About Lodestar

Much like a lodestar in the sky, Lodestar Technologies inc. is your guiding light through the vast world of technology.

We are your trusted Partner.

Lodestar provides data warehousing, business intelligence analytics and professional services solutions to financial institutions and other organizations looking for assistance with the complex technology systems needed to bring efficiency, sustainability and profitability to their business.

Lodestar can help leverage existing systems as well as design and implement new solutions. The Lodestar team will work with you to bring your technology project to a successful completion.

Lodestar’s core competency lies in our ability to remove the complexity of IT so clients can focus on meeting their core business mandate. Today’s competitive marketplace demands focus on efficiency and profitability. Placing trust in Lodestar allows our clients to take full advantage of the power of the Lodestar platform and its associated business intelligence applications, while they concentrate on building their business, reducing inefficiencies in their business, and enhancing their bottom line.

No matter the scope of your project, the experienced and dedicated Lodestar team will become your technology business partner for the life of your project and beyond. From the initial planning stages through to ongoing updates and maintenance, Lodestar is your trusted partner in technology.

Frequently Asked Questions

Following are the answers to your most frequently asked questions. If you have a question that’s not answered below, please contact us.

Can reports created within business intelligence be exported out and viewed in a program such as Excel?

Yes, all business intelligence reports can be exported in a variety of popular formats such as Excel, PDF and PowerPoint.

Does the solution perform house-holding?

The data warehouse contains all your customer data from multiple sources, allowing you to group related individuals based on your own rules which can be tweaked and refined over time giving you the ultimate flexibility when segmenting your customer base.

In your demonstration, business intelligence looked like a portal of sorts, is that correct and can it appear in widgets for SharePoint?

Yes one of the key value propositions of business intelligence is that it functions as a one-stop portal for delivering interactive reports by role to everyone in the organization. It can integrate into Active Directory to make user management centralized and convenient. Business intelligence reports can be surfaced in SharePoint as a widget but also you can create custom SharePoint reports that derive their data from the data warehouse.

Tell us about training our staff and what type of employee(s) we would need onsite to support, and build for our organization.

The two main resource types needed are business and technical people. On the business side, Lodestar trains key staff that will administer the system and create most of the reporting content for the organization. The people in this role will need to understand the banking and reporting requirements of the organization but it is not necessary for them to be technically proficient. On the technical side, your existing server support staff will be more than sufficient to monitor and manage the Lodestar server. Lodestar offers a service to take care of any and all Oracle related tasks which removes the need for your staff to have Oracle expertise.

Does this live in the cloud? or on a server in-house?

The Lodestar solution lives on a server in-house to give you maximum flexibility and control of your data and the systems that will feed into the data warehouse.

In the demonstration, I noticed a number of business intelligence cubes. Do those come with the system or do we need to create them?

The Lodestar solution comes with all the cubes that you viewed in the demonstration as well as all the business intelligence content presented (and more!).

Does it make more sense to centralize the creation of business intelligence content or have more of a self-serve environment?

Generally a mix of the two approaches is the most effective. The advantage of the centralized model is that a small group of people become in-depth experts on the business intelligence application and the data models in the warehouse. The self-serve option allows a wider group of people access to create their own business intelligence content for themselves or their departments. Of the two approaches, it is more essential to have a strong group of centralized report writers as a best practice.

Is there a search feature?

Yes, on a few different levels. On the system level, there are built-in search fields for finding existing business intelligence reports. On the data side, you can create any business intelligence report to contain free form text fields that allow you to search for matching data on any of the fields in the data warehouse. With this approach, you can create general reports on a data model that allows users to search and find the specific records they are looking for.

How will the solution help us gain more consistency and depth in our reporting?

The consistency is derived from the entire institution utilizing the same data model, and not falling back on the outdated practice of taking core information offline into Excel for manipulation. The depth lies in the ability to create reports that are aggregated with the ability to dive down all the way to the transactional or account details with a click of a button.

How are institutions using business intelligence to gain a better understanding of the customer?

The data warehouse functions as a storage facility for information from all your production systems and ties that information together to get a consolidated view of the customer. Business intelligence allows you to easily move around in that information and distribute it effectively to all departments. Analyzing transactional past behavior can help you predict future behavior.

Our Solutions

Business Intelligence

Enhance your ability to generate valuable insight from your data to improve productivity, increase efficiencies, and gain critical competitive advantages.