Morris Communications Chooses Ascential DataStage to Create Information Resource Bank
Morris Communications Co., LLC is a privately held media company with diversified holdings that include newspaper and magazine publishing, outdoor advertising, radio broadcasting, book publishing and distribution and computer services. Morris Communications selected Ascential's DataStage XE enterprise data integration solution to drive creation of the company's first enterprise-wide business information resource bank.
"We have 11 divisions, a diverse portfolio of broadcast, print and online media services and thousands of customer touchpoints recorded in various finance, circulation and purchasing applications each day," said Steve Stone, chief financial officer and vice president, newspaper division, for Morris Communications. "Ascential's technology will enable us to quickly consolidate this information across applications and address data quality issues so that we can rapidly deliver integrated information into our enterprise decision support system. We look forward to using DataStage XE as a scalable rapid- deployment data integration solution to help us achieve a rapid return on investment on our data warehouse project."
Morris Communications is deploying DataStage XE as the foundation for its Shared Technology and Resource (STAR) project. The STAR project is a company-wide business information platform that has been designed to improve customer service and reduce operational costs in key areas, including direct and indirect materials, cross-divisional shared functions such as human resources and finance and core business functions such as circulation and advertising.
Towers Perrin Delivers Self-Service Reports with Brio Performance Suite
Towers Perrin is a global consulting and administration firm that helps employers manage their investment in people to achieve measurable performance improvements. It specializes in human resource strategy and service delivery, benefit and compensation design and implementation, employee and organizational communication, HR technology and administration services. Towers Perrin has more than 9,000 employees in 78 offices in 23 countries.
Towers Perrin deployed the Brio Performance Suite to provide clients with access to benefits and administration service center reports. With this secure Web-based solution, Towers Perrin's Administration Solutions division is providing self-service report access to clients and experiencing increased client satisfaction as a result. More than 40 percent of Towers Perrin Administration solution clients are currently using the system with the remaining clients to be added within the next six months.
"An important part of our service offering is providing our clients with convenient Web-based access to their data in an easy-to-use format. Selecting Brio was a key step in providing such a service," said Wayne Guymon, CIO Towers Perrin Administration Solutions.
By implementing the Brio Performance Suite, Towers Perrin clients now have the ability to log into the secure portal, rather than telephoning their client services team and within minutes receive their customized reports, enabling near real-time decision making. Each client's private, opening page contains charts, graphs and links to detailed reports. In just a few simple clicks, clients now have easy access to human resource, compensation and benefits data. In only four months, Towers Perrin was able to evaluate, purchase and go live with an out- of-the-box version of the Brio solution that reached nearly 25 percent of its clients. Two employees then implemented a second phase, adding case management reporting, in just one additional month.
"The Brio suite is truly the tool to solve multiple business problems. Its ease of use and rapid deployment capabilities enabled us to streamline delivery of routine reporting to clients via the self-service Client Portal. Brio Intelligence and Brio Reports provide the mechanism to deploy sophisticated reporting solutions that add capabilities that our clients demand and differentiate our service offering in the benefit administration marketplace," adds Michael D. Boyer, Director of data management, Towers Perrin Administration Solutions.
Handspring Accesses Heterogeneous Operational Data with Business Objects
Handspring, a leading innovator in personal communications and handheld computers, employs a business model that relies on strategic partners to perform business tasks such as manufacturing and distribution. Because of this, Handspring receives data from partners in multiple formats and a variety of source systems. Handspring needed a way to consolidate and analyze this data to optimize corporate decision making.
With the help of Saama Technologies, a consulting and technology services company and Business Objects reseller partner, Handspring merged its scattered corporate data into one cohesive data mart. To leverage this valuable data, Handspring evaluated several leading business intelligence solutions before selecting Business Objects as its BI platform.
Utilizing WebIntelligence and the data mart created by Saama, Handspring can now generate reports on items such as Web orders, bookings, billings, backlog and shipping activities in less than a day, instead of weeks. In addition, with direct access to the consolidated data via the Internet or Handspring's corporate intranet, employees are no longer tapping the IT department for ad hoc reports that previously took days to generate. Users can now run their own queries and quickly perform analyses on the data that is important to them, increasing operational efficiency, improving insight into the business and reducing costs.
