Category: Organizational Structures
SAP is an enterprise application software vendor, assisting companies to run better using business insight effectively to stay ahead of the competition.
To be a best-run business ourselves, we initiated the One SAP for Data Quality program to improve business process efficiency, drive cost improvements, and increase reliability of decision-making analysis. With our organizational structure of global, regional, and line-of-business teams, we are instilling a culture of data ownership and quality at SAP. We partner with business leads to increase the quality of enterprise master data across all business lines.
This information governance program has delivered business benefits since 2009. Unlike similar programs, the business is the primary program sponsor and clear stakeholder in the outcome of the program’s process re-engineering efforts and IT solution improvements. The program began with clearly defined business goals, guiding investment and prioritization of activities.
Although every organization has a different culture and responds to different approaches, elements of our approach could be helpful to every organization. At SAP, we approach data governance by embedding metrics and KPIs into the governance processes as a way to guide investment, track progress, and encourage future investment. For example, productivity improvement of our sales force has exceeded 20 percent.
The core global data management team that drives and manages the One SAP for Data Quality information governance program is able to multiply this effect in larger organizations with our commitment to communicate and demonstrate the business case for information governance. We have developed innovative methods for assessing information management capabilities and combining process and data management.
Category: Government and Non-Profit
- USDA Risk Management Agency (RMA)
- Solution Sponsor: Teradata Corporation
The Risk Management Agency (RMA) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversees the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation, the primary source of risk protection for America’s farmers. The program provides approximately 1.3 million crop insurance policies, with over $124 billion in protection for major crops. The RMA’s compliance mission is to ensure that (1) adequate safeguards are in place to avoid potential fraud and abuse and (2) claims are accurate so benefits can be distributed equitably.
To counter fraud, waste, and abuse, the Agriculture Risk Protection Act of 2000 mandated the use of a data warehouse and data mining technologies to improve crop insurance program compliance and integrity. RMA asked the Center for Agriculture Excellence (CAE) at Tarleton State University to create a system to monitor and analyze the program, identifying fraud using satellite, weather, and remotely sensed data to analyze claims filed by farmers for anomalous behavior that could indicate fraudulent or other improper payments. CAE is at the leading edge of application of remote sensing to agricultural insurance.
The RMA program has had several significant impacts, including:
- Identification of anomalous claims, plus monitoring as a preventive measure
- Linking claims histories with weather data
- Integration of the latest MODIS and Landsat satellite data into the data mining process
- Automated claims analysis
The results: cost avoidance of over $1.5 billion (2001–2007) scored by the Congressional Budget Office. Estimated reductions from prior year indemnities represent more than a $23 return for every dollar spent by RMA on data mining since its inception.
One initiative produced a list of producers who were subjected to increased compliance oversight; from 2001 to 2011, this reduced unneeded indemnity payments by approximately $838 million.
Category: Enterprise DM Strategies
- Advance Auto Parts (co-winner)
- Solution Sponsor: Stibo Systems
Advance Auto Parts, Inc. (AAP) is an automotive aftermarket retailer established in 1932. With 2012 sales of $6.2 billion, AAP offers parts, accessories, batteries, and maintenance items to both the do-it-yourself and professional installer markets, with 3,794 stores in 39 states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and through an online shopping channel.
Advance Auto Parts embarked on its master data management (MDM) and product information management (PIM) initiative to achieve service leadership and superior product availability by: streamlining its merchandising efforts and time to market; increasing revenue and customer satisfaction; and receiving accurate information from manufacturers and complying with the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA) standards.
AAP sought to consolidate data for more than 650,000 products (SKUs) for over 350,000 vehicle models, including more than 35 million part-to-vehicle relations and over 500,000 interchange records (records that cross-reference the part number with other part numbers that could serve as a viable replacement).
Leveraging a multi-domain master data management platform—Stibo Systems STEP—Advance Auto Parts achieved buying accuracy, lowered return rates by offering the correct part/item the first time, improved sales with accurate inventory, and created a fully automated data processing pipeline for vendor-supplied data to be delivered in industry standard formats.
The company’s objectives for the MDM/PIM included:
- Receive accurate information from manufacturers and third-party vendors
- Comply with Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA) standards
- Reduce data entry costs
- Reduce product returns
- Improve reaction time
- Improve time-to-market
The MDM/PIM automates the validation and processing of vendor-supplied information and takes delivered data through an optimized workflow process for the few pieces of data that require manual review or approval. Once processed and approved, the STEP system syndicates the information to AAP's Enterprise Service Bus via a WebSphere MQ interface ensuring guaranteed delivery.
Category: Enterprise DM Strategies
- Standard Life plc (co-winner)
Standard Life is an international long-term savings and investments company headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland, responsible for the management of £218 billion in assets (as of December 31, 2012).
The company wanted to develop a generic, reusable ETL framework aimed at returning maximum ROI for its business customers by increasing development productivity and reducing risk of deviation from design.
