BI Insight

Hi there,

Welcome to the Feb 2010 edition of BI Insight newsletter!

It has been very exciting & encouraging to see the recent developments in the BI space. It has been a great start but there is a lot of work required. Over the last month, Systech and BI Insight had a chance to personally experience several cutting edge BI solutions and collaborate with customers at the MicroStrategy World 2010. What impressed me the most was that despite a rough 2009, BI technologies continue to quickly adapt and expand to pursue business and performance opportunities.

This year Systech’s mantra is to put customers first. Systech uses an agile approach that applies user-centric design. Our focus is not just turning data into knowledge, but turning knowledge into a format that customers can easily use for decisions. By understanding issues through your metrics, identifying the KPIs and then applying our data visualization techniques we make Business Intelligence relevant to you.

This month’s highlights:

1. Systech’s project success in MicroStrategy Implementation for a leading specialty retailer.
2. A featured report on Systech at MicroStrategy World.
3. And, of course, BI news articles from reputed sources.

We hope that you find the newsletter to be a valuable resource and we encourage you to share it with your peers.

Cheers,
Vaishnavi Gollapudi
The Editor

Background

In this case study we describe how a leading specialty retailer achieved a greater insight into Key performance and Sales metrics through Systech’s MicroStrategy implementation. The MicroStrategy implementation supported business users to analyze sales and inventory to identify key trends and opportunities.

To accommodate their expanding business the client sought a platform to support complex data analysis that is user friendly. Formerly they depended on time consuming and less efficient POS System.

After evaluating several Business Intelligence vendors, they chose Systech Solutions Inc. to meet their needs for identifying the key trends and making informed decisions. Systech Solutions, Inc. was assigned to design an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) for them in this regard.

Challenges

The client required a detailed access into a variety of business data to allow the business community to analyze their data in greater depth. To offer a simplified and integrated solution for a profitable growth Systech had to address certain challenges.

• To track trends and identify opportunities. Since the data was spread across disparate systems it was a laborious process.
• To manage overwhelming amounts of data from various sources—and turning it into reliable business intelligence that enabled better business outcomes.
• To effectively design EDW for consolidated reporting both from in-house applications, JDA and PeopleSoft.
• To configure and implement a scalable tool to query the EDW and to create reports.
• To build a system that would distribute reports with in a 24 hour window every month.
• To provide a platform that could keep up with constantly evolving user requirements.

Solution

Systech Solutions fashioned a business intelligence environment that comprised of a Netezza data warehousing infrastructure, a DataStage ETL environment and a MicroStrategy reporting environment.

The Systech team successfully achieved the extraction, transformation and loading of the source data into a data mart schema through an ETL process. The team made sure that the information was accurate, consistent, and optimally organized for complex analysis. The EDW was effectively designed for consolidated reporting from in-house applications, JDA and PeopleSoft. Since the source data was stored in individual schemas, the transformation strategy included consolidation of information which was common to all source systems. A user-friendly OLAP data model was successfully created to store pre-aggregated data for fast ad-hoc query performance.

MicroStrategy reporting tool was configured to query the EDW and to create reports. The Systech team developed dashboards that included scorecards to allow any type of key performance indicators (KPIs) to be rolled up into a score for a particular application area, overall IT performance, or anywhere in-between. More than 32 to 40 reports were run apart from the templates during the course of the project.

The sales data (KPI’s) was analyzed to:

• Anticipate the sales margin
• Analyze the SKU to aggregate (or roll-up) metrics into single overall “score” for IT and the inventory data
• Visualize store and warehouse inventory
• Calculate profitability evaluation ratio that analyzes the firm’s ability to turn inventory into cash above the cost of the inventory
• Study purchase orders and transfers

Result

The MicroStrategy implementation by Systech team provided the client a greater insight into Key performance and Sales metrics.
Systech developed an easy to use BI application to support their data from the users. The data warehouse was architected to support production reporting.
Multiple areas of their business used the data to manage inventory, identify sales opportunity, recognize key performers and review products.
Systech made it possible to provide customizable user experience and provide executive summary reports, analyze sales promotion and study products sales.
Systech created a robust architecture and a flexible platform. This architecture combined right level of access with required functionality and resulted in a positive user experience.

