The Business: The Company is the nation’s largest private provider of alternative dispute resolution services for nearly 25 years. With multiple resolution centers nationwide, the Company is responsible for resolving thousands of the nation's most important
arbitration, bankruptcy, employment, government, class action & mass torts, and personal injury cases.
The Challenge: Beginning 2004, the Company’s executive management has set aggressive goals to expand its presence at a national level, increase profitability, and customer satisfaction. The Company intended to objectively validate and/ or modify the current business strategy. It was streamlining core business areas, acquiring new companies, and wanted to challenge existing assumptions, uncover new opportunities, gather fresh ideas, and gain any insights that it is presently unaware of. However, lacking an in-house environment, the Company spent extensive manual and time-consuming efforts to gather day-to-day transactional data, and generate basic operational reports. With monthly hard copy reports and limited analytical tools, the Company was unable to monitor trends and reacting to events.
The Vision:
The Company needed an agile business intelligence infrastructure that can allow the executive management to implement its strategy consistently across the enterprise and provide a consistent, accurate, and timely view of business critical information at the corporate, regional and branch levels. The infrastructure would align individual branches with corporate strategy, empower executives and analysts with performance monitoring tools, and analyze performance from multiple perspectives. Armed with accurate information, the Company intended to address immediate business intelligence needs and gain strategic insight about its business areas, customers, and growth areas.
The Solution: A unique and innovative solution was deployed that combined predictive analytic approaches with a business intelligence platform and executive dashboards. First, we replicated the Company’s transactional data environment at an offsite location with nearly 10 years of data and analyzed it against current business functions and future objectives.
Second, based on the analysis’ results, we identified data mining areas, data sources, and business rules. Mining of the operational data (in collaboration with The North Arizona State University’s Center for Data Insight, http://insight.nau.edu/) yielded interesting results. Some of the Company’s assumptions were validated, while previously unknown business drivers were uncovered that were impacting revenue generation. Business and enabling technology recommendations were provided to operationalize predictive, analytic, and reporting functions.
Third, we implemented the business intelligence solution integrating daily operational data into a data mart. Predictive models were operationalized. Web-based executive dashboards are put in place to regularly monitor performance. Users were provided with access to pre-defined daily, weekly, monthly operational reports along with adhoc reporting capabilities.
The Results:
- Faster access to reliable enterprise wide transactional information
- Fine tuning of the Company’s business strategy with renewed confidence
- Validate “what’s working” with definitive data, discover potential trouble spots and take corrective measures wherever needed.
- Robust analytical, reporting environment with predictive models
- Consistent, reliable, and timely operational information for the entire organization
- Management can take better and more informed decisions.
Tools: Erwin, Oracle RDBMS, Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica PowerAnalyzer, and Windows 2000.
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