Business Intelligence Goes Real-Time

Between its 900 physicians, 30 outpatient sites and more than 40 medical specialties, Henry Ford Medical Group in Detroit handles hundreds of thousands of patient visits every year. But like any business entity, the $750 million-dollar group-medical-services company is always looking for ways to streamline and improve its business practices.

The group realized it was losing revenue due to its inability to accurately and promptly bill for its services. In addition, its existing reporting-and-analysis process was expensive and inefficient, and it was nearly impossible to accurately track or predict available capacity throughout its myriad facilities with any consistency.

Enter the concept of business-activity monitoring (BAM), which allows users to cull information from their existing data systems in real-time to track critical business performance indicators with an eye toward improving the speed and effectiveness of business operations (see "BAM: Setting the Record Straight," page 56).

"There are obvious industries where faster reaction time to threats and opportunities can literally mean millions of dollars," says Mark Hellinger, CEO of San Diego-based Praja, which makes BAM software along with vendors including Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, SAP and Sybase. "We see the financial markets, health care, automotive and pharmaceuticals with growing interest. Of course, homeland security is a big area as well, where we are really talking about activity monitoring."

The key opportunity for solution providers that want to start selling BAM integration services is in these vertical markets. "VARs can take a BAM application and build it out for a vertical solution," says Gary Toste, general manager at Toronto-based Activience, which develops software that monitors business processes. "From a systems-integration point of view, there are a number of different areas within the enterprise where BAM can be used. Most companies haven't realized the potential of how BAM can be disseminated to make operations more effective."

Better Decisions
According to Richard Milliman, director of patient access, referral and verification services for Henry Ford, the company's existing reporting system required managers to cull information from a variety of systems and manually marry them together in order to make informed business decisions. "The outpatient world is quickly changing and diverse," Milliman says. "We wanted a tool that would let us push information to our managers so they could access capacity and allocation issues."

Last August, the company turned to Covansys, a Farmington Hills, Mich.-based solution provider, for the necessary application support and integration, and to Siemens for the hardware to implement Praja's BAM software as the front-end interface to examine and utilize the data converging from its various systems. The health-care vertical is particularly suitable for BAM software, says Veeresh Nama, applications director at Covansys, because "there are a lot of applications available that focus on niche parts of the system, and bringing those things into an integrated picture for the provider is something that market is looking at. In addition, they all want to improve their revenue cycles and efficiency."

Covansys performed a proof-of-concept for Henry Ford, then came back with something that was informative and easy to navigate, Milliman says. In early January, Henry Ford decided to adopt the new system and began its launch the following month. "The challenge we faced [in helping Henry Ford] was to extract data out of several legacy systems and then integrate it with a visualization tool," Nama says. "The goal was to achieve real-time messages and monitoring of those systems. Henry Ford needed to track the revenue cycle from the time that the patient visits the clinic and to identify any slowdowns in that process."

Henry Ford identified two key metrics: monthly productivity of its 900-member physician providers and daily views of operation activity throughout its many facilities. Within 90 days, the system, which cost less than $500,000, was up and running.

It's too early to accurately measure return on investment, the medical group says, but it's optimistic the rewards will come. "Although we are early in the process, we expect to see economies of scale in terms of time used for assembling information," Milliman says. "Using the new data, we'll be able to shift resources to allow us to accommodate our patients better. We have the ability to identify the absence of capacity and react to it."

Trials With Little Error
Hospitals and clinics are only one of several opportunities for BAM within the health-care industry. The pharmaceutical segment is seriously considering these types of integration projects to help effectively manage clinical trial studies, which are often multiphased and include hundreds of sites and patients scattered around the world, says Doug May, director of pharmaceutical solutions at Latitude360, a systems integrator in Baltimore.

"We are just beginning to have pharmaceutical companies consider BAM," he says. "There is a trend in the industry to identify losing trials earlier in the cycle, since it is an expensive undertaking to take a drug all the way through clinical research. Anything they can do that would more quickly indicate things won't work out on a certain drug is of interest to them, and better real-time access to data is certainly an aspect of that."

Another area that offers considerable opportunity for solution providers is manufacturing, particularly in the area of supply-chain management and logistics.

"Traditionally, manufacturing companies, which have had to live off small margins, have gotten good at managing core processes. So, when you talk to them about managing by metrics and business activities, they're already familiar with the concept, even though they may not have had these technologies," says Darius Vaskelis, vice president of research and solutions at Inforte, a Chicago-based solution provider. "Other types of companies that have had the luxury of high margins, such as financial services and health care, haven't had to run their businesses with a tight eye to those metrics. In the downturn, they didn't have the discipline to run a tight ship and are now looking for tools to do that."

Although many vertical market segments are considering BAM, manufacturing and logistics companies are among the most open-minded and willing to be early adopters of BAM. The Wheels Group, a third-party logistics provider in Toronto, for example, decided to develop an Internet-based technology platform to provide its employees, customers and suppliers with real-time logistics information, including on-time performance data, core root analysis and nonconforming systems reports.

"Our whole effort is around capturing, cleansing and providing information back to business decision-makers so they can leverage that to figure out how the supply chain can be improved," says Peter Jamieson, president of The Wheels Group. "We needed a system to capture supply-chain information in a more timely manner and to measure, monitor and report on that to drive for continuous improvement."

Dubbed the "WheelsLink" supply-chain portal, Wheels' solution uses the Enterprise Supply Chain Portal from Applicor, a solution provider in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which licensed technology from Activience. "One of the critical points was building a system that would offer an easy interface and connectivity with all of our existing systems," says Jamieson, adding that the system will cost several million dollars. "There are a lot of people who build Web pages and collaboration tools for logistics, but without connectivity into the customer system, it won't be successful."

The Wheels Group is currently in the first stages of implementing the product; the system is being tested this summer and will go live to customers and vendors in the fall. "WheelsLink is going to make it easier to do business, and we are looking for areas of improvement so that we can save money over time," Jamieson says. "Traditionally, we have reduced the overall supply-chain cost through logistics by about 5 to 10 percent. We expect to get similar cost savings from this system, but with greater efficiency since we'll be dealing more with exceptions and problems. We can move from being reactive to being proactive."

Staying In the Right Lane
General Motors also sees how BAM can benefit its business. The auto-maker, whose business predates the 20th century, started working with Praja in 1999 to create a prototype system that would gather information from car dealers' sales databases to allow the sales, service and marketing group to make better decisions. GM opted to do much of the integration work itself, with the help of Praja, though it did tap solution provider EDS to integrate the BAM system into its existing system.

The prototype offers only a subset of the total information available from GM's systems, but does provide the functionality promised in the completely implemented system. Users can create reports that are specialized to their specific needs, or drill down deeper into information found in more standardized reports.

"Using the system, we can go to any location in the world to zero in on time periods and a hierarchical view of car models and makes, for example," says Samy Uthuruswamy, director of emerging technology at GM. "It's possible to quickly see where cars are selling, how many are selling and which competitors are doing best in a certain geographic region."

The company is also considering ways to use BAM technologies in other areas of the company, but hasn't announced any specific plans.

Hailey Lynne McKeefry is a freelance technical writer based in Belmont, Calif. She can be reached at hailey@cyberdeacon.com.

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