MicroStrategy’s 13th annual user conference 2010 kicked off with a bang at Las Vegas this year. MicroStrategy World has always presented us a great opportunity to spend time with our customers and partners to catch up and plan for the upcoming year, and this year was no different! There was record attendance of more than 1,500 customers and partners attending, signifying the beginning of what is looking to be a very strong year for BI.

Systech has been a regular at the MicroStrategy World for the past several years. This year we were a silver sponsor for the event. We were delighted to be on the exhibit floor along with our partner Pi Solutions to present our success strategies and experiences using BI to enhance business performance. Some of the exciting new attractions on this year’s Systech exhibit floor featured unique presentations and demonstrations highlighting “Discover the power of Analytics” solutions for various industries. Not only was our solution well received by our client base but was extremely well received by the audience who were exposed to Systech’s BI for the first time. At the event, we got a chance to re-connect with Systech alumni and it was gratifying to see them cheering and celebrating our success. Krish Lakshmi Narayan, summarized the sentiment when he said that it was great to see Systech’s growth in BI and the level of participation at the conference. Several Alumni also brought their entire team over to our booth and introduced Systech as the company which trained them of their BI expertise.

Adhering to their tradition, MicroStrategy world started off with a dashing performance – this year by Gwen Stefani (Or maybe a look alike…hey you never know in Las Vegas!)! The general session generated tons of energy and excitement – it included Sanju Bansal’s welcome, Mike Saylor’s keynote on Mobile Intelligence, Mark LaRow’s keynote on the Micro Strategy Technology Strategy, and Micro strategy customer panel.

The highlight was definitely the keynote from Mike Saylor, CEO, MicroStrategy. Mike declared in his keynote, “We are on the verge of a new era that will result in a new class of applications that will change the way we think about our business.” Saylor made the most compelling speech of why mobile may revolutionize BI. Saylor said, “Computing is entering its fifth generation in which desktop Internet applications are giving way to a new generation of Mobile Internet applications. In the Mobile Internet age, applications which were mildly successful when used at one’s desk suddenly become incredibly effective and valuable when consumed on the go, anywhere and anytime business is being conducted. A Mobile information access will likely eclipse desktop information access in the near future. This heightened level of usage, combined with the richness of the mobile interface, will change the way information is consumed and MicroStrategy intends to be at the forefront of this wave. MicroStrategy 9 is designed to outperform competitive BI architectures, and is well-suited to provide intelligence in the age of the Mobile Internet. Our goal is to enable our customers to deliver Mobile Intelligence ahead of their competition to their employees, their suppliers, and their customers.”

Mark LaRow’s keynote focused on the strategy and the launch of MicroStrategy 9 release 2. MicroStrategy boasted its in-memory solution last year in MicroStrategy 9. With MicroStrategy 9 Release 2, they have improved its cache load times, query processing times, and memory consumption. VP of Marketing Mark LaRow claimed that cubes consume 70% less memory in the latest release, making an already scalable solution more so. With the upgrade to 64-bit BI, empowered business people to conduct analysis quicker, leverage more BI functionality, and to create their own reports without IT help.

The event featured more than 100 educational sessions, and an update on MicroStrategy’s latest technology advances. MicroStrategy outlined their technology advancements and strategy to emphasize the important impact of advancements: speed of thought performance, mobile intelligence, enabling an information gateway, rapid time to value, lower cost of ownership, making BI pervasive and the future with predictive analytics and next generation user interfaces through navigation and visualization.

At the conference, MicroStrategy recognized companies for achieving outstanding business performance with their MicroStrategy-based business intelligence applications. These companies were recognized because of the way their dashboards and dashboard technology enhanced the way the business decisions were made. The winners from this year were AmerisourceBergen for extranet deployment, Con-way Freight for advanced analytics, Yahoo for data analytics, Lowes for user scalability, Ross Stores for enterprise deployment and Brian Fox from Citi for individual excellence in business intelligence.

AmerisourceBergen was recognized in the Extranet Deployment category for its InSite system. The InSite system supports AmerisourceBergen’s community pharmacy clients across the U.S. with powerful dashboards and scorecards that provide rich analytics and tailored information. The extranet allows pharmacy owners to quickly identify suspect claims that may contribute to profit leakage, and uncover opportunities to expand their business and reduce unnecessary costs. AmerisourceBergen is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical services companies, with operations primarily in the United States and Canada. Chuck Reed, from ABDC acknowledged the Systech team for its integral role in the project at the award ceremony, thus recognizing Systech’s contribution in skill and resources for the project.

