsel or legal department manager, you face a near-overwhelming flow of information from diverse sources every day. We can take your data — regardless of what form it's in, the datasets in which it resides, and where it originated — and give you an organized, constantly updating dataset along with the powerful tool you need to mine its insights. You can now understand costs by matter, provider, location. Get early alerts of runaway cases. Determine how similar cases have fared in a particular venue to determine whether it pays to go to trial, or to settle out of court. And much more.

It's all done with our BIQ technology, loaded with Opera's proprietary "legal schema" that allows us to rapidly load, clean, and categorize even millions of lines of legal-related inputs. BIQ gives you a coordinated view of spend across the enterprise, plus the OLAP-charged ability to slice and dice your data in any way you'd like, rapidly and without any IT intervention. Ask the question, click the mouse, see the answer, right there on your screen.

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Intelligent machines once transformed automotive assembly lines. Now machine intelligence — like that which Opera offers — is transforming the automotive industry.

Accelerate car sales — to the right people. Opera's predictive analytics plus our marketing expertise can identify likely targets for particular promotions. On a customer-by-customer basis, we can even predict what level of incentive is enough, and how much is too much. And our proprietary "likely to default" models provide accurate credit risk evaluations before a car leaves the showroom.

Keep them for the long haul. Then there's loyalty and retention. Our advanced analytics can create a 360? longitudinal view of each customer's relationship with both the manufacturer and the dealer over time, and then use that information to help create satisfaction and keep customers loyal to you and your brand.

Win at the finish line. Finally, there's termination and remarketing of vehicles returned from fleets and when they come off lease. We combine our predictive analytics and technology expertise into Opera's Auto Auction Pricing Optimizer, a dynamic, constantly updated way to accurately set floor prices for each vehicle at auction and then deliver this intelligence dynamically to the auction sites through an interactive iPad™ interface. We combine the Pricing Optimizer with an allocation optimizer model, which determines where to send a particular car to get the best possible auction price. For one major US remarketer, the Pricing and Allocation optimizers together are adding an average of $150 -$200 per car.

For a summary of Opera's capabilities in the auto industry, click here.

For more information on Opera's Dynamic Marketing Auto Auction Pricing Optimizer, click here.

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With consumers watching their money more closely than ever, it's never been more important for retailers and restaurateurs to watch where, how, and why their customers spend — and to optimize the product mix, pricing, and promotions that will keep that activity going and growing. Opera's analytics capabilities for retail range from creating virtual clusters of customers to determining what types of consumers react to which kinds of offers. We deliver our results right down to the neighborhood level — often recommending different promotions for a store or restaurant in one location different from that offered by the same retailer just a few blocks away. We also aid in location siting, determining the best spots for new outlets.

For a summary of Opera's capabilities in the retail industry, click here.

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It's an improved profit picture in three acts, produced and directed by Opera analytics. The curtain rises on a vast audience of individual customers eager for — what? Using the sophisticated modeling techniques that drive our recommender engine, we can serve up movies and other entertainment options most likely to appeal to every viewer, one set of eyeballs at a time. Act Two is about determining scheduling and the optimal times to air particular shows. And Act Three? Maximizing profits for the entire performance by optimizing advertising pricing.

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Whether it's getting an individual to keep staying at the same hotel chain or flying on the same airline, successful customer loyalty programs travel right to the bottom line. Opera's analytics have repeatedly identified the kinds of offers and promotions that motivate repeat business at a cost-effective price — and warn clients away from the ones likely to cost too much for the results they're likely to get. We also provide revenue leakage solutions that find and fix billing errors and omissions, and procurement optimization applications that help make sure our clients get the best possible prices on everything from fuel for their jets to cleaning supplies for their Jacuzzis.

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