Category: Advanced Analytics
- Seminole Gaming
- Solution Sponsor: Business Intelligence Systems Solutions
Seminole Gaming operates seven casinos throughout Florida. The multibillion-dollar company prides itself on controlling costs while achieving ultra-high profit margins. Credited with pioneering Native American gaming in the United States in 1979, the company has long been recognized for its innovation in gaming and technology.
Seminole Gaming has developed internal advanced analytics capabilities, combined them with award-winning data visualization software from BIS2 and predictive modeling from SAS, and added highly analytical human resources to create a powerful strategic analytics team. This team has helped the company operators leverage analytics in a way that drives tens of millions of dollars to the company’s bottom line.
The foundation of the company’s advanced analytics tool is a “big data” data warehouse that takes in 14 source systems to provide 360-degree views of both the customer and the business. Multiple methods are used to attack this big data set, including customer analytics, slot and table analytics, enterprise decision management, bundled tools, dashboard reporting, scorecards, data visualization, and predictive analytics.
Seminole’s department of strategic analytics has developed a five-step process to maximize the company’s benefit from this advanced analytics tool. At its heart is the concept of a “war room” in which 4-by-6-foot pages of analytics and data visualizations are posted on the walls of a meeting room and company operators work with the strategic analytics team to make the best data-driven decisions possible. The total benefit to date in terms of measured and realized incremental profit is $26.8 million.
Across the company, new “war rooms” have sprung up. It is clear that stepping away from traditional analytical techniques and into this approach to visual analytics offers a level of teamwork, collaboration, and insight that would otherwise be unachievable.
Category: BI on a Limited Budget
Emory University, recognized internationally for its outstanding liberal arts college, superb professional schools, and one of the Southeast’s leading healthcare systems, is located in Atlanta, Georgia. Several of Emory’s graduate schools and programs are ranked among the best in the nation in U.S. News & World Report’s “2013 Best Graduate Schools” guide. Its schools of business, medicine, and law are ranked among the top 25 programs. Emory's joint department of biomedical engineering program with Georgia Tech ranks second in the nation.
Emory’s implementation of the PeopleSoft Financial Management system in September 2009 was widely anticipated across campus. A mainframe financial system had been used for decades and an upgrade was necessary for a variety of reasons. It became apparent that users’ reporting needs were not being met through the new financial system. Executives ultimately approved the purchase of Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) products. The BI system selection, approval, and deployment processes would take some time, so the university needed to deploy an interim system that would provide immediate relief to users.
The BI/DW team had been using WebFocus, Business Objects, and Microsoft Reporting Services (SSRS) for a variety of BI projects on campus. Several key individuals came together to brainstorm interim solutions for financial reporting. Emory determined that it could meet a large percentage of users’ needs by deploying several targeted and flexible reports with SSRS. The university met with stakeholders in November 2010 and signed governance documents in early December. The project, known as Financial Online Reporting Services (FORS), went live across campus at the end of March 2011.
Category: Emerging Technologies and Methods
Founded in 1998, Novation is the leading healthcare supply chain and contracting company for more than 65,000 members of VHA Inc. and UHC, two national healthcare alliances, Children’s Hospital Association, an alliance of the nation’s leading pediatric facilities, and
Provista, LLC. Based in Irving, Texas, Novation develops and manages competitive contracts with more than 600 suppliers. Novation recently earned the coveted Ethics Inside Certification from Ethisphere Institute, a leading international think tank dedicated to the research and promotion of best practices in corporate ethics and compliance, as well as its 2012 World’s Most Ethical Companies list.
Novation’s database includes data from more than 1,600 member organizations representing more than $65 billion in annual spend. Benchmark data is updated weekly, including current pricing information. To allow member hospitals instant, on-the-go decision support, the company made its key analytic applications mobile. Novation uses the Apple App Store to offer customer-facing iPad and iPhone native applications and has additional field-facing iPad applications. The applications allow procurement resources, pharmacists, physicians, and field teams to make data-driven decisions on price, spend, and other data in a mobile setting. MicroStrategy is the BI platform and the data marts are based on SQL Server. Collectively, these applications represent approximately 125 analytics dashboards.