MicroStrategy World 2010 was a jam packed event filled with learning and networking! We had a chance to personally experience MicroStrategy, examine the new product technology, collaborate with customers and review their progress. On the whole it was clearly evident that we would be seeing a seismic shift in the way business is conducted. And most of all it was exciting and rewarding to connect with everybody in Systech’s BI/DW ecosystem – our client base, our partners and our alumni friends!

Here’s to a productive 2010!

Vaishnavi Gollapudi
The Editor, BI Insight

Systech has been weaving MicroStrategy’s award winning BI platform into its proven methodology for creating sophisticated Business Intelligence environments since 1998.

View Systech’s MicroStrategy Technology Practice
http://www.systechusa.com/microstrategy/

Informatica Announces Data Integration Marketplace

Like Salesforce’s AppExchange for cloud computing, the idea behind the data integration marketplace is to enable its large community of developers and partners to share information and products such as mapplets, vertical solutions and connectors.

“This is a place where we can bring together the 52,000 developers in our community and allow them to showcase their wares,” said Tony Young, CIO at Informatica.

To ensure quality control, initially Informatica will be vetting what goes onto the marketplace to check code is viable. But once Marketplace is more established, it hopes to introduce certification programme and to adopt a peer review process with a start rating calibrating the success of the product and any documentation that goes with it.

“One of the unique things we’re doing is creating a marketplace for buyers to post what they want from sellers, such as a connection to an innocuous system that is not readily used by many people. People can go out and work on that for you,” said Young.

It is also an open platform and the products traded may not specifically be related to Informatica. The company is not aiming to make money from the venture, but hopes that creating an open platform for discussion among customers, partners and developers will provide useful feedback on future product directions and strategy.
The beta version is up and running now.

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech’s expertise in Informatica covers a variety of databases and integration software enabling us to deliver Informatica solutions across different platforms.

View Systech’s Informatica Technology Practice

http://www.systechusa.com/informatica/

Healthcare IT is Transforming from Supporting Administrative Processes to Supporting Patient Care, Survey Says

Inadequate focus on reliable IT infrastructures will hobble healthcare organizations’ efforts to automate critical operations to improve patient care while cutting costs, according to a commissioned study of 102 U.S. healthcare IT professionals conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Stratus Technologies. Server Availability Trends in the Time of Electronic Health Records: What the Move to Paperless Medical Records Means for Server Reliability finds that, despite debate on the rate of growth or barriers to adoption, EHRs are growing and here to stay. This is transforming the role of IT — and the IT organization — from supporting administrative processes to supporting patient care.

Policy makers, patient advocates and healthcare companies themselves agree that electronic patient records and care management systems will improve treatment by reducing error rates and costly duplication. A focus on front-end applications and the handheld devices they run on, however, has overshadowed the server and network layers of the IT infrastructure, where the critical data processing and retrieval will occur, the study said. Without highly reliable server infrastructures, patient information systems are likely to perform poorly and lead to frustrated medical personnel, lower quality care and lost revenues.

Although healthcare IT professionals are aware of their needs at the server and network levels, they face scant financial and staff resources for meeting them. “Healthcare IT professionals face significant challenges in maintaining server availability,” according to the study’s findings. “And the impact on the delivery of care and operations of the hospital or physician practice were significant, ranging from overtaxed and disgruntled medical staff to delays in patient care. Availability has become an imperative, yet health care IT professionals struggle to meet the challenge,” the study said.

The survey recommends a three-pronged strategy for developing a durable, reliable server infrastructure:
• Assess your entire server portfolio and identify critical and key points of failure that impact care. Identify the function and the process role of each server and assign a rating to the impact of a failure.
• Develop a strategy for server availability around a solid set of tools that minimize the cost impact.
• Align with a vendor that understands health care’s requirements for availability. Sixty-eight percent of survey respondents felt that having a server vendor that understood the health care sector’s unique needs was a critically important factor to them.
“Between the focus on health care at the national level and the federal funds available, there may never be a better time for healthcare organizations to convert to electronic healthcare records,” said Karen Ramirez, Stratus healthcare sales executive. “They have a lot of anxiety about how to do it correctly and within their means. With the right combination of forethought, planning and product selection, healthcare IT can provide the reliability and performance that patient healthcare applications need to deliver cost savings and better quality care.”

