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Data management is an issue for everybody, not just IT. These are just some of the ways we help our clients achieve their goals.
Business Objective
MediMedia is an organization that has enjoyed sustained and organic growth over many years, driven by enthusiastic marketplace acceptance of its ever-expanding portfolio of products and services to the pharmaceutical industry. MediMedia’s IT ecosystem can best be described as more a product of evolution than architecture. The organization consequently launched an initiative to modernize it and make it a differentiating asset of the company.
Solution
A2C was engaged to conduct a Master Data Management (MDM) Assessment to identify, classify, and capture MediMedia tactical and strategic requirements for Master Data to:
- Enable the strategic ERP, CRM, and DW enterprise initiatives to succeed
- Improve the organization’s ability to interoperate more effectively and seamlessly with its pharma clients
- Improve and streamline the dissemination of higher quality Master Data across the suite of MediMedia’s new and legacy products and services
- Position MediMedia to discover, develop and commercialize a new generation of information-based products by unlocking the insight potential of its data assets
Benefits
As a result of the engagement, MediMedia was able to achieve the following:
- Identify, describe, classify, and prioritize a holistic set of MDM capabilities needed by MediMedia’s Triple-i Division, and enterprise-wide
- Identify and describe both a technical and organizational strategy for MDM Architectures and Governance
- Create a high-level MDM roadmap of continuous delivery of business value and insight to the organization
Business Objective
Our client is a global pharmaceuticals manufacturer, researcher, and developer of drugs to reduce pain and to improve human health. Through a series of outsourced services, the company uses multiple vendors to provide clinical study management, data collection and trial reporting. The company needed a better system to collect, store, analyze, and share information about research, development, and commercialization of medicines. In particular, the company needed a Clinical Trial forecasting tool that could improve their ability to plan and manage clinical trial spending.
There was no consistent approach to clinical trial planning within the environment. Budgeting was therefore difficult to manage at the trial level. The company was seeking to select a standard tool to assist with clinical trial planning so that forecasting spend could be performed more efficiently and consistently. Part of the strategy was to leverage recently purchased business intelligence products that included Netezza (database platform), Informatica, (ETL tool) and Micro Strategy (dashboard and reporting tool).
Solution
Utilizing the client’s existing infrastructure and working with company personnel, A2C was engaged to provide Informatica and data architecture expertise:
- Developed a logical and physical data model in Netezza based on the requirements and data sources
- Developed ETL data packages from Source to Stage tables and then from Stage to Target tables. These packages were used to manage internal financial data as well as outsourced clinical data
- Worked with client’s Micro Strategies resources to develop a Clinical Trial Dashboard and Reporting Application
- A2C supported overall Project Management leadership with the client, including external data vendors for this initiative. This included the selection of resources, support for dashboard design, and overall cadence for the management of the dashboard implementation
Benefits Realized
The CTMS Dashboard provided an executive view of the Clinical Trials currently in progress along with the financial state of each. Drill-down reports into study and site details, including the accompanying financial information, were also delivered.
Business Objective
AmeriHealth Administrators (AHA) is a highly profitable and forward-thinking administrator of successful health benefit plans for employers or other organizations that choose to self-insure their members. AHA’s success in the marketplace caused them, over time, to outgrow the capabilities of their legacy information technology (IT) systems. For this reason they decided to invest in a far-reaching and ambitious IT re-engineering effort - designed to eliminate IT as a constraint on future growth, and to provide the organization with differentiating IT and product flexibility in the marketplace.
AHA asked A2C to lead in the definition and realization of a state-of-the-art Enterprise Data Strategy - designed to supply their new suite of IT applications with the best and most current information, and to establish an information framework for greater organizational agility in an increasingly dynamic marketplace.
Approach
A2C architects and AHA’s senior management quickly settled on a shared vision for an AHA’s enterprise data strategy that established a framework of enabling capabilities. This included Data Warehousing (DW), Master Data Management (MDM) and Data Virtualization (VODS). These data assets were also leveraged to support a robust suite of shared Data Services that enabled the adoption of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) rendered in MS BizTalk architectures.