With these mobile applications, Novation aimed to equip its customers and staff with mobile access to its healthcare supply chain analytics, integrate its tools into customers’ daily workflow, and provide an exceptional mobile user experience that would increase adoption and engagement. Novation has gained additional value from completing several customer-facing BI applications for member hospitals: thanks to lessons learned, the company now uses a few key methodologies and design principles that keep costs low and improve the mobile user experience. This has in turn increased the adoption or “stickiness” of the apps and helped support a positive ROI.
Category: Enterprise BI
—and—
Category: Right-Time BI
- Sabre Holdings
- Solution Sponsor: Teradata Corporation
Sabre Holdings is a global travel technology company that provides solutions to travel agencies, corporations, travelers, airlines, hotels, and car, rail, cruise, and tour operator companies through its four businesses: Sabre Travel Network, Sabre Airline Solutions, Sabre Hospitality Solutions, and Travelocity. As a world leader in travel technology, Sabre’s distribution and solutions businesses have served travel agencies, travel suppliers, and consumers for more than 30 years. Combined, Sabre’s global distribution and airline reservation systems process more than 350 million travel reservations each year.
Data associated with travel reservations processed through the Sabre system, including three years of trend data and up to 331 days of future bookings and pre-trip data, is captured and stored within Sabre’s enterprise travel data warehouse (ETDW). Using the Teradata Enterprise Travel Data Warehouse and the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence platform, Sabre created a powerful enterprise BI/DW platform that is the foundation for business intelligence products utilized by Sabre and its customers.
These products help Sabre solve its biggest business challenges—primarily, helping its customers generate revenue, reduce costs, and provide better customer service. The previous time-consuming processes involved collaboration among multiple business units and manual information gathering and review, with reports on data that was days (and often weeks) old.
The solutions developed and implemented provide a significant business impact every day to Sabre’s customers as well as its internal users. These solutions provide valuable offerings beyond Sabre’s traditional reservation products, allowing Sabre to retain and grow its customer base and enable customers to improve the services offered. Sabre has moved beyond traditional reporting and now offers dashboards for its business units of airline solutions, travel network, and customer delivery, as well as a customer management product with integrated functions and content for traveler risk management.
Category: Enterprise Data Management Strategies
- Cooper Lighting (co-winner)
- Solution Sponsors: Stibo Systems, Inc. and ActionTek Incorporated
Cooper Lighting, a subsidiary of Cooper Industries plc (NYSE: CBE), is a leading provider of world-class lighting fixtures and controls to commercial, industrial, retail, institutional, residential, and utility markets. The company has manufacturing facilities throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
Cooper embarked on its master data management (MDM) initiative to consolidate product data for its 23 brands. Leveraging Stibo Systems’ STEP MDM application, Cooper met its goals of reducing data variability, increasing maintainability, and making data available to other applications.
Cooper Lighting’s parent company has grown primarily by acquisition, resulting in inconsistent data among its brands. For example, order information tables (OITs) were maintained at a single level in a single table field, sometimes with the effect of duplicating data or creating errors. Updating product ordering data was difficult and time consuming. A new five-level OIT architecture was designed so each element exists only once in the STEP application. The number of table headers was consolidated from 400 to 150, making it easier for employees and customers to learn and understand product data.
All product data was reviewed and updated as required using a workflow process tracked in real time. The workflow process was dynamically adjustable to reflect real-world review sequencing requirements and took six months to develop and program. The resulting first uniform review of all Cooper Lighting product data was carried out in only three months by 120 participants in six departments and three countries.
Previously, the company’s website was updated on an ad hoc basis, and product updates often took weeks. The site is now linked to the Stibo Systems STEP platform, so data updates in STEP are automatically reflected on the Web site after appropriate quality approvals. In addition, the project provided product data to newly updated print and virtual Product Selection Guides, iPad and Android mobile deployments.