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech’s Healthcare Analytics solution helps integrate patient data across the enterprise and makes it available at the point-of-service to help providers improve customer service, reduce medical errors, improve productivity and enable patient-centric processes – the prerequisite for improving the care delivery process.

View various applications and benefits of Healthcare Analytics developed at Systech.

http://www.systechusa.com/healthcare-analytics/

Gartner Identifies Four Information Management Roles IT Departments Need to Remain Effective for 2010

Gartner, Inc. has identified four information-management roles that IT departments need to establish and recruit from outside the IT team in a major trend that will affect both IT and business.

“Over the next two years, business demand for IT-driven growth and innovation will outstrip the supply of qualified people to fulfill job roles and as result traditional IT tasks are moving outside the IT department,” said Debra Logan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The future of IT lies outside the IT department. Increasingly CIOs are coming from “the business” and “users” are taking control of their own information delivery infrastructure.” By the end of 2010, Gartner predicts that 40 percent of people who report into IT in a matrixed fashion or directly will have substantial business and non-IT experience.

Organizations need staff with different skills from the ones they were originally hired for. These are not IT people as organizations know them. “Staying relevant in this changing environment will require a new way of thinking about organizational models and staffing in IT projects,” added Ms Logan. The four job roles that IT will need to support within the business or within IT are:

Legal and IT Hybrids
Gartner predicts that 20 percent of Global 2000 companies will add the role of litigation support manager by 2010, up from less than 5 percent in 2005. Legal and IT hybrids create policies and schedules, help design and execute discovery exercises for regulators, and mediate between legal and IT departments. Organizations can fulfill the role by retraining security professionals in law or giving legal professionals some IT training.

“IT leaders with responsibility for information management have been in a stalemate for more than five years over what to do about legacy information, how long information should be kept, and what the legal precedent is for doing so,” said Ms Logan. “The lawyers won’t tell companies what to do, but they won’t listen to anyone but other lawyers. The records managers want to implement retention schedules as they did in the paper world, and IT departments just want someone to tell them what to do with all the e-mail that is bringing their exchange servers to their knees and all the personal folders clogging the storage devices.”

Digital Archivists
Digital archivists will be required to appraise arrange and preserve digital records for legal and regulatory purposes. Gartner expects around 15 percent of companies to add a digital-archivist role by 2012 compared with fewer than 1 percent in 2009. Suitable candidates can be found in library and information science (LIS) schools or existing employees nearing the end of their careers.

“Organizations typically have vast quantities of records, which require specialist expertise to access, appraise and preserve,” said Ms Logan. “This isn’t a job for conscientious users to perform if they have time; it requires training and expertise. If you have never heard of persistent uniform resource locators (PURLs), don’t know what PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) is and are unaware that there are reasons why Portable Document Format (PDF) is not a suitable preservation format for e-mail, you need a digital curator.”

Business Information Managers
Twenty percent of business managers rated the information that they get from IT as poor, according to the Gartner Business Pulse survey conducted from June through August 2009*. “Information management has never been an explicit job role: IT manages the technology, business manages the domain, but who manages the information?” said Ms Logan. “Companies have allowed a huge gap to open up, and consequently, everyone has been the manager of their own information.”

There will be an increasing trend to combine business and information management expertise in a single role, carried out by a single person, rather than a “business and IT partnership” with two people, two hierarchies and two sets of reporting relationships. One company already taking this approach achieved all its objectives including a cost reduction for the department of 10 percent in the first year. Gartner expects 20 percent of companies to employ business information managers by 2013, compared with 5 percent in 2009.

Enterprise Information Architects
Within IT itself, enterprise information architects will be required to create taxonomies, document templates and data models. Gartner has observed several additional roles within the title of information architect, which has developed to include a mix of skills to enable both structured and unstructured content to be managed effectively. In some cases, the same person may fill more than one information architecture role, such as business-level information architect, data-integration architect, application-oriented information architect and content-oriented information architect. All these roles focus on adding structure and context to data so that the data can be leveraged to increase its value and maximise efficiency and reuse.

