Industry Implementations

InfoManagement Direct, February 2004

SAS Enterprise Guide Enhances Unparalleled Asset Allocation Tool for BBH Clients

Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), a privately held bank specializing in investment management and global custody, has used SAS software to develop a unique online investment asset allocation service. Using this service, BBH can accommodate clients' complex investment demands, yielding increased managed assets and higher return on investment.

This service, known as SALSA (Stochastic Asset Liability Strategy Analysis), is designed to meet the investment demands of insurance companies and other financial clients. It is powered by SAS business intelligence and analytics tools, particularly SAS Enterprise Guide software.

BBH becomes the first company to move one step beyond the industry's dynamic financial analysis (DFA) standard with a solution that breaks down complex data and lets customers easily understand their financial risks, both currently and five years into the future.

"We implemented SAS because we needed a solution that could handle the massive amounts of information generated by DFA. With SAS, we're pulling intelligence out of the data and giving our customers confidence that they're receiving the most informed asset allocation advice available anywhere," said Carl Terzer, marketing director at BBH. "Our ability to differentiate our service while providing clients with actionable investment alternatives has increased dramatically since we began partnering with SAS last year. Our customers can see the difference SAS makes."

SAS Enterprise Guide, a powerful component of SAS' unparalleled end-to-end business intelligence solution, is an application for business analysts and programmers that offers tangible time savings while increasing return on investment. It quickly clarifies and simplifies masses of data with a user-friendly interface. SAS Enterprise Guide lets users manage data, perform query and reporting functions, and share powerful graphic displays. Quantitative analysts and strategists at BBH can now analyze more data than before while increasing managed assets and adding many new clients. The company is also saving lots of time.

"We consider the huge time savings SAS has given us to be a great return on investment," said Raghu Ramachandran, BBH's chief portfolio strategist for insurance asset management. "Before using SAS, we could only look at eight different allocations and producing a single graph could take days. Now, with SAS Enterprise Guide, we can run 200 scenarios and easily produce 40 graphs in half an hour."

US Naval Safety Center Selects JReport 6

The U.S. Naval Safety Center has selected JReport 6 from Jinfonet Software for mishap event reporting and analysis. Located in Norfolk, Virginia, the Naval Safety Center works with more than 4,200 Navy and Marine commands worldwide to promote safety and safety processes. It is the Department of the Navy’sorganization for conducting safety investigations and mishap analysis and is responsible for disseminating this information to the fleet.

In response to the Navy’s initiative to move toward an e-business environment, the Safety Center has been aggressively implementing new, Web-based technologies to enhance operations and availability of information. Among their Web-initiatives is the migration from the Safety Information Management System (SIMS) to the Web-Enabled Safety System (WESS).

WESS willprovide access to historical data on shore safety, aviation safety and afloat safety. This data includes information on involved personnel (both on and off duty), involved civilians and involved Naval equipment. Deployed as a component of WESS, JReport 6 is expected to facilitate mishap analysis and provide data to several audiences.

“The Naval Safety Center is committed to working closely with sailors, marines and civilians to help them reduce risk and accept no mishap as the cost of doing business,” says Tommy Tucker, head, Information Systems Division. “We anticipate JReport will provide us with an easy-to-use, Web-based tool for managing and sharing pertinent data to achieve our goals.”

On May 19, 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent out a memorandum challenging the United States military to reduce the number of mishaps and accident rates by 50 percent in the next two years. Embedded in WESS, JReport 6 will provide Naval analysts with a level of sophistication that will assist in identifying relationships between seemingly unrelated mishaps and their root causes. With this type of intelligence, the Naval Safety Center can educate appropriate audiences to affect equipment design, training and operational maintenance processes in order to reduce mishap occurrence.

Safety officers will utilize JReport 6 to generate parameterized reports on mishap data. This data is expected to help safety officers identify potential hazards and to educate the Navy and Marine commands on those hazards and how to avoid them. JReport 6 will also generate Excel format reports on unclassified information, for example, incident rates over a ten-year period. These reports will be posted on the Naval Safety Center’s Web site for ready public access.

