BI Insight

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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