MicroStrategy helps us free from complex work in the past, object-oriented mechanism makes our  engineers decrease large amount useless duplication manual work, the functions not only provide a powerful query analysis functions, but also provide an open platform to connect to our existing system perfectly. FirstBI as the sole agent and distributor of MicroStrategy in Greater China has provided overall solutions and strong technical support, which is part of the key factors this project successfully implemented, we would like to express our appreciation to SolventoSOFT all personnel involved in this entire project to give us the strong.

-- ZTE BI Project Manager   Cai Xueyuan 

ZTE Corporation Profile 

ZTE Corporation is the world leading integrated communications company listed developing quickly in manufacturing sector, in recent years to be global communications solutions provider. In 1997, ZTE listed A-shares in Shenzhen Stock Exchange. December 2004, ZTE Corporation from China first listed A-share successfully in Hong Kong. In 2004, fulfilled the contract orders for 34 billion yuan. In 2005, ZTE Corporation was elected in global “IT 100” as the only IT and telecommunications manufacturing enterprise in China. ZTE is key high-tech corporation in China, technology innovation enterprise and national “863 Plan” high-tech result transformation, and offered nearly 20 countries “863 Plan” and is one of the most offered national “863 Plan” enterprise in the field of telecommunications equipments. ZTE invests R&D each year is around 10% of sales revenue, and established R&D centers in the United States, India, Sweden and also in China domestic.

Project Goals

ZTE Corporation is the main purpose of the decision-making support system of enterprise management personnel to provide the operations of enterprises, management of enterprise development can make a correct judgment of the direction of the support given to information. The system is currently mainly from the business and financial aspects of both the current business operations and corporate assets were analyzed. Business including: business analysis, inventory analysis, sales analysis, shipments of receivables analysis, financial management include: cost analysis, budget analysis and financialmanagement of the cockpit. Below the main functions of each module by January 1 to illustrate: 

■ Management Analysis: From a macro point of view to display current ZTE each product business units and each marketing departments operations.

■ Inventory Analysis: From delivery costs, inventory structures and inventory turnover rate to let users know current inventory status, reduce inventories, decrease cash flow, while avoiding materials backlog or shortage. Users can combine historical inventory to adjusted inventory to make the right decisions.

■ Sales Analysis: Sales analysis is one of most concern for ZTE. This analysis display current ZTE each product business unit and marketing department’s sales performance, for management level to adjust marketing strategy to increase sale revenue. 

■ Delivery Analysis: Display total amount of delivered sales from ZTE all product business unit and marketing departments from the beginning of the year to current, let ZTE understand A/R by products delivered. At the same time, based on the sales contracts and A/R analysis, adjust delivery strategy of customers. This is one of the most concerns for ZTE. 

■ Accounts Receivable Analysis: Accounts Receivable analysis is one of ZTE's most concerns, though the A/R analysis of each product unit and each marketing department, enterprise can quickly define which business units need to increase retrieving A/R effectiveness. Though sales, delivery and A/R, enterprise can understand current cash flow.

■ Cost Analysis: Based on staffs, business units, accounts, time, and suppliers to identify cost. Find out high cost and transaction-level classification to minimize operation costs, while examinating differences between comparing current actual costs and past actual costs.

■ Budget Analysis: understand the budget of product groups and marketing unit during future specific period of time, management level can process adjustment for unreasonable budget. 

■ Financial Management Cabin: provide financial management cabin for business leaders a business information room and decision-making room, from a macro point of view to show current enterprise management operation to enable better plans and strategy to win the competitions. 

Front-End Requirements

ZTE Corporation had very strict requirements on user interface, MicroStrategy as a project report tool must be able to perfect embedded in whole system interfaces. The main requirements are as following: 

User access rights integration requirement, ZTE's access rights include user roles control and data permission two parts. DSS system user roles control the user in the system if allowed to review certain reports, if allowed to do report operations, like printing reports, export, and so on. In DSS system user’s role filter role information, DSS transfer several conditions for filtering access rights for certain actions operating on systems. 

Customized user interfaces

Front-end reports into Excel file integration. In other words, this front-end reports system must be able to export into Excel or. Pdf files in complete format.

Applications Results

ZTE's report display of decision supporting system fully adopt MicroStrategy 8 solutions, in this project, MicroStrategy 8 product functions in particular are fully used. In general, the following development characteristics providing great convenience: 

Complex report display style: Based on Report Service, MicroStrategy users can create and distribute various enterprise reporting, major functions including: Graph-level accuracy, drag-down documents production; effective tiers layout; powerful data grouping characteristics; intuitive design and formatting functions; automatically publish and distribute; perfectly generate PDF format. 

Complex business logic relationship definitions: As MicroStrategy 8 products using fully object-oriented development methods, analysis processes in all kinds of business logic are defined as objects, so this method brings a good package to compose relatively simple objects to into complex combination objects to achieve the purpose of complex business logic integrating closely with background database system. Manual SQL reports are also good supplement to complex business logic relationship definition. This made very complex reports solve easily.

Fully integrate with background database system: MicroStrategy 8 provides a unique set of configurations of VLDB attributes and Pass-Through function. By VLDB attributes configuration, users can set different parameters for background data warehouses to optimize SQL statement generation to improve performance; through Pass-Through function, users can directly use background database functions to optimize product effectiveness. 

Flexible customized drilling path: This function in this project is reflected the most adequate. Users are often hoping to flexible switching between other completely different indicators reports from the current report. MicroStrategy 8 Drilling Map functions can meet this requirement. Meanwhile, this function is not equipped in many other analysis systems. With this drilling function, reports can be flexible and convenient enough to meet users' analysis requirements, and also to ensure that system flexibility. 

Perfect combination with Excel: This function very popular by clients. Clients are intending to save report result into local hard disk in excel format. MicroStrategy 8 solves this requirement, it save MicroStrategy report into Excel files, and also keeps formats complete.

Powerful web functions: This function is also unique in MicroStrategy. It can directly create reports, edit report, define report formats in flexible ways through web browsers, and not required to download any activeX controls to maintain a strong Web functions, and also ensure web security and network traffic not to increase dramatically.