MetaManager™ Saves RTI International from Complete Rewrite
Katherine Swain from RTI International*, a BSP Software MetaManagerTM & Integrated Version ControlTM customer, contacted our support desk recently with an unusual problem that was wreaking havoc in their IBM Cognos environment. Many of the Query Studio reports were no longer working, and she was hoping that MetaManager could help, or at least a new set of eyes could make some progress. When certain Query Studio reports were opened, an error message was displayed that the Report Server was no longer responding. Server side, a dangerous new issue was arising. Each time this error occurred, the IBM Cognos stack created a Memory Dump file over 100MB in size. This new problem wasn’t discovered until disk space on the machine ran out. Katherine was starting to accept the fact that all of these reports were going to need to be recreated from scratch.
Katherine had many people both within Cognos and within RTI working on this issue for a solid three months, but they were hampered by not being able to see the XML report specs for the Query Studio reports. Andrew Weiss of BSP Software investigated for a while looking at log files and using the CM Trace utility to no avail. Then we decided to look at the specification to see what was different since the issue was only with certain Query Studio reports. Using MetaManager, we were easily able to copy the Query Studio report specification to the clipboard for viewing in Notepad (a feature not available in Query Studio). We removed parts of the Query specification and pasted it back to the Content Store. If Cognos created a .dmp file, we knew that we still had the error. Then we noticed an empty filter node in the query specification. It seemed odd that it was there when it was empty. We removed it, pasted the specification back, and to our surprise no .dmp file. The report worked! The problem existed within the Query Studio report spec, something that is not accessible natively through Cognos. Without MetaManager and the dedicated work of Andrew Weiss of BSP Software, this problem would not have been able to be resolved without completely rewriting the Query Studio reports from scratch.
Apparently, we found an edge condition of some sort that IBM Cognos wasn’t protecting against, and frankly we were unable to figure out how these Query Studio reports got into this state in the first place. Now all we had to do was remove those offending lines from the rest of the specifications. We used the Find / Replace module of MetaManager to fix all of the Query studio reports in bulk. Katherine’s environment is up and running again and her users are relieved that they will not have to recreate their reports from scratch.
"Thanks again for taking the extra time yesterday to help with it, you have no idea how much I appreciate it and how nice it is to find someone willing to spend the time to really solve the issue, especially when it wasn't even your problem to fix." - Katherine Swain, Information Technology Services, RTI International
*RTI International is one of the world's leading research institutes, dedicated to improving the human condition by turning knowledge into practice. http://www.rti.org/
BrightStar Partners and Assurant Health: Cognos Analytics Ensure Faster Applicant Reporting
Richard Manns, Vice-President − Performance Management for Assurant Health, is an executive member of the data warehousing and reporting group. His team was charged with finding and implementing a solution that could handle a growing need to handle ad hoc reporting requests against applicant data. The old process was arduous. A business owner would request a report from a business resource manager. The business resource manager conveyed the request to a project manager. The project manager would forward the request to the development team, which then had to search through data spread across a number of databases, then wrestle with the different data formats to get the answers. The entire process could take weeks, meaning the reports were outdated by the time they were finished. Every new request, no matter how minor, meant the whole process needed to start over again.
Obstacles Faced
- No proven 'Best Practices' approach
- Limited ad hoc reporting ability
- Turnaround time to generate reports
Mr. Manns needed a solution provider − one that could guide his team through the 'Best Practices' used to deliver a Cognos solution and provide some "lessons learned" around the tools to cut down on costly implementation mistakes. This approach would help Assurant Health implement a supportable Cognos solution. Assurant Health also looked for guidance on how to use Cognos to integrate applicant data into a format that could deliver that data in a timely and accurate way, and that could enable business owners to do their own ad hoc reporting and analysis. He found all four in BrightStar Partners ('BSP').
Benefits Realized
- Documented 'Best Practices'
- Business owners can create their own ad hoc reports
- Turnaround time cut from weeks to minutes
After deploying Cognos' BI analytical and reporting tools with the guidance of BrightStar Partners, Assurant Health had the foundation laid for building their Cognos applicant reporting solution. Assurant Health business owners can now create their own ad hoc reports and conduct their own analysis. "The decrease in turnaround time was significant and has resulted in an unprecedented level of responsiveness to business needs," says Mr. Manns. "Turnaround time went from weeks to, in many cases, minutes."