- Fiserv (co-winner)
- Solution Sponsor: SAS DataFlux
Fiserv, a publicly traded financial services company based in Brookfield, Wisconsin (Nasdaq: FISV), specializes in payments, processing services, risk and compliance, customer and channel management, and insights and optimization. Fiserv serves more than 16,000 clients worldwide. One of the company’s flagship products is CheckFree RXP, which supports electronic billing and payment for tens of millions of consumers via the online banking sites of more than 3,600 financial institutions across the U.S.
It is important for Fiserv to be able to extract accurate, high-quality data from CheckFree RXP to ensure that client needs and compliance requirements are being met, as well as to understand how the service is being used and how it can be continuously improved. Previously, this was a highly manual process that required a specialized skill set. In order to streamline the process and increase accuracy, Fiserv engaged DataFlux to help establish a data quality framework that would ensure any data extracted from CheckFree RXP was reliable, consistent, and accurate.
The project established metrics to gauge data quality, which is now measured using a standard set of dimensions including uniqueness, completeness, accuracy, validity, consistency, and integrity. Data quality metrics are continually monitored and refined as the system scans millions of transactions daily.
One of the major business impacts of the solution is that it helps the company avoid unnecessary costs. For example, Fiserv created a centralized repository for performance-related statistics to track data-focused SLA measures. This helps the company proactively spot atypical performance and address issues to maintain or exceed client expectations and avoid possible penalties.
The Fiserv DataFlux deployment repaid its initial investment in two years. In addition, the impact of the data quality initiative reached further across the business than the Fiserv team had initially envisioned, benefiting areas ranging from marketing to compliance.
Category: Enterprise Data Warehousing
—and—
Category: Government and Non-Profit
- Michigan Departments of Technology, Management & Budget (DTMB), Community Health (DCH), and Human Services (DHS)
- Solution Sponsor: Teradata Corporation
Through customer service, resource optimization, and the innovative use of information and technology, Michigan Department of Technology, Management & Budget (DTMB) impacts every area of government. Nearly 10,000 users in five major departments, 20 agencies, and more than 100 bureaus rely on the EDW to do their jobs more effectively and better serve Michigan residents. The EDW achieves $1 million per business day in financial benefits.
The EDW helped Michigan achieve $200 million in annual financial benefits within the Department of Community Health alone, plus another $75 million per year within the Department of Human Services (DHS). These savings include program integrity benefits, cost avoidance due to improved outcomes, sanction avoidance, operational efficiencies, and the recovery of inappropriate payments within its Medicaid program.
The Michigan DHS data warehouse (DW) provides unique and innovative information critical to the efficient operation of the agency from both a strategic and tactical level. Over the last 10 years, the DW has yielded a 15:1 cost effectiveness ratio. Consolidated information from the DW now contributes to nearly every function of DHS, including accurate delivery of and accounting for benefits delivered to almost 2.5 million DHS public assistance clients.
Michigan has been ambitious in its attempts to solve real-life problems through the innovative sharing and comprehensive analyses of data. Its approach to BI/DW has always been “enterprise” (statewide) in nature, rather than separate BI/DW platforms for each business area or state agency. By removing barriers to sharing enterprise data across business units, Michigan has leveraged massive amounts of data to create innovative approaches to the use of BI/DW, delivering efficient, reliable, enterprise solutions using multiple channels.
Category: Organizational Structures
- Telenor Group—Business Intelligence Groupwide (BIG), BI Competence Center
The Telenor Group, the world’s sixth largest mobile communications provider, operates in 14 countries and serves over 180 million customers with more than 40,000 employees. The Telenor Group is structured into separate legal entities in each country (referred to as business units); each has its own profit and loss responsibility.
BI has long been a focus for the Telenor Group because it has access to massive quantities of data, though BI implementations success has been inconsistent. Some units are recognized as world-class in BI; others struggle with the basics.
BIG, the Telenor Group’s BI competence center, has a mandate from the highest decision-making body to bring all business units to a world-class level of BI and assure that BI is exploited in transforming business. It is dedicated to building a community in BI, spreading best practices, setting a direction for group units, monitoring progress, and supporting group companies through projects.
