Data Warehouse and IBM Cognos 8 Implementation – Health Care
Business Challenge
A leading Health Care company engaged KCM Solutions to build a data warehouse that delivered fast and adequate reporting.
- Previously used MicroStrategy, which did not provide real time updates and required a customer web interface
- Limitations in the web interface meant only one report could be run at a time for the batch process update
- Highly inefficient batch process took 6 hours to run
- Usability was low and maintenance and support costs for this application was high
KCM’s Solution
- Immediately designed the data warehouse, leveraging Informatica as the ETL tool to extract data from the different transactional sources and separate them into different Subject Area Marts
- Added extra columns to the data warehouse that were not available previously to provide more insight into the business.
- Replaced MicroStrategy with IBM Cognos 8 as the Business Intelligence Tool for the client after running a cost-requirement analysis
- Reduced the number of reports from 300 to 50 while increasing functionality and simplicity of use, by leveraging IBM Cognos 8’s advanced functionality such as conditional blocks, conditional formatting and parameter maps
- Report run time was reduced from 6 hours in MicroStrategy to 5 minutes using IBM Cognos 8 , which is also connected to real-time data and refreshes each time the report is run
Benefits
- Enhanced and all inclusive solution that offered more features, reduced support and decreased maintenance costs
- Overall number of reports was reduced by 80%
- Performance time enhanced 60-fold
- Standard and easy to use web interface
