Business Intelligence Overview

What is business intelligence? A BI system extracts information from your accounting and other systems, refines and transforms it where neccessary and finally aggregates it into a flexible format useful for making strategic business decisions.

BI answers questions like:

How profitable are my firm's practice groups, offices, timekeepers, clients and matters?
Which practice groups have a high profit margin but low billing volume and vice versa?
How can I determine realization differences between practice groups?
How can I get supporting information when determining partner allocation and compensation?
What are the underlying billing and collection lag differences across billing partners?
What are the firms carrying costs by billing timekeeper?

The ProVantage^® Business Intelligence Suite consists of the following:

Wellspring – point and click data extraction and portfolio-building tool

Executive Portfolio – user interface supporting executives and senior administrative staff

Drill-down and flat views of information –- a flat view is a recap of any dimension in the drill-down
Dynamic selection of tabular and graphical presentations
Dynamic time slicing choices:

monthly, quarterly, and yearly
calendar and fiscal basis

Focal Point – point and click Excel report writer

ProVantage BI Suite reveals performance within the context of organization dimensions. We support the following measures and dimensions (unlimited user-definable measures can be obtained by using expressions):

Performance Measures – 36 basic measures (by month worked, billed or applied) the number of which can be extended with expressions

Utilization
Realization
Profitability
WIP and AR aging
Collections

Compensation formula
Billing lags
Payment lags
Carrying Costs
Standard Costs
etc.

Organizational dimensions – 80+ Date effective or current assignments

Office
Department
Area of law
Originating, responsible, billing partner
ABA code
Industry

Client/matter
Practice group
Attorney type
Working attorney
Participating attorney (matter credit splits)
etc.

The ProVantage Suite is unique in its:

Simplicity
Flexibility
Extensibility
Extremely small IT footprint
Comparatively small budget

A relationship with ProVantage Software, Inc. is characterized by:

High quality support
Accessible expertise based on intimate knowledge of your industry
Available customization services
Preferred upgrade status to other software offered by ProVantage Software

Read about how the BI Suite helps a firm access information they couldn't get to before, what our clients are saying, overview of the Business Intelligence Suite. We also have a published article in the LawNet Knowledge Management white paper (PDF, Requires Adobe Acrobat).