Handspring gained several significant benefits from their business intelligence implementation. In addition to improvements in operational efficiency, such as now being able to close the company's books and finalize quarterly financial statements in half the time it used to take, there have been several unique benefits from the WebIntelligence deployment. For example, Handspring receives a large number of product orders via its Web site and must continually monitor these orders to detect fraudulent activity. In the past, due to scattered data and report backlogs in the IT department, it was hard to track orders to identify trends in the data. Using WebIntelligence, Handspring's credit analysts now have easy access to the order data to run ad hoc queries and reports on their own, allowing them to spot trends more quickly.
"WebIntelligence has made our job of identifying trends in fraudulent activity a whole lot easier," said Mike Paneitz, senior credit analyst at Handspring. "We are now able to get instant results with the streamlined data access. When we detect a pattern change within fraud activity, we can more quickly adjust to the new MO, increasing the effectiveness of fraud analysis and more importantly fraud prevention at Handspring."
Convera Selected by Top Swiss Insurance Provider to Help Speed Claims Process
Swiss Mobiliar, one of Switzerland's leading insurance providers, has installed Convera's RetrievalWare search technology on its corporate portal to assist customer service personnel in more effectively processing and resolving insurance claims for its 1.2 million customers. More than 4,000 multilingual staff across 100 disparate offices in Switzerland are using RetrievalWare to access a range of internal and external sources. This enables Mobiliar's 25 in-house lawyers to concentrate only on the most complicated cases because they are no longer being requested by customer service staff to advise on everyday claims.
RetrievalWare has been installed on Swiss Mobiliar's RedNet portal, providing customer service personnel with fast, accurate access to customer profiles, more than 8,700 insurance-related government regulations and more than 1,600 court judgments on previous compensation claims. The system also allows staff to search, find and order online books, press articles and journals from the company's central library, and delivers daily updates covering financial services and insurance news from Berne's leading newspaper Der Bund.
Searches can be performed in Swiss German, French, English and Italian. In the past, searching for previous claims based on a key phrase such as "whiplash" would require four searches – one in each language. RetrievalWare's multilingual capability increases the accuracy and speed of searches as it is able to search across multiple languages in a single search. Therefore, staff can search claims for "whiplash" in English and have matching results returned, whether the phrase is in English or one of the other languages.
"Our competitive edge lies with the fact that we stay close to our customers," said Hans Romann, head of library and information services, Swiss Mobiliar. "Ensuring the most up-to-date information is available for all staff to handle requests in a speedy and timely manner is a challenge. It was evident within a short period of time that Convera had not only met our requirements, but exceeded them. The caliber of Convera's services personnel was also instrumental in delivering a complete solution to our needs."
Raytheon Powers Early Warning Radar Network with SGI
Raytheon Company, a global technology leader in defense, government, and commercial electronics and business and special mission aircraft, has selected SGI Origin 3000 series high-performance computing systems to power a U.S. Upgraded Early-Warning Radar (UEWR) site in the United States. This UEWR site is a large, fixed, phased-array surveillance radar used to detect and track ballistic missiles targeted at the United States.
As an upgrade of America's Early Warning Radar network, Raytheon is replacing computer hardware at an existing radar site on Beale Air Force Base, California. The new hardware includes SGI Origin 3000 series servers and SGI Total Performance 9100 (TP9100) RAID to help the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System precisely identify and track ballistic missile launches against the United States.
Powered by SGI technology, the UEWR will be able to search for different types of missiles, distinguish hostile objects such as warheads from other objects, and provide this data to other Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System elements. In addition to providing raw real-time mission-critical compute power for processing the data, the SGI Origin 3000 series systems are ideal storage management servers for managing very large data repositories typical of national missile defense programs. The SGI TP9100 storage array is also the highest throughput RAID storage subsystem in its class.
Prior to deployment of the Space-Based Infrared System Low satellites, the UEWR will be used to detect and track ballistic missiles during their midcourse phase. The UEWR is an important part of the Ground- Based Midcourse Defense System, a fixed, land-based, missile defense system with land- and space-based detection systems capable of responding to a limited strategic ballistic missile threat to the United States.
Mary Jo Nott is the editor in chief of DM Review and responsible for the content that appears in the magazine and its associated Web sites. You can reach her at (262) 784-0444, ext. 215 or maryjo.nott@sourcemedia.com.