“Despite difficult economic conditions and disruptive technology, business and demographic trends, IT organizations have not changed their priorities or behaviors,” said Ms Logan. “If IT responds the way it always has, IT operations face obsolescence. The role of technology will now be to augment human contributions, rather than automate them. The only way to manage information better is to manage information better with people.”

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Hi there,

Welcome to the Dec 2009 edition of BI Insight newsletter!

While the economy still faces some significant challenges, there are a number of reasons to feel optimistic about 2010: "The momentum is building." In a changing economy, businesses explore ways to streamline processes and reduce costs. It is essential to focus on innovation to spur recovery and long-term growth.

The latest statistics reveal that the top technologies for enhancing competitiveness over the next five years at high-growth, midsize organizations are business intelligence, analytics and self service portals. Recognizing the value of delivering competitive insights that are often hidden in data, Systech’s R&D groups and client engagements have given us an excellent test bed to explore deep analytics to target various industry verticals.

http://www.systechusa.com/solutions/

The solution provides valuable insights to help organizations to make evidence-based decisions, measure business objectives, drive sustainable growth and manage change.

This month’s highlights:

1. Systech’s project success in Global Credit Management Reporting for a leading provider of financial advisory services and international banking services.
2. A featured report on Data Warehouse Appliance.
3. And, of course, BI news articles from reputed sources.

We hope that you find the newsletter to be a valuable resource and we encourage you to share it with your peers.

Cheers,
Vaishnavi Gollapudi
The Editor

Background

In this case study we describe how a leading provider of financial advisory services and international banking services benefitted from Systech’s innovative solution and also saved more than $7 million in logistical costs.

Our client provided a variety of products and services, including the Credit Card, the Optima Card and other consumer and corporate lending products, stored value products, corporate and consumer travel products and services, magazine publishing and merchant transaction processing, point of sale and back office products and services.

The client was looking to enhance their customer satisfaction. They wanted to act as a Global Credit Management source and needed a reporting system to manage this efficiently and cost effectively.

Solution

Systech initially established security access for web and created a data collection process. The data collection process included the gathering of report profile information and corresponding MIS data as requested

Systech then enabled a web based reporting system that helped their clients gain easier access. This proved to be a comprehensive method of viewing their statements. The data from current reports such as Industry Reports, Card member Reports and Client Hierarchy Reports was made available. The solution gave their clients the functionality and accessibility to view their corporate accounts in the categories of air, hotel and rental. This allowed for more cost effective methods of negotiating travel patterns for companies. It helped companies track their expenses world-wide.

It thereby, provided the client with a tool to leverage customer data for more complex analysis through the use of filters and interactive access to detailed information. The system also gave a highly summarized report on items such as global spending, and where and how money is being spent. This provided a value-added service to their customer. The modification of the data warehouse allowed for access of reporting on the web with guaranteed, data level security – an important issue for the users. The system could also report on multiple currencies.

Benefits

The web based reporting system provided the benefits of:

• Improved timeliness of the Corporate Purchasing Card data
• Reduced purchase order costs
• Better strategic procurement decisions through increased analytical capabilities
• Enhanced Customer Satisfaction

Fast emerging and dynamic global economy have made quick and easy access to information. It has become mandatory that organizations understand and respond quickly and appropriately to unanticipated changes in operations and marketplace. Data warehouse appliances make data warehousing simple and powerful. They enable high performance data warehousing at a lower TCO. Using DW appliances businesses can build BI projects that were previously not possible. Many new data warehouse appliance vendors are now extending their products to support more complex workloads that offer additional capabilities and utilities for BI application and are changing the way that business thinks about data warehousing.

This research paper describes the nature, importance and benefits of “Data warehouse (DW) Appliances” and its use for business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW). It also highlights a variety of other aspects concerning DW appliances such as the differentiators among DW appliance products, Total Cost of Ownership, things to remember while reaching a buy decision for DW appliances etc. The report also includes a note on the future of Data Warehouse Appliances in ever changing, dynamic BI industry.

Register here to request the white paper.

