Analytic applications

CGram Software is a software authoring company established in 1982. It provides accounting software, enterprise resource planning (ERP), CRM, production control and supply chain management software for small to medium-sized companies, and has a long history in the UNIX and Linux commercial world.

The maturity levels for business intelligence solutions are as follows:

• operational reporting
• analytic reporting
• business dashboards
• analytic applications

It may extend further to predictive analytics, or predictive analysis may form part of the analytic application - depending on both the subject matter under analysis, and the nature of the analysis required.

Analytic applications are typically described as a subset of performance management. They specifically relate to the analysis of a business process (such as sales pipeline analysis, accounts payable analytics, or risk adjusted profitability analysis) in support of decision making.

To qualify as an application (rather than simply as a data warehousing tool), these tools should promote some form of automation. The maturity level of this automation is as follows:

• reading data from a nominated operational system (ERP, CRM, SCM, etc.) into a data warehouse optimized for analysis (data led automation),
• reports, dashboards and scorecards based on that data structure (reporting led automation),
• what-if analysis and scenario-modeling (predictive or analytic led automation).

In most cases, these three levels are discrete functions, loosely banded together as a single product, and there is little automation of the process from end to end.

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Enterprise application integration

Overview

Enterprise application integration is an integration framework composed of a collection of technologies and services which form a middleware or "middleware framework" to enable integration of systems and applications across an enterprise.

Many types of business software such as supply chain management applications, ERP systems, CRM applications for managing customers, business intelligenceapplications, payroll and human resources systems typically cannot communicate with one another in order to share data or business rules. For this reason, such applications are sometimes referred to as islands of automation or information silos. This lack of communication leads to inefficiencies, wherein identical data are stored in multiple locations, or straightforward processes are unable to be automated.

Enterprise application integration is the process of linking such applications within a single organization together in order to simplify and automate business processes to the greatest extent possible, while at the same time avoiding having to make sweeping changes to the existing applications or data structures. Applications can be linked either at the back-end (database) or the front-end (GUI)

In the words of the Gartner Group, EAI is the "unrestricted sharing of data and business processes among any connected application or data sources in the enterprise."^[2]

The various systems that need to be linked together may reside on different operating systems, use different database solutions or computer languages, or different date and time formats, or may be legacy systems that are no longer supported by the vendor who originally created them. In some cases, such systems are dubbed "stovepipe systems" because they consist of components that have been jammed together in a way that makes it very hard to modify them in any way.

Improving connectivity

If integration is applied without following a structured EAI approach, point-to-point connections grow across an organization. Dependencies are added on an impromptu basis, resulting in a complex structure that is difficult to maintain.^[3] This is commonly referred to as spaghetti, an allusion to the programming equivalent of spaghetti code. For example:

The number of connections needed to have fully meshed point-to-point connections, with  points, is given by  (see binomial coefficient). Thus, for ten applications to be fully integrated point-to-point, , or 45 point-to-point connections are needed.

However the number of connections within organizations does not grow according to the square of the number points. In general, the number of connections to any point is independent of the number of other points in an organization. (Thought experiment: if an additional point is added to your organization, are you aware of it? Does it increase the number of connections other unrelated points have?) There are a small number of "collection" points for which this does not apply, but these do not require EAI patterns to manage.

EAI can also increase coupling between systems and therefore increase management overhead and costs.

However, EAI is not just about sharing data between applications; it focuses on sharing both business data and business process. A middleware analyst attending to EAI may also look at the system of systems.

Purposes[edit]

EAI can be used for different purposes:

• Data integration: Ensures that information in multiple systems is kept consistent. This is also known as enterprise information integration (EII).
• Vendor independence: Extracts business policies or rules from applications and implements them in the EAI system, so that even if one of the business applications is replaced with a different vendor's application, the business rules do not have to be re-implemented.
• Common facade: An EAI system can front-end a cluster of applications, providing a single consistent access interface to these applications and shielding users from having to learn to use different software packages.

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Child care management software

Child care management software also referred to as child care administrative software or daycare accounting software  is business software designed specifically for use by child care centers, preschools, and similar child-oriented facilities. They can be either run from local computers or via mobile/hand-held access to other systems running elsewhere. The software is intended to increase staff productivity by recording unique child and family information.

This category of software incorporates aspects of other types of business software, notably accounting software, but typically addresses business managementissues that are unique to child care and beyond the scope of generic business software. Immunization tracking and record keeping for the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) are examples of the specific nature of such software that appeals to a niche market.

Child care management software is typically developed by an independent software vendor. Capabilities vary by vendor  but may include tracking one or more of the following:

• Sign In-Out of Children and Staff
• Child scheduling and attendance
• Authorized pick up persons
• Child/teacher ratios
• Staff scheduling
• Classroom rosters and reporting
• Child immunizations
• Emergency contacts
• Photographs of children or pick up persons
• Waiting list management
• Summer camps, activities and after school programs
• Student meal counts
• Menu planning
• Automated billing for private pay and subsidized child care
• Family tax statements and receipts
• Electronic payment processing
• Payroll and time cards
• General accounting and financial reporting

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Business software

Business software or business application is any software or set of computer programs that are used by business users to perform various business functions. These business applications are used to increase productivity, to measure productivity and to perform business functions accurately.

By and large, business software is likely to be developed specifically for a business and therefore is not easily transferable to a different commercial enterprise, unless its nature and operation is identical. This is due to the unique requirements of each business that off-the-shelf software in unlikely to completely address. However, where an on-the-shelf solution is necessary, due to time or monetary considerations, some level of customization is likely to be required. Exceptions do exist, depending on the business in question, and thorough research is always required before committing to bespoke or off-the-shelf.

Some business applications are interactive, i.e., they have a graphical user interface or user interface and users can query/modify/input data and view results instantaneously. They can also run reports instantaneously. Some business applications run in batch mode i.e. they are set up to run based on a predetermined event/time and business user does not need to initiate them or monitor them.

Some business applications are built in-house and some are bought from vendors (off the shelf software products). These business applications either are installed on desktops or on big servers. Prior to the introduction of COBOL (a universal compiler) in 1965, businesses developed their own unique machine language.. RCA's language consisted of a 12 position instruction. For example, to read a record into memory,the first two digits would be the instruction (action) code. The next . four positions of the instruction (A address) would be the exact leftmost memory location where you want the readable character to be placed. Four positions (B address) of the instruction would note the very rightmost memory location where you want the last character of the record to be located. A two digit B address also allowed a modification of any instruction. Instruction codes and memory designations excluded the use of 8's or 9's. The first RCA business application was implemented in 1962 on a 4k RCA 301.The RCA 301, mid frame 501, and large frame 601 began their marketing in early 1960. .

The term covers a large variation of users within the business environment, and can be categorized by using a small, medium and large matrix:

• The small business market generally consists of home accounting software, and office suites such as OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office.
• The medium size, or small and medium-sized enterprise (SME), has a broader range of software applications, ranging from accounting, groupware, customer relationship management, human resource management systems, outsourcing relationship management, loan origination software, shopping cart software, field service software, and other productivity enhancing applications.
• The last segment covers enterprise level software applications, such as those in the fields of enterprise resource planning, enterprise content management(ECM), business process management (BPM) and product lifecycle management. These applications are extensive in scope, and often come with modules that either add native functions, or incorporate the functionality of third-party computer programs.

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