The project to deliver the EDW_TOOLKIT has ensured consistent application of Kimball-based design patterns across all projects. The EDW_TOOLKIT is composed of over 40 generic components that form part of a mature and extensive framework to enable cost-effective configuration of the ETL process. This has realized significant cost savings (estimated to be in excess of £5M) through reduced development and maintenance effort, while at the same time significantly increasing the probability of project success.
Having had a vision to build the EDW_TOOLKIT and provide productivity and risk reduction benefits, we are not finished. Our next chapter in innovating ETL development involves continued streamlining of the ETL development environment to minimize the requirement for technical resources in the project. This will allow systems analysts and data analysts to configure and build ETL jobs by configuring an end-to-end ETL process rather than individual code modules within this ETL process.
In addition, we want to expose business rules to systems analysts, data analysts, and business support analysts so they can view, define, and modify rules within the ETL process. In a business-as-usual, support environment, this will allow the ETL process to be modified with less reliance on valuable technical resources.
Category: Enterprise Data Warehousing
- Stanford Hospital and Clinics
- Solution Sponsor: Health Catalyst
Stanford Hospital and Clinics (SHC) is known worldwide for advanced patient care provided by its physicians and staff, particularly for the treatment of rare, complex disorders. SHC is ranked by US News & World Report as one of the best hospitals in America. Closely aligned with Stanford University Medical School, SHC includes a 613-bed ACS Level 1 Trauma Center, with over 2,100 medical staff, 700 interns and residents, and 2,100 RNs servicing more than 725,000 inpatient, outpatient, and ER visits each year.
SHC deployed the Health Catalyst Late-Binding Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), along with a unique multi-disciplinary approach and processes to drive quality interventions that improve health outcomes for patients. The project is especially critical to enable SHC to achieve its triple aim of improved patient care, reduced costs, and enhanced patient satisfaction.
Stanford Hospital and Clinics’ EDW architecture, along with a unique multi-disciplinary approach and methodology, have driven quality interventions that, in early results, have improved health outcomes for Stanford’s patients. These two innovations combined to give SHC’s users previously unheard-of insight into opportunities for quality improvement and a clear process for the deployment of focused interventions.
As a result, SHC produced a number of early, promising results, including reducing 30-day readmissions for heart failure patients and significantly lowering staff surveillance requirements for major hospital-acquired infections. Such improvements are mission critical for today’s hospitals, which are confronted by a revolution in their fundamental profit structure.To succeed under federal health reform, they must improve the quality of care they deliver, be able to measure and report on health outcomes across their entire patient population, and drive down costs.
Category: Performance Management
Quicken Loans, Inc., is the nation’s largest online mortgage lender and third largest retail lender. The company closed more than $70 billion in home loans in 2012, a 133 percent increase over the previous record of $30 billion set in 2011. The company also doubled in size.
This growth can be attributed to the success of our online lending platform. Our scalable, technology-driven loan platform has allowed us to handle a large surge in loan applications while keeping closing times for the majority of our loans at 30 days or less.
The speed from loan application to close is due in large part to the focus Quicken Loans places on operations performance management, which allows us to meet client needs as thoroughly and quickly as possible. Over the past eight years, performance management has evolved from a manual process of report generation to self-service dashboards and user-defined alerts that allow business leaders to proactively deal with obstacles and identify opportunities for growth and improvement.
At Quicken Loans, performance management is not a top-down project but a collaborative process between the business intelligence and technology teams and the business. This has reduced the time it takes to provide the metrics to business leaders and has dramatically increased the effectiveness of our solutions. Our culture and our processes drive how we identify metrics, measure them, and use them as a basis for improvement.
Category: Emerging Technologies and Methods
- Motorola Mobility
- Solution Sponsor: Cloudera
Motorola Mobility, a Google company, creates mobile experiences for consumers. Whether calling, writing e-mail, playing games, listening to music, watching a movie, taking pictures and videos, surfing the Web, collaborating, or sharing content—Motorola Mobility puts consumers at the center of it all.
Motorola Mobility is leading the extension of traditional enterprise data warehousing systems and tools to big data and analytics systems. Motorola introduced the concept of a unified data repository platform that breaks enterprise data silos and helps drive a comprehensive global view of the business and its customers by harnessing the power of data. This platform is built using technologies that scale on demand and at price points and speeds orders of magnitude better than traditional technologies.
With the adoption of a cloud-based solution, Motorola uses the power of the open source, distributed application framework Hadoop to run computations previously constrained by cost, scalability, speed, or resources. The company can now conduct large-scale, complex analyses across a mix of internal and external data sources so the business can evaluate the performance of existing products, understand consumer perceptions of its products and features, get feedback about potential new product offerings, and identify and address quality issues before they impact customers.
Motorola’s approach is beginning to have a meaningful impact on business KPIs. Customer satisfaction scores have risen based on call center insights, product returns (a metric of quality) are decreasing based on service center insights, and Motorola forums and other open forums are helping drive insights into customer sentiment. This, in turn, is helping internal business functions to respond effectively to the voice of the customer. The business is now better positioned to manage its product line, forecast demand, and manage supply chain inventory with greater accuracy and shorter turnaround.