Fordham University and IBM Launch Business Analytics Curriculum to Prepare Students for Careers

Fordham University and IBM are collaborating on a new business analytics curriculum to help prepare college students for careers in key industries such as energy and utilities, healthcare, education, transportation and public service that are expected to benefit from $1.8 trillion in global stimulus investments.

Businesses and governments are now driving transformation projects including smart grids that lower energy consumption, sensors that help reduce traffic congestion, electronic medical records for personalized healthcare and RFID tags that trace food and medicine for consumer safety. The digital infrastructures supporting these projects will generate enormous amounts of data requiring a skilled workforce to make sense of it in a meaningful way. For example, computing systems today are generating 15 petabytes of new information every day — eight times more than the combined information in all the libraries in the U.S.

In a recent IBM Global CIO Study, 83 percent of respondents identified business analytics — the ability to see patterns in vast amounts of data and extract actionable insights — as a top priority and a way in which they plan to enhance their competitiveness. As the adoption of business analytics grows within organizations, the need for analytics skills across all functions of a business rises as well.

“Analytics can vastly improve our lives and provide new job opportunities for college students entering the workforce,” said W. Raghupathi, Professor of Information Systems, Fordham University School of Business. “Fordham has a long history of collaboration with IBM that has brought innovative new skills to our curriculum to prepare students for future jobs. With this effort, Fordham is preparing students with marketable skills for a coming wave of jobs in healthcare, sustainability, and social services where analytics can be applied to everyday challenges.”

Fordham’s Schools of Business, which offers undergraduate and graduate programs in information and communication systems, is addressing the need with a first-of-its kind Business Analytics for Managers course based on IBM analytics technology. Beginning Spring 2010, students can register and get hands-on training in business intelligence, data analytics, data warehousing, data mining and online analytical processing (OLAP) techniques. Students will also learn managerial decision making and how analytics technology can improve the effectiveness of key business functions such as marketing, sales, finance, business development, human resources and manufacturing. Additional topics include:

Reporting: Students will become proficient at authoring, using and sharing any type of report — drawing on any data source — so they can present business analytics information in a consistent and easy-to-use way.

Analysis: Students will learn how to analyze and report against online analytical processing (OLAP) and dimensionally aware relational data sources. This will help them learn how to spot trends and see business issues from a variety of dimensions.

Score carding: Students will master the art of building easy-to-use scorecards to align teams and tactics with business strategy. They can communicate business goals company-wide and let people monitor performance against their targets.

Dashboards: Students will learn how to communicate complex information quickly using dashboards, which provide a single view of information that business professional, can use to make key decisions.

Business and governments alike are using the power of analytics to better manage the information explosion and make informed decisions to better serve customers and citizens.

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Over the years Systech continues to develop skills, knowledge, work processes and technologies to effectively deliver BI solutions across the globe.

View Systech’s Training model and road to building leaders in BI

http://www.systechusa.com/training-model/

Kaleida Health Monitors Flu Cases with Oracle

Kaleida Health, the largest health care provider in Western New York, is monitoring daily cases of patients showing flu symptoms being treated across its five- hospital system with the help of business intelligence (BI) dashboard developed using Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (Oracle BI Suite EE).

The dashboard enables a team of 35 at Kaleida Health including hospital presidents, Chief Nursing Officers, Chief of Emergency Medicine, Chief Medical Officer, and others, to understand trends related to patients with flu symptoms, and track trends related to staff with flu-like symptoms.

Additionally, the dashboard tracks how the trending information impacts staffing levels at its hospitals, and report the number of cases of patients with flu symptoms to the New York State Department of Health.

The Flu Monitoring Dashboard is updated automatically daily and replaces previously manual efforts by hospital staff to track patients showing flu-like symptoms from reports run daily.

Flu Monitoring Dashboard Part of Broad BI and Analytics System Deployed by Kaleida Health

Kaleida Health’s Flu Monitoring Dashboard highlights:

Current in-house patients with flu symptoms in aggregate, per hospital and as a percentage compared to the total number of in-house patients across Kaleida Health hospitals;

Graphs tracking trends of patient visits to Emergency Departments with flu symptoms at each of Kaleida Health’s hospitals;

In-house patient and outpatient with flu symptoms trends over the last 13 months; and,

Total number of Kaleida Health employees calling in sick with flu-like symptoms by day, by role and by hospital

The Flu Monitoring Dashboard, prototyped and developed within a week’s time in September 2009, is just one of over 25 executive dashboards available to Kaleida Health’s management team via the organization’s “Magellan” Balanced Scorecard system, which is powered by Oracle BI Suite EE.