A2C utilized a method based on its Agile Data Warehousing methodology that captured AHA’s “to be” vision as a set of detailed business process meta data. This repository became the basis for design specifications for the entire IT solution - including online transaction processing (OLTP) operations, DW, MDM, VODS, and the collaboration portal (SharePoint). The meta data model was extended as needed to include IT components for realizing the vision - applications, platforms, interfaces - all traceable to the shared vision of business process capabilities.
Benefits Realized
Work continues on the realization of AHA’s new IT vision. But the agile A2C method is allowing parallel advancement of data, application, and technical architectures that work together and adapt to change. A2C is completing designs for the AHA Dimensional Data Warehouse, Master Data Management systems for Benefits, Providers and Members, shared Data Services, and BizTalk Enterprise Service Bus.
Business Objective
A large Wall Street bank launched a major program to unify their Financial Reporting and Risk divisions to ensure the efficacy of their data across a complex and diverse set of products and services of their Investment Bank, Private Bank, and Asset Management organizations.
In order to realize this goal, A2C provided a deeper understanding of the information flows - originating both internally and externally - that feed Financial Reporting and Risk systems, and identified opportunities for improvement in both the efficiency and quality of these information flows. Because the bank had thousands of systems and interfaces that were built and evolved over time, the first crucial step in this journey was getting an accurate, holistic and actionable picture of their “as is” information ecosystem.
Solution
A2C compiled a complete inventory of all types of data movement / sharing that fed Risk and Financial Reporting systems, and investigated and profiled particularly interesting subsets of this inventory to uncover Interface Rationalization and Data Quality Improvement Candidates.
We identified Interface Rationalization Candidates through selective investigation and data profiling of the payload of interface populations. These included interfaces whose patterns of source, target, scheduling, structure, and payload (transactions, products, etc.) met A2C-defined criteria for potential forms of full or partial redundancy and/or overlap. Data Quality Improvement Candidates were identified by analyzing the payload of interfaces and ensuring that they are sourced from the systems of record for the transactions, products, and/or reference data that they carry. These two streams of investigation and analysis resulted in a proposed roadmap of directing attention to potential data sourcing improvements with the highest potential business value.
Benefits Realized
The solution has allowed the bank to identify opportunities for improvement in the efficiency and quality of flows of information into Risk and Financial Reporting, and to formulate the basis of a larger enterprise strategy for their Master & Reference Data utilized across their Investment Bank, Private Bank, and Asset Management organizations.
Business Objective
Our client was a large market leader in the rapidly growing online FOREX (foreign currency exchange) industry with a global client base from over 140 countries. The client selected A2C to launch a fast-paced initiative to bring contemporary Marketing Analytics capabilities to their rapidly growing organization:
- Create ability to convert “Trial Account Customers” over to a paying customer based on their trading history
- Create a “lights out” operation for bringing timely and actionable business information to knowledge workers
- Improve the selection process for identifying prospects and the effectiveness for their marketing and promotional campaigns
Solution
A2C’s Information Services organization created a Dimensional Data Warehouse for their Foreign Currency Exchange consisting of a trade transaction subject area and all associated Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) software needed to automatically populate it nightly. A2C also identified several business areas where data mining / predictive modeling technologies were highly likely to deliver important insights for competitive advantage.
- Established a repeatable method and extensible platform for bringing information to knowledge workers in easily-understood and actionable forms
- Described a path forward in evolving Gain’s marketing information capabilities from intuition-based to fact-based - and a means of quantifying the successes and opportunities in new marketing initiatives
Benefits Realized
The foreign currency exchange now has a reliable and high-performance platform in production for serving knowledge workers that can be readily extended to incorporate new subject areas. A2C continues our relationship with Gain in leveraging more of the potential of this foundation to realize the benefits of the virtuous cycle of closed-loop marketing: planning, integrated execution, evaluation, refinement - with fact-based metrics driving continuous marketing performance improvements.
Data management is an issue for everybody, not just IT. These are just some of the ways we help our clients achieve their goals.
