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My career – Management & Services – HI LLC

excluded from the tender. We found this attitude strange, as
we had very good specialists in Business Intelligence, and
especially in Business Objects. We therefore lost the sales of
new licenses and the implementation of the project which
consisted in setting up financial KPI's and a Dashboard
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to help steer the company. What was even more surprising
about this approach was that all the data had to come from
HI-Account, our accounting solution that they had been
using for almost 10 years.
In short, we were invited to a meeting attended by two
representatives of the service company, who had to explain
what information they needed and in what format.
Contractually, all our customers had the right to read
data directly from the HI-Account database. A customer

would explain his requirements to us, and we would give
him the schema of the part of the database he could use.
I was surprised when the two people from the service
company asked us to provide them with a "flat" file (the most
basic of files) that would be updated by a nightly routine, i.e.
every 24 hours.
I quickly had the premonition that we were heading for a real
conflict. I explained that they could have live access to the
data, that this would guarantee consistency, and that we
would remain in a real-time process, not one delayed by
24 hours. I also pointed out the time savings, and that there

111 Key Performance Indicator. A KPI is a performance indicator. It is a
quantified indicator used to monitor the effectiveness of an action in relation
to defined objectives.
112 Dashboard with graphical and numerical KPIs.
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