Magellan helps Kaleida Health’s management team monitor metrics and Key Performance Indicators across five categories: Financial, Quality, Staffing, Operational, and Growth and Strategic.

In addition to offering executives an accurate overview of daily operations and finances, the system’s dashboards helps guide strategic decision-making from exploring expansion and development of new lines of business, to physician recruitment and staff retention, and beyond.

Oracle BI Suite EE runs on top of an Oracle Database-powered data warehouse that includes data from various systems running at Kaleida Health including financial, billing, payroll and clinical applications.

Buffalo, New York-based Kaleida Health went into production with Oracle BI Suite EE in August 2009.

Magellan will be rolled out to over 600 employees across Kaleida Health in 2010.

“With the flu season starting up in early September, we were able to pull together all of the necessary information on a single dashboard page in about a week’s time,” said Dan Gerena, Director of Business Intelligence and Corporate Analytics, Kaleida Health. “It’s a very different paradigm for reporting now with Oracle BI Suite EE. It was a very quick process in terms of building the Flu Monitoring Dashboard, getting new users up and running, educating them on what the metrics are, and showing them how to access the dashboard.”

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech offers a number of innovative solutions based on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Partnering with Oracle, Systech continues to help companies manage customer, workforce and financial information.

View Systech Solutions as a leader in the implementation of Oracle based Business Intelligence solutions

http://www.systechusa.com/oracle-bi/

Systech’s Healthcare Analytics solution helps integrate patient data across the enterprise and makes it available at the point-of-service to help providers improve customer service, reduce medical errors, improve productivity and enable patient-centric processes – the prerequisite for improving the care delivery process.

View various applications and benefits of Healthcare Analytics developed at Systech.

http://www.systechusa.com/healthcare-analytics/

Sunny Delight Leverages Trade Promotion Management to Strengthen Customer Profitability

Consumer Goods (CG) manufacturers rely heavily on trade funds to proactively shape demand, influence retailers and to collaborate on marketing programs that help drive consumer behavior. While the average shopper may not be aware of it, virtually every product placement, price reduction, and end cap has been funded by the manufacturer. For the average CG manufacturer, trade spending ranks second only to the cost of goods on the balance sheet and regardless of the recent recession trade spending has not decreased in most companies.

As a result, most consumer goods companies have implemented trade promotion management (TPM) solutions with the idea of improving trade spend, automating antiquated spreadsheets or creating a better planning and forecasting process. For Sunny Delight Beverages Co. (Sunny D), a leading producer of juice-based drinks in North America and Western Europe , it was all about customer profitability.

A Sunny New Direction

After spinning off from CG giant Proctor & Gamble, Sunny D suddenly found themselves a small fish in a big pond. As a new small-to-medium-sized business (SMB), it was imperative that Sunny D not only implement new technologies, but rather use them in a way that could exploit their position as a smaller CG manufacturer and help them to better compete with their much larger competitors.

The first step in the process for Sunny D was to integrate its TPM system with its broker’s network. In order to make this happen as quickly and as seamlessly as possible, Sunny D knew they needed to adopt the right trade promotion management solution – one that would tie into the broker network while improving synergies between TradeLync and Sunny D’s financial system. Sunny D also realized, like many other CG companies, that Excel spreadsheets were not the optimum way to communicate trade promotion and/or sales and reporting activities between the Company and its broker, Acosta. Consequently, and on the recommendation of Acosta who already uses MEI for trade promotion management, Sunny D began an intensive look at this TPM solution.

Customer Profitability Will Quench Your Thirst

After a fast implementation, Sunny D’s order management and ERP systems were feeding data to the new TPM application. However, they soon began to realize that there was a lot more to trade promotion management than improving and tracking overall trade spend, so they quickly shifted their overarching goal to improving customer profitability. If they could map revenue, trade promotions, cost of goods sold, logistics and any other variable customer-related costs to finance, they could also improve the overall efficiency and revenue of the Company. To do so, this model would require them to extend the use of the TPM solution throughout all of finance, product supply and logistics.

