COL Partners for Advanced Analytics

Connections Online Partners with Birst to Enhance Connections Online with Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics

Integrated with Birst^™, Connections Online allows organizations to monitor, measure, and control performance by leveraging easy-to-use analytics, dash-boarding, and collaboration.

Connections Online 4.0 (COL), has partnered with Birst^™, a leading provider of on-demand solutions for business intelligence and analytics, to enhance its Connections Online 4.0 strategy execution tool. This partnership provides Connections Online with business intelligence and advanced analytics for customers, enabling them to stay on track with their strategy with improved documentation, management, and tracking capabilities. As a result, Connections Online has released an enhanced version -- Connections Online Professional with its new Advanced Analytics Option.

Birst provides the Advanced Analytics Option within Connections Online, which allows COL customers to interact with analytic dashboards and reports that combine information from multiple data sources. Sources include core financial systems, sales data, marketing data, HR data, or any other data sources that include spreadsheets – along with Connections Online transaction data.  This process allows customers to truly understand where they are performance-wise related to their strategy in ways they have never been able to accomplish before.  Karla Norwood, President of Connections Online says, “This partnership brings unique value to the customer who wants to improve business performance – you are “marrying” advanced analytics that help determine where you have been and where you want to go with the operations side of the business to manage how you get there.” 

Benefits clients will realize using the integrated solutions:

• Understanding of where they have been (analytics).
• Documenting and capturing their core strategy and/or business unit/departmental strategy to understand where they want to go.
• Manage strategic projects and how they are aligned with strategy.  How they are going to get there?
• Manage all people and accountability for all work across the organization.  Who is doing what and by when to get to their goals completed?
• Track performance over time to see progress or areas that continue to need improvement.
• Combine multiple data sources for analysis on things like the affect of marketing promotions on actual sales results or comparison of performance across all locations over time.

The Connections Online SaaS Solution allows organizations to create a virtual blueprint of their organization.  This blueprint is inclusive of strategic performance, project portfolios and plans, as well as employee performance & competencies. Coupled with Birst, COL allows organizations to monitor, measure, and control performance by leveraging easy-to-use analytics, dash-boarding, and collaboration.

Birst works by pulling data from the core financial source used by the customer as well as other data sources like SFDC. Dashboards will show integrated views of data not possible before.  COL also has a meeting module that is similar to a meeting portal, which all members of a group belong to and have access to for meeting notes, agendas, presentation info, etc.

 “We know our partnership with Cardwell will assist their financial services clients with incorporating predictive business insights to operational executives that will help them drive effective decisions,” says Randi DiPrima, Vice President of Global Partners for Birst. “In the long run, it will make their organizations much more valuable to their customers.”

“We believe this partnership certainly takes our Connections Online tool to the ‘next level’ of service,” says Jim Cardwell, CEO of Cardwell. “We’re very excited to see the level of increased insight our clients will be able to garner from this business intelligence inclusion into Connections. Everybody should benefit greatly from this addition.”

About Birst

Birst™ is the leading provider of on-demand business intelligence solutions. Birst brings the benefits of fact-based decision-making to a much broader audience by making it affordable, fast, and easy to use. Birst is designed to support users of all sizes – from individuals to groups and entire companies, so that everyone can benefit from greater insight into their business. More information is available at www.birst.com.

About Cardwell and Connections Online SaaS

Based in Cleveland, Ohio, Cardwell is a software development and management-consulting firm that helps clients succeed by improving organization-wide alignment and cross-functional collaboration through its Connections Online strategy execution tool. Jim Cardwell and Karla Norwood, the firm's current CEO and President, founded Cardwell in 1983 as a leadership development and management process consulting firm.

For more information about Connections Online Professional, call Karla Norwood at (800) 395-1410 or email  knorwood@cardwellgroup.com