Unlocking internal intelligence

WHEN RXCENTRIC WANTED to measure how effectively its physician drug marketing programs perform against it strategic company goals, the pharmaceutical ASP turned to BI (business intelligence) analytics for the answers.

The New York-based company has between 10 and 15 analytic metrics, such as how many repeat physicians participate in RxCentric marketing programs. These metrics help the company instantaneously measure performance against its overarching corporate plan. Managers compare the data obtained from the company’s Microsoft SQL Server, generated through software from Optimized Software to goals outlined in the company’s “management by objectives” philosophy, says RxCentric CTO Damian Roskill.

“We have the analytics in place to instantly know how we are doing on that metric,” Roskill says. “It’s particularly useful for marketing activities and seeing how you are doing versus goal.”

RxCentric also leverages data analysis from transactional systems to provide performance reports to customers detailing how their own marketing efforts are faring. For example, RxCentric can detail the time physicians spent studying marketing materials or how many ordered drug samples. “All of these are BI points that allow our customers to follow up with physicians and improve that customer relationship,” Roskill adds. “This is really what BI is all about, creating these multiple data sources to provide a complete view of the customer.”

Managing to the exception

RxCentric is one of a growing number of companies beginning to ratchet BI data gleaned from transactional systems up to the executive level for use in BPM (business process management). The most advanced BPM technologies, which are being actively marketed by traditional BI stalwarts such as Cognos, BusinessObjects, and Brio, layer analytics on top of their BI platforms to create scorecards and other performance reports that can be accessed by executives via “digital dashboards” for use in meeting strategic goals.

As a result, an executive can “manage by exception” — respond quickly to numbers and performances outside the norm — by using alerting capabilities in the dashboards instead of learning about such events at the close of a quarter.

“[BPM] will drive consensus in regard to what are the measures that really matter,” says John Hagerty, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston. “In many cases today those measures are looked at in isolation. Executives focus in on what they need to … and everyone knows what the executives are worried about. It focuses like a laser the top 10 or 15 metrics to drive the business.”

Getting information into the hands of managers in an almost real-time manner was the impetus for bringing on a BPM dashboard at catalog retailer Lands’ End, which was bought in June by retailing giant Sears. “We wanted to provide information that they could act on a daily basis,” says Frank Giannantonio, senior vice president and CIO of Lands’ End in Dodgeville, Wis.

The ability to do forecasting is one of the most important uses, the CIO says of the three major dashboards divided by inventory, finance, and merchandising lines. “The workbench … brings up a quick view of where sales are going by region. Managers can drill down to the region and then by store within the region. They can capture the information on Sears point of sales. … For IT, it takes the demand off us to generate reports.”

The ability for executives to “manage by fact” or measure company performance against key indicators is the reason that Raytheon is in the midst of developing an enterprise portal that will serve as a digital dashboard for executives.

The Lexington, Mass.-based government contractor plans to leverage analytics from Cognos to analyze transactional data from its SAP R/3 ERP system and SAP data warehouse. Each dashboard will be personalized so executives can manage “by exception” to their most crucial operating data instead of having to wade through paper-based reports, says Principal Architect Brian Moore, who works in Dallas. For example, the portal will be used to surface multiple financial reports that now are generated by hand and captured in a Lotus Domino database.

“Today, there is a lot of wasted time between when someone in the company knows a number and when the executive sees it,” Moore says.

But the endeavor is not without its hurdles. First, because Raytheon is comprised of a number of acquired companies, the portal designers are faced with retrieving far-flung data from various disparate systems, Moore says. To tackle this challenge head on, Raytheon now is designing a data warehousing initiative to normalize all the data needed for the portal, he adds.

Defining the challenges

Marvin Richardson is not as far along in the design process as Raytheon’s Moore. In his recent sign-on as the new chief application officer of Chicago-based insurance brokerage firm Aon, Richardson is evaluating dashboard and metric tools. Because his company also provides performance consulting and some “Six Sigma” training, Richardson wants a tool that can be implemented into Aon’s customer applications .

“We’re looking at some .Net framework [tools] that allow easier access to metric information over the Internet, without the classic client server that is required by some BI vendors,” explains Richardson, who is optimistic that some of the new tools will make BPM more accessible to the enterprise and to managers.

But enterprise executives are not concerned with technical details; they want to see the BPM output — that upgraded internal BI, says Richardson. “Outside the IT community, it’s the measure that’s being pushed for. Executives want to know how the business is performing. They’re pushing for measures and process improvement. In IT, we see BPM as a way to address these drivers.”

As Richardson moves forward, he is considering the technical and business complexities of BPM. “The key challenge is in defining what you’re measuring. Companies have different systems built by different teams. The systems may use the same terms, but those terms have different definitions.” Thus, making sure that BPM apps correctly identify the data from various systems is key to the tool’s successful use, he says.

Measurements and definition disparities are just some of the issues arising when BPM is added to the mix, experts say. “One of the cultural issues that people have to get around is looking at and measuring things differently than they have in the past,” Richardson says. “Skills have to change when you begin to take a holistic view of the firm. It’s amazing how many people get lost in the details … and if you ask them to think more strategically they can’t,”says AMR’s Hagerty.

Raytheon’s paramount cultural challenge is overcoming employees relinquishing control over data, Moore says.

“The lower-level programs of business units have control over when their data is released,” Moore says. “They don’t let executives see numbers … that haven’t been scrubbed by them. Whatever we do, we have to allow for that. People need to have some level of control of numbers that reflect on them; otherwise, the system will never be real.”

Despite hurdles — technical or cultural — the promise of BPM is alluring for Raytheon, whose main client is the U.S. Department of Defense. “We really get regularly reviewed by DOD … so just managing our customer relationships well and showing continuous improvement in how we manage our programs is really key to us. The more precise we can get in understanding where our programs are and identifying problem areas sooner rather than later will be really key to us,” Moore says.