For community building, BIG has organized yearly conferences, developed and maintained an intranet site with over 20 GB of materials, publishes monthly BI news bulletins, and provides on-demand expertise. BIG develops best practices in collaboration with business units, collects and shares business unit development guidelines and documentation, and actively promotes best- and worst-practice sharing in its communications.
BIG sets the strategic direction for business units by creating and sharing a BI strategy development framework with processes, templates, and tools. The competence center benchmarks BI in the Telenor Group every year, conducting on-site assessments of each unit every two years, and holding BI monthly status calls with each business unit.
BIG has put BI on the agenda of every company’s senior management during its short tenure. Perhaps the biggest measure of BIG’s impact is the rising demand by business units for its services.
Category: Performance Management
Con-way Freight is North America's leading less-than-truckload (LTL) freight transportation company, providing guaranteed, day-definite regional and transcontinental service through a single, unified network of more than 300 service centers in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Con-way Freight is a subsidiary of Con-way Inc. (NYSE: CNW), a $5 billion diversified freight transportation and logistics services company.
In the past, Con-way could not easily measure operational performance or how performance measurements were tracking to strategic objectives. Each service center had an isolated scorecard, and manual coordination was required to gather the data. Even then, there were concerns about its reliability and completeness.
To address these challenges, business executives translated strategic goals into key performance metrics to manage operational performance. These metrics are calculated using data sets from the EDW that are sourced from a wide variety of application and systems. The Con-way EDW team leveraged Informatica features such as near-real-time data replication, Web services, and reusable transformation to quickly add new data sources, integrate data, and respond to changing business needs.
The operations scorecard had to be flexible in terms of time to develop, change, and deploy. Used by about 20,000 employees, the scorecard also needed to respond quickly and handle thousands of user requests concurrently.
To achieve its vision, the Con-way Freight BI team used innovative techniques such as third normal form, asynchronous ETL load stream, and unconventional design patterns for high-performance ETL, among others. The final product is delivered using MicroStrategy, whose features enable it to be delivered with a dynamic, user-friendly interface across a variety of channels and platforms. The resulting low-cost solution is highly automated and is also flexible enough to adapt to future problems.
Thanks to this BI solution, Con-way personnel are able to make timely, data-driven decisions at the point of operations process execution. As a result, the company is able to realize a number of key performance improvements, including an optimized number of trucks and drivers on the roads, increased safety for employees and customers, and reduced fuel consumption, carbon emissions, and traffic congestion.
Award winners were chosen by a panel of independent judges who have expertise in BI and DW. The panel included:
Aaron Fuller, Principal, Superior Data Strategies, LLC; Barb Wixom, Associate Professor, University of Virginia; Chris Adamson, DW Specialist, Oakton Software LLC; Cindi Howson, Founder, BI Scorecard; Colin White, President & Founder, BI Research; Daniel R. Evans, CBIP, Sr. Group Manager/Solution Lead, Avanade, Inc.; David Stodder, TDWI Research Director; Evan Levy, Partner, Baseline Consulting; Hugh Watson, Professor of MIS, University of Georgia; Jed Summerton, Business and IT Consultant,Summerton Consulting, LLC; Jill Dyché, CBIP, Partner, Baseline Consulting; John Myers,Senior Analyst for Business Intelligence, Enterprise Management Associates; John Thompson, CEO, Marketing Sciences, LLC; Jonathan G. Geiger, CBIP, Executive Vice President, Intelligent Solutions, Inc.; Krish Krishnan, Industry Analyst and Data Warehouse Expert, Sixth Sense Advisors, Inc.; Mark Madsen, President, Third Nature; Mark Peco, CBIP, Partner, InQvis; Mike Lampa, BI Business & Solution Development, Dell Services; Nancy Williams, CBIP, Vice President, DecisionPath Consulting; Patty Haines, President, Chimney Rock Information Solutions; Philip Russom, TDWI Research Director; Ralph Hughes, Chief Systems Architect, Ceregenics, Inc.; Steve Dine, President, Datasource Consulting, LLC; Shawn Rogers, Vice President Research, Business Intelligence and DW, Enterprise Management Associates; and Steve Williams, President, DecisionPath Consulting.