Legacy System Upgrade to IBM Cognos 8 Standard Reporting Environment –Pharmaceuticals
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
A Large Pharmaceutical giant faced numerous challenges in consolidating and integrating the data received from various sources and the in house data currently present in their internal systems.
- Not having the data aggregated properly often resulted in wasted time, effort and incorrect results
- Need to standardize how regional managers calculated compensation for their Field Force based on the number of sales and visits by each representative.
- Previously, tedious and time consuming data requests were sent to the IT department every time Sales Managers wanted to gain some visibility into the performance of a respective Field Force
- Urgent need to come up with standardized reports that provided managers with the essential information needed to properly accomplish their forecasting and planning requirements
- Required interactive reports that allowed the user to retrieve the correct information instantly
- The new solution would need to be architected from scratch since there was no system currently present to handle their needs
KCM’S SOLUTION
- Consolidate the in house data and the data obtained by the different providers. After the data was merged into a single database using the business requirements, this was simplified further by automating the process.
- IBM Websphere was used to associate the provider data with the in house data based on some unique keys to consolidate the data and load the data to an Oracle database. Data would no longer have to be manually retrieved and sorted by calling the IT department.
- provide a solution that would provide the Sales Managers from the different regions to be able to focus on their specific Sales Force using Cognos /achieved by integrating specific attributes from the LDAP with the reports for dynamic filtering of the data
- all the required calculations including Profit and Loss, Head Count, Sales Expenditures and Market Share were included in the reports for complete visibility.
- the Manager is able to see summarized high level data in the form of Dashboards and Scorecards, and drill down to lower levels of data for more details, like whether a subordinate is meeting their specified goal
BENEFITS
- Decision making process was sped up as required data and calculations were already pre-defined in the report and therefore more quickly accessed
- No need for custom Excel spreadsheets or Data Requests being sent to the IT department
- Potential weak spots and exceptional performance of the Sales Team could be quickly highlighted
- Shortages of specialized resources could now be foreseen and the appropriate action could be taken if necessary