Business Objective
MediMedia is an organization that has enjoyed sustained and organic growth over many years, driven by enthusiastic marketplace acceptance of its ever-expanding portfolio of products and services to the Pharmaceutical industry. MediMedia’s IT ecosystem can be described as more of a product of evolution rather than architecture, therefore an initiative has been launched to modernize it and make it a differentiating asset of the company.
Investments in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Data Warehousing and MDM have been recognized as a vital piece of this IT strategy. In order to ensure that these foundational enterprise IT application platforms will interoperate fully, efficiently and meaningfully, and that these investments actually deliver all of their potential value to the organization and its clients.
Solution
A2C was engaged to conduct a MDM Assessment to identify, classify, and capture MediMedia tactical and strategic requirements for Master Data to:
- Enable the strategic ERP, CRM, and DW enterprise initiatives to succeed
- Improve the organization’s ability to interoperate more effectively and seamlessly with its Pharma clients
- Improve and streamline the dissemination of higher quality Master Data across the suite of MediMedia’s new and legacy products and services
- Position MediMedia to discover, develop and commercialize a new generation of information-based products, by unlocking the insight potential of its data assets
Benefits
As a result of the engagement, MediMedia was able to achieve the following:
Identify, describe, classify, and prioritize a holistic set of Master Data Management capabilities needed by MediMedia’s Triple-i Division, and enterprise-wide
Identify and describe both a technical and organizational Strategy for MDM Architectures and Governance
Create a high-level MDM roadmap of continuous delivery of business value and insight to the organization
Business Objective
Our client was a global pharmaceuticals manufacturer, researcher, and developer of drugs to reduce pain and to improve human health. Through a series of outsourced services, the company uses multiple vendors to provide clinical study management, data collection and trial reporting. The company needed a better system to collect, store, analyze, and share information about research, development, and commercialization of medicines. In particular, the company had the need for a Clinical Trial forecasting tool that improved their ability to plan and manage Clinical Trial spending.
Within the environment, there was not a consistent approach to clinical trial planning and therefore budgeting was difficult to manage at the trial level. The company was seeking to select a standard tool to assist with clinical trial planning so that forecasting spend could be performed more efficiently and consistently. Part of the strategy was to leverage recently purchased BI products that included Netezza (Database platform), Informatica, (ETL tool) and Micro Strategy (Dashboard and Reporting tool).
Solution
Utilizing the client’s existing infrastructure and working with other company personnel, a2c was engaged to provide Informatica and Data Architecture expertise:
- Developed a logical and physical data model in Netezza based on the requirements and data sources
- Developed ETL data packages from Source to Stage tables and then from Stage to Target tables. These packages were used to manage internal financial data as well as outsourced Clinical data.
- Worked with client’s Micro Strategies resources to develop a Clinical Trial Dashboard and Reporting Application
- a2c supported overall Project Management leadership with the client, including external data vendors for this initiative. This included the selection of resources, support for dashboard design, and overall cadence for the management of the dashboard implementation.
Benefits Realized
The CTMS Dashboard provided an executive view of the Clinical Trials currently in progress along with the financial state of each Trial. Drill-down reports into study and site details including the accompanying financial information were also delivered.
Business Objective
AmeriHealth Administrators (AHA) is a highly profitable and forward-thinking administrator of successful health benefit plans for employers or other organizations that choose to self-insure their members. AHA’s success in the marketplace caused them, over time, to outgrow the capabilities of their legacy information technology (IT) systems. For this reason they decided to invest in a far-reaching and ambitious IT re-engineering effort - designed to eliminate IT as a constraint on future growth, and to provide the organization with differentiating IT and product flexibility in the marketplace.
AHA asked a2c to lead in the definition and realization of a state-of-the-art Enterprise Data Strategy - designed to supply their new suite of IT applications with the best and most current information, and to establish an information framework for greater organizational agility in an increasingly dynamic marketplace.
