A prominent developer of brain-monitoring equipment,
Aspect Medical was working with a variety of
applications: Siebel Systems for CRM, Remedy
for its call center and QAD for ERP. But there was a glitch. Those systems didn't talk to each
other.
Ultimately, each group within the company could
report its version of the truth, but those versions
wouldn't necessarily jibe with each other, said
Papamitrou. "We needed a corporate reporting
tool that everyone could access easily from
a browser and use to get the same data every
day."
Enter Creative Computing Inc., or CCI,
which has expertise in business intelligence
and data warehousing. "The idea was to provide
them with one view of all their data," said
Mike Sherman, a consultant at Lincoln-based
CCI. Papamitrou said he opted for CCI because
of its expertise in data warehousing and Cognos
tools.
Left to right: CCI's Chris Simonelli, Dave Doucette and Mike Sherman.
"We had about four diverse systems, and that created different
islands of data," said George Papamitrou, director
of information services at Aspect Medical, Newton,
Mass. "We couldn't get an outflow as a whole;
we couldn't analyze the business because it
was too manual with people relying on spreadsheets."
One key metric of Aspect Medical's success
is its ability to predict when hospitals will
need to order more of its disposable sensors.
"We needed to help them predict burn rate, how
to calculate how many sensors they sell relative
to the number of monitors out there," said Sherman.
Coming up with a single way of calculating was
"huge because it required all the company's
business units to talk to each other and agree
on things," he said.
The first step was a proof-of-concept
phase, typically three to five days, to implement
at least a partial solution for a fixed fee.
The issue with live, transactional databases
is that companies don't want users hammering
on them for reports and queries because it hinders
database performance, said Sherman. It's far
more effective to download data from various
back-end systems into a single repository where
it can be analyzed by users.
And while the back-end work was key to the
solution, it was also necessary
to create tools for building fast, accurate
sales reports.
To that end, Chris Simonelli,
a CCI consultant, wrote a program that e-mails
daily sales updates to Aspect Medical executives'
Blackberry devices. "They can get sales figures
for current-day, week-to-date, month-to-date,
quarter-to-date and year-to-date on their way
home," Simonelli said, adding that he used Cognos'
Impromptu to build the report and a script editor
to automate the notification process. CCI also
used Cognos' DecisionStream, Extraction, Transformation
and Load (ETL) software, that helped the solution
provider unite data from disparate sources.
CCI's Mike Sherman says the objective of the
solution was to provide Aspect Medical with
one view of all its data.
For CCI, the Aspect Medical system represents one of several the
solution provider has deployed in the past year.
The down economy hasn't been as traumatic for
the analytics market as it's been for some others,
said CCI President Dave Doucette. "There's no
question that the post-Y2K frenzy hit hard in
2000," he said. "In 1999, you could make money
if you could spell 'computer.' But in 2000 and
2001, things were bad. The big thing now is
that you have to show people a return on investment
[ROI]. First we've got to get their attention.
Once we get them to look, we go in and spend
a week or so on proof-of-concept. We show them
what they can get for x amount of money."
In fact, savvy integrators can reap tail-end benefits
for the raft of back-end supply chain and business
process integration work that was launched in
rosier times, said analysts. But the analytics
and business intelligence spaces are not quite
recession-proof, said Jeb Bolding, research
director at Enterprise Research Associates.
"It's just that a lot of these projects were
on tap already, and companies are trying to
complete them," he said. "But there's no doubt
that, in general, there's still a lot of work
in business process integration, and you can
demonstrate to customers a pretty reasonable
ROI."
ANATOMY OF A SOLUTION
- • COMPANY: Creative Computing Inc. (CCI), Lincoln, R.I.
- • FOCUS: Creating and maintaining datamarts, business intelligence
solutions annual revenue: Private company, did not disclose revenue
- • PROBLEM & SOLUTION: Aspect Medical fielded an array of databases
that didn't talk to each other, creating islands of information.
CCI defined and built a data warehouse aggregating the data and the
reporting tools feeding off it.
- • PRODUCTS & SERVICES USED: Cognos' Impromptu, DecisionStream
- • LESSONS LEARNED:
- ° A limited proof-of-concept trial is an ideal way to prove ROI.
- ° Implementation groundwork helps customers determine how their business processes must change.
- ° Reporting needs often drive those processes.
Copyright © 2002 CMP Media LLC
