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Achieving Single Version of Truth at a Global Medical Device Maker |
The Business: A global medical device maker (“Company”) manufactures and markets a full range of innovative sterilization, disinfection and cleaning technologies and products for health care providers. Based in Southern California, the Company handles R&D, marketing, manufacturing, quality, supply chain, sales, finance, and service functions.
The Challenge: The Company’s ERP and CRM systems and the mainframe system at parent’s company’s headquarters manage massive amount of historical and current transactional data. Lack of integration among these disparate applications resulted in unnecessary, “manual patch work”. Temporary databases were routinely used to clean, translate and retrieve information for reporting consolidated measures to decision makers in all divisions. Data was stored in transactional form, which was a not amenable to simple, business-user view or quick retrieval. Extensive manual efforts caused data consistencies, inaccuracies and often resulted in duplications across divisions. Business users often received stale information and had to depend on scarce IT resources to access critical information, whenever there was a need.
The Vision: The Company is pursuing an aggressive growth strategy and strives for excellence in all areas. To achieve these corporate goals, the Company requires a business intelligence solution that provides a “single version of truth” in a consistent, accurate, timely manner across all divisions. The solution shall enable an integrated environment for monitoring performance across-the-board, in-depth analysis of products, services and markets and offer insight into the entire supply chain. Business users shall be empowered to access and analyze the operational data, retrieve business metrics and trending information on a daily basis with minimal IT intervention.
The Solution:
A business intelligence solution was delivered for Sales, Service, and Quality subject areas. The solution adopted several industry best practices and was based on the dimensional bus architecture with ability to expand to other subject areas in future. Informatica based ETL and data cleansing processes are integrated for “in-stream” data quality check. Relevant operational information is extracted nightly from disparate data sources and loaded into a SQLServer based data mart. Cutting edge suite of Cognos reporting and analytical tools are provided for business users with a set of predefined reports and adhoc report generation capabilities. With three years of history and a reliable business intelligence environment, the Company is able to monitor performance, analyze health of the business, and optimize as needed.
The Results:
- Single source of information with an accurate, timely and consistent view of the business
- Reduced time to access information from weeks to less than 24 hours
- Enabled the Company management to make effective, timely and better information-based business decisions
- Empowered business users to access and analyze business data.
- Automated processes, reducing IT burden
The Tools: Erwin, Microsoft SQL Server, Informatica PowerCenter, Cognos ReportNet, PowerPlay, and Windows 2000. |
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