Category: Enterprise BI
- Aircel Limited
- Solution Sponsor: Teradata Corporation
Aircel is an innovative data-led telecom company with operations across the country, serving more than 60 million subscribers.
The company had many heterogeneous systems capturing day-to-day customer interactions and transactions, requiring analytical capabilities for business users to generate an integrated analytical view of customer demographics, usage patterns, and social behavior. With market demands, future growth, and telecom dynamics, Aircel initiated a business intelligence project to provide a single customer view that helps it construct the best-suited products and offers for increased customer satisfaction and additional revenue.
The enterprise EDW/BI solution brings together lines of business and over 20 varied data streams under one umbrella, enabling a 360-degree view of customer lifetime value and effecting synergies among sales and marketing and customer relationship management. It has empowered business users to explore previously unrealizable analytical opportunities. The integrated view made it possible to analyze the customer life cycle, including such tasks as customer identification, customer acquisition, customer relationship management, customer retention, and customer value enhancement—and to do it instantaneously. Business users can now analyze all aspects of the customer life cycle and micro-segment the customer base to create or release segment-specific retention and cross-sell and up-sell offers to improve average revenue per user while ensuring a uniform experience across customer touch points.
Examples of business value include:
- Monthly revenue increase of INR 47 million (US $860,000) with reduced information latency and availability of the latest customer profile, which allows Aircel to recommend personalized products and content through various touch points.
- The campaign management system leverages the BI profiling framework, which has helped increase annual revenue by more than INR 160 million (US $2.9 million) by pushing best-fit products and offers to selected customer segments.
Category: BI on a Limited Budget
USAA is a member-owned Fortune 500 company that serves more than 9.4 million members of the military and their families with a variety of insurance, banking, investment, and financial service products.
The company looked for a solution to allow USAA to quickly determine the impact of global financial events on USAA’s investment portfolio.
A core team (IT lead and business subject matter expert) built the first iteration of the data mart tables and associated business semantic layer (the interface between the data mart and the reports) to allow for fast development and future intuitive ad hoc, self-service reporting. Only after numerous report, table, and semantic layer iterations by the core team were ETL and database resources were brought in to build the ETL process and finalize the database design. This minimized relatively expensive and time-consuming ETL and data mart work.
The solution helps USAA meet increasingly stringent state and federal requirements related to effective risk monitoring. It also reduces labor costs and increases accuracy in reporting investment positions. The capabilities needed to be delivered quickly due to the fast-paced and ever-changing investment landscape.
Faced with increasingly stringent state and federal investment portfolio management requirements, USAA’s CIO team needed to quickly implement an effective solution utilizing the limited development dollars available. This project utilized creative development techniques with a core team of multi-skilled resources; 70 percent of the work was completed by two people with all the business and IT skills needed to build the first working development solution prototype. The business resource had an understanding of relational databases; the IT lead resource understood financial investments. The iterations were fast and strictly focused on processes that were absolutely necessary.
In just 10 weeks, with an IT investment of $26,000, a fully automated solution was delivered that far exceeded the CIO team’s expectations.
Category: Advanced Analytics
- Telenor Pakistan
- Solution Sponsor: Teradata Corporation
Telenor Pakistan is the second largest mobile telecom operator in Pakistan, with over 30 million subscribers and a 25 percent market share. It is 100 percent owned by Telenor Group, a Norwegian multinational telecommunications company.
When Telenor Pakistan was launched in 2005, it had a basic reporting data warehouse with not enough subject areas to enable views for operational business requirements or the scalability to add sources crucial for strong positioning in a market increasingly dominated by price competition. The shift to a robust Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) delivered the 360-degree customer view using data from multiple source systems. Today, the EDW and integrated BI platform go beyond traditional reporting, extending the EDW to commercial applications of analytics that intelligently route calls, drive cross-selling and up-selling, enable customer centricity in marketing strategies, customize offers for individual customers, target micro-segments, and predict customer behavior.
This strategic EDW platform provides a sustainable competitive advantage. With improved customer service and increased revenue, Telenor Pakistan has strengthened its second-place market position. Among the applications:
- Magic screen combines customer data, CRM functionality, BI, and data mining in a single view
- Behavior-centric routing scores every customer using a host of criteria to route callers to the right type of agent
- System X allows marketing to rapidly define incentives for customers in near real time
- Churn prediction uses data mining techniques to quickly identify probable churners and facilitates incentives for them to stay
- Behavioral segmentation allows respective brand managers to identify which groups of subscribers are behaving in line with the brand’s unique selling proposition
- Location intelligence is a strategic tool for creating visual representation of geographic relationships by combining streams of commercial data and technology KPIs in the EDW
Award winners were chosen by a panel of independent judges who have expertise in BI and DW.