“By gaining small wins with the MEI trade system and then multiplying those wins on an enterprise-wide level, we could really drive change across the company,” commented Chris Miller, Sales Finance Manager. “We knew that combining various data and customer touch points would allow us to identify spend by customer and see how effective we are at driving specific financial contributions at the customer level.”

Managing cash is always a priority for SMBs and Sunny D is no exception. They needed to be specific when it came to incremental trade and be able to analyze which programs could be more profitable to the business. Miller stated, “When allocating incremental trade funding, we can analyze the data to determine the appropriate investment. We recently analyzed two very similar customers with slightly different profitability to determine why there was a delta. Using the MEI TPM suite across internal groups, we identified the difference in profitability was due to logistics; not necessarily in shipping costs, but in ‘lumper’ fees and late fees. After some discussions, the customer now picks up their orders saving both Sunny D and the customer a significant amount of budget. Being able to see trade spend and revenue per customer enabled the groups to perform an accurate analysis of the situation. This resulted in a win for Sunny D and the customer.”

The TPM solution helped in other ways too. For example, the Company sells to the Military though government approved distributors; consequently, they wouldn’t normally be able to track the end customer’s profitability. By leveraging the functionality of the MEI TPM solution, Sunny D is able to drill down and see how the distributors are loading their data, which – in turn – enables Miller to gain valuable insight into how the end user is buying the Company’s products.

Sunny D also uses the TPM solution to help analyze a company after an acquisition. During its recent acquisition of Veryfine, some of the product lines were considered unprofitable. However, using the MEI system, Sunny D was able to analyze the “spend per pack size” data and determine that trade spend was a lot more efficient than they initially realized. “The ability to see the details enables us to act faster to market conditions and make the best choices for the Company.”

Sunny D’s sales force is also using the TPM application. In fact, Miller stated they use contribution to maximize the efficient use of their customer’s trade funding by analyzing top-line revenue down to cost of goods sold. ”Our goal is to make our funds work as hard as possible to grow revenue for Sunny D and our retail partners.”

Since the implementation, Sunny D has seen a higher level of efficiencies across the board, and has enlisted the help of various departments to help strengthen profits. In fact, the trade promotion management application has already helped the company exceed initial goals for the implementation. Although Sunny D concentrates on customer profitability, they also reap the more standard rewards from trade promotion management technology including simplified budgeting, planning, accruals and volume- and spend forecasting. But it’s the smaller business mentality that Miller claims is the crux behind the Company’s successful use of its TPM technology. By fully utilizing all of the functionality of its TPM suite, Sunny D has successfully managed its business through a detailed view of customer profitability and by continuing to create wholesome beverages that meet the needs of their target audiences.

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech provides cutting edge Cost Reduction and Profit Improvement solutions for Retail and CPG companies. Systech enables companies in uncovering hidden profit opportunities and in creating profitable revenue growth; quickly and easily.

View various applications and benefits of Profit Analytics developed at Systech.

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Welcome to the October Edition of BI Insight! This month’s newsletter highlights Systech’s project success in “Store and Merchandising Analysis” for a leading specialty retailer of premium pet food and supply stores. In this case study you would see how a customer achieved an insight into sales & margins through Systech’s store analysis. The ‘Systech corner’ article features a report on Operational BI. This whitepaper includes an in-depth report on Operational BI. The main aim of this paper is to introduce the reader to “Operational Business Intelligence” and make him familiar with the characteristics and capabilities of Operational BI. And of course, this issue also includes BI news articles from reputed sources. We hope that you find the newsletter to be a valuable resource and we encourage you to share it with your peers!

Operational BI represents one of the fastest growing areas of business intelligence. It has the potential to inflate the benefits of BI usage throughout the organization to a user audience that has been unable to benefit from BI technology. It can provide noteworthy benefits, however operational BI must be implemented carefully. It requires a sound and robust underlying infrastructure and database processing environment.

It is important to remember, that most operational BI applications do not call for close to real-time operations, and to facilitate most users would be quite happy if action times can break the 24-hour barrier and help them make intra-day decisions.

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