Users can now examine application data by region, agent, market segment, submitted date and more than two dozen other key attributes associated with the application. The BSP/Cognos solution gives business users the flexibility they need to combine views or drill down for more detail to identify new business opportunities. Business users can now easily compare performance across states and product lines, which give them a better view of their overall performance. Manns noted, "This solution enables users to identify opportunity areas much quicker than was ever before possible, which in turn helps them to make decisions that return results more quickly."
By using the 'Best Practices' approach developed by BSP, Assurant Health's data reporting operations are becoming leaner and more efficient. "We were able to cut down the learning curve and development time by using experienced BSP consultants" Mr. Manns said. Mr. Manns' team is now looking at ways to expand the Cognos capabilities into other areas of Assurant Health. "Our goal is to give everyone that needs to access or analyze information the ability to do so by themselves with minimum interference from our development staff. If we're successful in that mission, our efficiency will increase across the board."
2006 Informationweek 500 list
Based on the considerable success of this implementation and the business value attained, Assurant Health was selected for the 2006 InformationWeek 500 List. For the past 20 years, InformationWeek has identified and honored the nation's most innovative users of information technology with its annual listing. The list focuses on the power of innovation in information technology.
Assurant Health's submission highlighted one of its most innovative business-technology initiatives completed in the last year, including the business value derived from the Data Capabilities initiative. The entry explained how the Data Capabilities program repurposed and re-platformed Assurant Health's business transaction information to support analysis of our business − its trends and idiosyncrasies. More than 30 billion data points are assembled, managed, and analyzed using proven technologies underscoring that the value attained from this effort is not a product of technology, but rather improved and more widespread analysis.
The innovation of this program is its focus on value to empower existing analysts and new analysts. The program inverts the 80/20 ratio of marshalling information versus analyzing information to 20/80; thereby quadrupling the amount of analysis performed. BrightStar Partners was instrumental in the success of the Data Capabilities initiative.
Why BrightStar?
At BrightStar Partners, success is measured by our ability to deliver highly innovative solutions on time and within budget, and then driving that solution through to the user adoption phase of the project. By combining our leading edge Methodology & Best Practices with our passion and drive for success, BrightStar Partners is uniquely qualified to deliver the highest quality Performance Management solutions in the market.
BrightStar Partners is a Cognos® Gold Reseller strictly focused on the Cognos Performance Management toolset in the areas of Business Intelligence, Enterprise Planning, Enterprise Scorecarding, and Data Warehousing. We combine thought leadership, highly talented staff, and a commitment to customer success in each and every project that we do. BSP has offices in Chicago, Illinois and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
About Assurant Health
Assurant Health has been in business since 1892. Assurant Health's underwriting companies provide health insurance coverage for more than one million people nationwide. The companies' primary products include individual medical, small group, short-term and student health insurance products, as well as non-insurance products and consumer-choice products such as Health Savings Accounts and Health Reimbursement arrangements. With almost 3,000 employees, Assurant Health is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wis., and has operations offices in Minnesota, Idaho and Florida, as well as sales offices across the country. Assurant Health is the brand name for products underwritten and issued by one or more of Assurant Health's underwriting companies − Time Insurance Company, John Alden Life Insurance Company and Union Security Insurance Company. Each underwriting company is financially responsible for its own insurance products. The Assurant Health Web site is www.assuranthealth.com .
Case Study: Deployment of the Cognos / SSA Performance Management solution in an SSA/PRMS platform
For a combined 25 years BrightStar Partners' owners have been working with Performance Management solutions - as customers, partners and employees of Cognos Corporation. It is through their work with clients that they've realized the value of a market leading technology enabler to solve the challenge of lack of exposure to enterprise data. The following case study highlights one such example, where BrightStar Partners implemented the Cognos Performance Application / SSA Global Enterprise Application for a large manufacturing firm in the Chicagoland Area.
The company in this example runs their business with SSA Global's PRMS ERP system, and though the solution implemented was packaged for this ERP, there are similar solutions for JD Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, Infinium, BAAN, and a number of others. Because of the significant competitive advantage obtained through the implementation of the solution, all references to the company and employee names have been omitted.
