Altair Newsroom

Featured Articles

Ensuring Return on Investment From Data Analytics Solutions

Today, it’s more important than ever for organizations to have powerful, intuitive data analytics solutions in their software repertoire. But not all data analytics solutions are created equal, and it’s vital that companies know these solutions’ cost and how fast they’ll see their returns on investment (ROI) after implementing them. After all, data analytics software doesn’t come cheap. Thankfully, there’s never been a better time for organizations to analyze and compare data analytics solutions so they’re certain they’re making the right investments. Reviews, demonstrations, and scorecards from sites and services like G2 help organizations compare solutions’ performance, pricing, flexibility, ease-of-use, and more to ensure companies are satisfied with their choices. They also provide statistics, averages, and awards so users can see exactly how many months or years they’ll start seeing results and what solutions stand out from the competition.


We’re proud to announce that Altair Monarch – our desktop-based, self-service data preparation solution for all industries – garnered G2’s “Best Estimated ROI” badge for Spring 2022. Thanks to Monarch’s ability to assist organizations of all sizes and stripes, it has proven an intuitive, adaptable, and powerful solution for any organization’s data needs. According to Monarch’s G2 page, which is compiled from scores and reviews left by product users:


  • It took users an average of 11.4 months to achieve full ROI, beating the industry benchmark by just under four months
  • 89% of users would recommend it to colleagues
  • Monarch has a 4.5/5 star rating

But technology review sites are only one way to inform your future technology investments. It’s also critical to understand how solutions solve problems in diverse use cases, particularly those that are in or apply to your industry or department. Read the testimonials below to learn how Monarch has impacted businesses in healthcare, retail, and engineering, and discover what Monarch can do for your organization.


Keeping Finances and Data Healthy


Cape Regional Health Systems expanded significantly, and as it grew, its data grew as well. In fact, the organization dealt with so much data that even IT struggled with pulling the right information – turning to an outside consultant for assistance – which lengthened the response time and slowed insight generation. And the organization needed data so it could better serve its patients and provide them with the best, most affordable care possible. For instance, the team needs to create detailed analysis of outpatient revenue by account type and by individual patient basis. These reports are essential to understand where revenue is coming from and helps tie the contracted rates back to the individual payers. These data reports allow Cape Regional to negotiate favorable rates with each insurance firm.


To better organize and operationalize their data, Cape Regional turned to Monarch to speed the data collection process and to avoid the lengthy timeframes it took to secure information from the IT team. The results were immediate. “Monarch has significantly changed and improved our financial practices. We could do analysis in Excel, but it took 10 times longer and we couldn’t summarize the data by department, employee, etc,” said Regina Barrett, reimbursement analyst, Cape Regional. “We uncovered issues with one system that was processing multiple chargebacks for a service. With Monarch, we could correct and streamline our patient billing process.”


Now, the executive team has greater insight into the revenue and financial health of the organization and helps them conduct smoother, more efficient operations. “When we speak with other hospitals, they are amazed at the amount of information and insights we are able to gather from using Monarch. We are a small facility, but we can uncover greater detail faster and better,” said Tom Sigmund, director of financial reporting and reimbursement, Cape Regional. “Monarch saves hours daily and is open at all times on our desktops. I couldn’t imagine doing any analysis without it.”


To learn more about how Monarch helped Cape Regional, read the full story here.


Fueling Retail Results with Data


Retail is a fast-paced business. To stay competitive, retailers must be able to quickly analyze their operational data and respond strategically to marketplace conditions, industry trends, and economic upticks and downturns. To manage data, a chain of more than 100 sporting goods stores utilized an ERP system to centralize data from internal sources including accounts payable, inventory control, credit card reconciliation, sales auditing, and real estate operations sales. Management wanted a less time-consuming method to assemble these critical reports and to reduce the chances of introducing errors during the manual steps that had been required to way to join data from so many disparate sources. The organization found Monarch was the best solution for the job.


In addition to a broad range of capabilities, Monarch’s ease-of-use supported a short learning curve, required no custom coding, and connected directly to all data sources currently in use or likely to be used in the future. Monarch can also handle structured and semi-structured data, including PDFs, text, complex spreadsheets, JSON, XML, big data sources, relational databases, and many others. With it, business users and analysts can extract, cleanse, and transform data into consistent, governed, and secure rows and columns without specialized knowledge or training, and without writing any code.


Implementing Monarch streamlined and increased accuracy of the retail chain’s 200+ monthly operations reports and helped them create reusable data models they can apply to the various data sources used in their reports, which the team can modify as needed in just a few minutes.


To learn more about these features, read the full story here.


Saving Time and Money


Client Engineering Services (CES), a division of Altair, began by providing technical staffing focused on engineering and simulation. Driven by a massive increase in demand for technical talent, CES rapidly grew to meet the staffing needs of businesses around the globe. Like many organizations, as CES’s business grew so did the amount of operational data it generated. However, the group’s internal systems and processes did not evolve to match the data growth. With numerous sources of data to merge and review, their manual process was no longer efficient to keep up with the pace of growth.


While seamlessly providing the best service to their clients, the operations team at CES was still spending countless hours manually preparing data and creating the accounts receivables, open order audit, and revenue forecasting reports. Not only was this process time consuming, the volume of data from disparate sources and manual data entry increased the risk of errors and inaccurate reports.


Thanks to Monarch, the CES team saved more than 15 hours per week by streamlining their data preparation process. Now, they can use the time they once spent in tedious meetings to better utilize, analyze, and generate valuable insights from data. In addition, Monarch removed all human transposing errors and improved the team’s reporting accuracy. The team can now generate reports and insights in minutes instead of hours. Reducing their order audit reporting and accounts receivable from 15-30 minutes per day down to three minutes empowers them to do other proactive tasks that propel the company forward.


To learn more about this application, read the full story here.


To learn more about Monarch’s capabilities, features, and to request a free trial, find community support, and read additional customer stories, visit the Monarch homepage.