Putting Their Heads Together

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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 and 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 and 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.