Significant investments were made into collecting and storing information, however the value in the data is achieved only when it can be utilized as a strategic advantage. "The transactional system resulted in a good sales, financial and manufacturing historical database, but it was difficult to extract summary and comparative information," explains their Vice-President of Information Technology. "To generate our management reports, we were often re-keying data from PRMS into Excel. Inevitably mistakes were made, so instead of interpreting and analyzing our business, a lot of time was wasted figuring out whose numbers were right, and we still could not articulate sales performance by territory."
The main challenged faced by this manufacturing company was that despite their investment in the collection of data using PRMS, they had very little timely exposure to the numbers, and lacked an enterprise-wide solution for viewing and analyzing the information. Among the numerous challenges were:
- Extremely difficult to extract sales and financial information from ERP system
- Difficult to provide timely and accurate reporting and analytical capabilities to management.
- Impossible to streamline custom reporting process.
Through two years of evaluation and due diligence, this company selected the SSA Enterprise Analytics and turned to BrightStar Partners, Inc., a Cognos reseller and SSA Global services partner, for help implementing the solution. The decision to implement the Enterprise Analytics from SSA Global provided a very good foundation to solving these problems. The Enterprise Analytic solution includes mappings into PRMS's file structure to speed up implementation, enabling the company to leverage predefined valuable business reports and analytical tools within the space of a few months. "The deep product and functional expertise that BrightStar Partners brought to the solution enabled us to realize the most value out of our customized solution" says the client Project Manger.
The solution included operational reporting, enterprise analysis and financial reporting solutions for General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Inventory, Procurement and Sales. A production and Human Resources solution are also available for several ERP systems.
After just six months of implementation with one consultant and a team of 3 employees of the company working part-time on the project, they company was able to realize the following benefits:
- A conformed enterprise wide data warehouse leveraging industry best practices
- Immediate and rapid integration with PRMS ERP system
- Improved reporting accuracy across all functional areas of the company
- Exposure to data that was not available previously, in a consistent manner across the entire enterprise.
- Pre-packaged business-intelligence components with summary and transaction details providing the ability to deeply analyze enterprise data seamlessly
The overall solution provides the company's business users with self-service access to their information needs, and frees up Information Technology resources to enable them to participate in higher value-add activities. Instead of printing hard copy reports from their legacy system, they can now leverage their existing internal portal to allow employees to access their information over the intranet. And because the information is based on the transactional records from the ERP system, there are no discrepancies between transactional information and reporting and analytical environment.
"This has improved accuracy," said the VP of Information Technolgy. "Everyone is working from the same numbers, driving confidence and increased productivity. It has been a good morale booster too because we are more responsive to the sales force and to management. Receiving near real-time answers to their questions increases their ability to work running the business with confidence. We are giving people the support they need." "We can now conduct analysis we could not do before - and see things we had not considered before. SSA's Enterprise Analytics was a very good match between what we wanted and what it did."
About SSA Enterprise Analytics
Getting the best out of less is what optimizes performance, and managers must know where to take action to achieve it. SSA Enterprise Analytics is what you need to deliver actionable information. It enables facts and figures to be viewed from different business angles and levels of detail. Informed decisions can be made by seeing performance in true perspective and through insight into not only what has 
happened, but why. Transformation of transactional data into a single version of the truth provides a consistent foundation for reporting, analysis, and monitoring across the enterprise.
About BrightStar Partners, Inc.
BrightStar Partners (BSP) is a professional services firm that exists to seek constant innovation, delivering tangible business benefit to our customers. As both a Cognos Reseller Partner and SSA Global Services Partner, BSP's core competencies focus on Cognos Performance Management, comprised of Business Intelligence, Enterprise Planning, Scorecarding, and Data Warehousing solutions. BSP provides the highest quality end-to-end solutions that give their clients competitive advantage, all the while shortening the time to market for implementations using a proven methodology and best-practice approach.
About Enterprse Analytics & Performance Applications
The EA and Performance Application solution is available for Oracle, JD Edwards, SAP, PeopleSoft and a variety of other ERP Systems out of the box, and can be customized to virtually any ERP solution.