Geac System21 ERP Systems Selected to Help Fuel Expansion Plans for Agropol Group

Czech Republic food processing giant Agropol Group’s 350 users will be upgrading to Geac System21 Aurora across its multiple operations. Agropol will be installing Geac System21 to replace existing Intentia and CSB systems. System21 Aurora combines core enterprise resource planning (ERP) functionality with real-time business process management for midsize enterprises.

For Prague-based Agropol Group, its unified Geac System21 system will go live in March 2004. The system will provide integrated production, distribution, sales, management and reporting. Agropol has seen its IT requirements grow as it diversified from corn, animal feed and chemical distribution into chicken meat processing following three recent strategic acquisitions. As a result, it now has seven specialist production plants and requires one system not only to help optimize its supply chain operations but also to maximize the efficiency of production planning across all plants.

"The Group has been busy acquiring companies to support our growth plans and build our negotiating power, so that we can be a major force when dealing with the big Eastern European retail chains," said Miroslav Pesta, IT manager for Agropol Group. "We knew that our strategy would have been undermined without effective IT to bring our operations together. We chose Geac System21, on an IBM hardware infrastructure, to support our aggressive growth plans particularly due to its good food industry functionality and also due to Geac's ability to implement new IT effectively and fast. Also Geac System21 has underpinned growth in other parts of Agropol's business for over three years, so its capabilities are known to us," Pesta continued.

Portal Speeds Time to Market for Orange UK

Orange UK (www.orange.com), has implemented Portal Software, Inc.’s convergent content billing solution to drive increased revenue from content, data and messaging services. Orange, the United Kingdom’s most popular mobile service with more than 13 million customers, now uses Portal’s billing solution. Orange UK is using Portal’s solution to generate additional revenue by rapidly supporting value-based pricing for a wide variety of prepaid and postpaid services as well as quickly increasing the number of third-party partner relationships.

Lucien Ducorney, vice president of Customer Systems at Orange Group, has welcomed the implementation as a step in the fulfillment of Orange’s stated ambition to establish a range of leading-edge systems consistently across its territories. Didier Lebrat, vice president Technical at Orange UK, said, “Portal’s proven content solution enables us to rapidly expand our content community by giving third-party partners the competitive, differentiated and auditable service they need to sell their content over our network. Portal solutions also give Orange UK a low-risk way to support the flexible and intuitive charging models we need to encourage the rapid trial and adoption of new services.”

Portal’s services group worked closely with Orange UK to provide the rich rating functionality needed to drive the company’s content services business in a way that effectively reduced custom development overhead. By integrating with the existing billing infrastructure, Portal billing solutions enabled Orange UK to rapidly deploy in a phased implementation that will be leveraged in other parts of the Orange business. By employing this coexistent approach technical risks and impacts were reduced, while meeting fixed time and pricing requirements.

Hyundai Chooses Bradmark’s NORAD to Drive Oracle Environment

The Kia Division of Hyuandi in Seoul, Republic of Korea, has standardized on Bradmark products, including NORAD DBControl Online and NORAD Surveillance to manage and monitor their Oracle databases.

NORAD is a fully integrated suite of tools designed to help the DBA monitor and maintain a single relational database environment or an enterprise of hundreds of disparate servers and databases. NORAD is the most comprehensive product suite on the market for maintaining database and system availability. Hyundai's cars and sport utility vehicles provide customers with many features and a high level of performance at an affordable price. Every vehicle in the lineup demonstrates Hyundai's emergence as an auto manufacturer whose products compete successfully in technology, quality, styling and refinement with automobiles from around the world.

After extensive benchmark testing of products from the leading database management software vendors, Hyundai selected Bradmark’s NORAD suite to monitor and manage 19 HPUX, Sun and AIX servers and a variety of Oracle databases. With NORAD Surveillance and DBControl Online, Hyundai administrators will be able to detect and resolve problems in their operating system and database environments before performance degradation or downtime affects end users.

“The Hyundai environment is an ideal, mission-critical showcase for the performance and productivity that Bradmark products deliver,” says Mr. Lee Kwangbae, general manager of ISC Global, Bradmark’s Korean distributor. “Hyundai was in need of a solution that would help maintain the availability of their critical Oracle databases. The NORAD suite allows them to maximize their investment in Oracle by providing the ability to reorganize tables online.”

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