ACADEMIA

Informatica Corporation today announced that J. F. Shea Co., Inc., one of the oldest and largest privately held construction companies in the U.S., selected the Informatica PowerAnalyzer business intelligence software for real-time visibility into sales and construction activity. By enabling senior J. F. Shea management to react more quickly to changing operational indicators, PowerAnalyzer will help the highly diversified company reduce its exposure to risk in the face of changing market conditions. "PowerAnalyzer will let us view sales and other key activities at a glance as they happen around the country, so we can be much more agile in adjusting pricing and managing inventory within our construction projects," said Mike Little, senior technical manager at J. F. Shea. "From the CEO down, our executives are excited about implementing this technology to improve our competitiveness by closely tracking our profit drivers. We selected Informatica over other software for this critical project because PowerAnalyzer has the best real-time dashboard and alerting functionality, and is easy to deploy, learn and use." J. F. Shea is currently using the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform to capture transactional and historical data from its ERP, sales and construction scheduling software, as well as its escrow, mortgage and warranty tracking systems. Beginning with its core homes division, J. F. Shea will leverage the data integration platform by deploying PowerAnalyzer dashboards to more than 60 of its top executives and senior managers across the country in March 2004. J. F. Shea plans to use PowerAnalyzer's real-time alerts to flag exception conditions and thresholds as they occur and notify appropriate personnel for immediate action. "Companies in highly competitive industries can no longer just track business events after they happen -- they need to make decisions and move on events as soon as they occur," said Girish Pancha, executive vice president of products at Informatica. "We're pleased to help put real-time information into the hands of decision makers across J. F. Shea to help them even better manage risk exposure, sales and construction activity, variations in demand and other market complexities and rapid demand changes endemic to the construction industry." PowerAnalyzer uniquely leverages the industry-leading Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform to provide greater confidence in data, while delivering ad-hoc query and reporting, analysis, embedded Excel, and collaborative analytics via "out-of-the-box" dashboards. PowerAnalyzer is the only business intelligence software today offering a single, unified server and pure Internet-centric architecture -- designed for usability, scalability and extensibility -- to ensure the lowest cost of ownership and quickest return-on-investment. PowerAnalyzer was recently recognized as a 2003 eWeek Excellence Award finalist and received "excellent" ratings for scalability and support for query, reporting and analysis in an Intelligent Enterprise product review.