Approach
a2c architects and AHA’s senior management quickly settled on share vision for an AHA’s enterprise data strategy that established a framework of enabling capabilities - including Data Warehousing (DW), Master Data Management (MDM), Data Virtualization (VODS). These data assets were also leverage to support a robust suite of shared Data Services that enabled the adoption of SOA (Service Oriented ) and ESB (Enterprise Service Bus - rendered in MS BizTalk) architectures.
a2c utilized a method based on its Agile Data Warehousing methodology that captured AHA’s “to be” vision as a set of detailed business process meta data. This repository became the basis for design specifications for the entire IT solution - including OLTP / operations, DW, MDM, VODS, and the collaboration portal (SharePoint). The meta data model was extended as needed to include IT components for realizing the vision (applications, platforms, interfaces) - all traceable to the shared vision of business process capabilities.
Benefits Realized
Work continues on the realization of AHA’s new IT vision. But the agile a2c method is allowing parallel advancement of data, application, and technical architectures that work together and adapt to change. a2c is completing designs for the AHA Dimensional Data Warehouse, Master Data Management systems for Benefits, Providers and Members, shared Data Services, and BizTalk Enterprise Service Bus.
Business Objective
A large Wall Street bank launched a major program to unify their Financial Reporting and Risk divisions to ensure the efficacy of their data across a complex and diverse set of products and services of their Investment Bank, Private Bank, and Asset Management organizations.
In order to realize this goal, a2c provided our client with a deeper understanding of the information flows - originating both internally and externally - that feed Financial Reporting and Risk systems, and identified opportunities for improvement in both the efficiency and quality of these information flows. Because the bank had thousands of systems and interfaces, built and evolved over time, the first crucial step in this journey was getting an accurate, holistic and actionable picture of their “as is” information ecosystem.
Solution
a2c compiled a complete inventory of all types of data movement / sharing that fed Risk and Financial Reporting systems, and investigated and profiled particularly interesting subsets of this inventory to uncover Interface Rationalization and Data Quality Improvement Candidates.
Interface Rationalization Candidates were identified through selective investigation and data profiling of the payload of interface populations of interest: interfaces whose patterns of source, target, scheduling, structure, and payload (transactions, products, etc.) met a2c-defined criteria for potential forms of full or partial redundancy and/or overlap. Data Quality Improvement Candidates were identified by analyzing the payload of interfaces and ensuring that they are sourced from the systems of record for the transactions, products, and/or reference data that they carry. These two streams of investigation and analysis resulted in a proposed roadmap - directing attention to potential data sourcing improvements with the highest potential business value.
Benefits Realized
The solution has allowed the bank to identify opportunities for improvement in the efficiency and quality of flows of information into Risk and Financial Reporting, and to formulate the basis of a larger enterprise strategy for their Master & Reference Data utilized across their Investment Bank, Private Bank, and Asset Management organizations.
Business Objective
Our client was a large market leader in the rapidly growing online FOREX (foreign currency exchange) industry, with a global client base from over 140 countries. The client selected a2c to launch a fast-paced initiative to bring contemporary Marketing Analytics capabilities to their rapidly growing organization:
- Ability to convert “Trial Account Customers” over to a paying customer based on their trading history
- Create a “lights out” operation for bringing timely and actionable business information to knowledge workers
- Improve the selection process for identifying prospects and the effectiveness for their marketing and promotional campaigns
Solution
a2c’s Information Services organization created a Dimensional Data Warehouse for their Foreign Currency Exchange consisting of a trade transaction subject area and all associated Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) software needed to automatically populate it nightly. a2c also identified several business areas where data mining / predictive modeling technologies were highly likely to deliver important insights for competitive advantage.
- Established a repeatable method and extensible platform for bringing information to knowledge workers in easily-understood and actionable forms.
- Described a path forward in evolving Gain’s marketing information capabilities from intuition-based to fact-based - and a means of quantifying the successes and opportunities in new marketing initiatives.
Benefits Realized
The foreign currency exchange now has a reliable and high-performance platform in production for serving knowledge workers that can be readily extended to incorporate new subject areas. a2c continues our relationship with Gain in leveraging more of the potential of this foundation to realize the benefits of the virtuous cycle of closed-loop marketing: planning, integrated execution, evaluation, refinement - with fact-based metrics driving continuous marketing performance improvements.