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Industry Implementations
InfoManagement Direct, August 2004
Ventana Research Improves Customer Service, Saves Time, Money Using Soffront CRM
Soffront Software, Inc., a supplier of end-to-end CRM solutions specifically designed for the mid-market, announced that Ventana Research is using Soffront CRM as a hosted ASP service to improve customer service, save time and analyze sales/marketing procedures more effectively. Ventana Research (www.ventanaresearch.com) is the preeminent Performance Management research and advisory services firm.
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"We advocate aligning business and IT to improve performance, and Soffront CRM is an example of this philosophy in action." said Mark Smith, CEO and senior vice president of Research. Using Soffront's calendar feature, Ventana Research is able to quickly schedule multiple analysts for meetings by viewing all of their analysts' calendars on a single screen. "Analysts are also able to better track their services using a "ticketing" feature, which provides us with a detailed analysis of what services we have delivered," explained Smith.
"This analysis not only helps us improve customer service, but also allows us to be certain that we are delivering on our contractual obligations to our clients. We are in a very competitive business - one in which we must constantly demonstrate superior results. Using Soffront, we are able to quickly provide a comprehensive report that allows our clients to view all aspects of our successful activities and achievements," continued Smith.
Ventana Research is also saving time with the software, which translates into cost savings. "We understand the importance of leveraging human capital for workforce performance management, and this software allows us to do just that," explained Smith. "We are probably saving 30-40 man-hours per month because the software automates our reports and campaign mailings so efficiently." Smith went on to say that they are able to glean insights into their marketing campaigns that were not available previously. "We can now target our messaging and focus our research to fit the concerns and interest of our readers and clients," Smith concluded.
APMC Insurance Services Selects Business Objects as Its Business Intelligence Standard
Originally formed in 1976, APMC Insurance Services is the exclusive management company for American Physicians Insurance Exchange (APIE), a reciprocal insurance company that is physician governed. The management team of APMC Insurance Services along with the Board of Directors for APIE brings decades of industry experience, and expertise in medical malpractice insurance issues. APMC Insurance Services manages the underwriting, claims handling, marketing, risk management, day-to-day servicing, and accounting for APIE. APMC Insurance Services and APIE both have an exceptional track record for defending physicians against litigation and exerting a positive influence on the medical profession. Furthermore, this partnership has demonstrated long term, conservative decision-making practices which have resulted in exceptional stability over the last 28 years.
APMC Insurance Services selected Business Objects as its business intelligence standard and the foundation for its enterprise performance management strategy. Business Objects solutions will be rolled out within APIE to capture and analyze information in the areas of policy administration, claims, finance, sales and marketing.
With Business Objects, APMC will gain improved access to data to drive revenue, improve productivity and continue to strengthen the carrier it manages, APIE. For example, APIE will utilize Business Objects to measure campaign effectiveness and learn how well their message is being communicated in the marketplace. Sales managers will also gain an improved ability to track sales performance and manage the pipeline, leading to improved customer service and profitability.
In addition, APMC Insurance Services plans to use Business Objects to streamline reporting to state and federal regulatory agencies, and assist with corporate governance and compliance. Ultimately, the company will use BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager to power dashboards across the company in order to track key performance indicators vital to the company's success.
"We have been in business for 28 years and understand the medical malpractice business," said Marc Zimmermann, chief financial officer of APMC Insurance Services, Inc. "We are committed to providing excellent service to our APIE doctors, and we feel that through the Business Objects implementation, we will continue to build a financially stronger carrier for years to come."
Business Objects fulfilled APMC Insurance Services requirements for an ETL solution, including easy and quick deployment, rich metadata, and low total cost of ownership. BusinessObjects Data Integrator will help ensure information accountability, and play a key role in allowing APMC Insurance Services and the company it manages, APIE, to standardize on one BI solution.
Cognos and TIES Deliver Performance Management Solutions to K-12
Working with Cognos Professional Services, Cognos and TIES, an education and technology consortium that represents over 400 schools, will offer a performance management solution that includes over 150 prebuilt reports for addressing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) for K-12 school districts in Minnesota. The NCLB act was implemented to hold states and schools accountable for the academic achievement of all students, and to demand continuous performance improvement from students and teachers.
The TIES and Cognos solution will enable superintendents, principals, teachers and other administrators to analyze and report on student data and receive alerts on pre-determined metrics. Authorized users will be able to look at data multidimensionally with Cognos PowerPlay, drawing information from a central data warehouse, and can analyze and create reports on a number of areas including student performance, test results, curriculum management, attendance and absence reporting, and aggregated performance reviews. These abilities will enable educators to easily identify children who are falling behind, and to empower schools to take specific actions without having to wait for a formal report card to indicate where students are struggling academically.
In addition, school administrators will use Cognos ReportNet for operational and ad-hoc reporting on financial, human resources, and payroll data. Quicker and easier access to information, coupled with the ability to analyze across dimensions will enable schools to examine different aspects of organization performance and how it relates back to student success.
"TIES evaluated several other business intelligence vendors, but after close scrutiny we feel strongly that Cognos has the best solution for our market," said Betty Schweizer, TIES co-executive director. "By leveraging TIES' deep expertise in K-12 education with the powerful reporting, analysis and scorecarding capabilities of the Cognos EBI solution, educators can better understand the driving factors behind student performance and take action at the stage where they can have maximum impact. In addition, we are offering schools a practical solution that meets the information needs of the No Child Left Behind act, legislation that affects all our school districts."
FDA Expands Use of Convera Search Technology for Drug Review and Approval Process
Convera announced expanded use of the company's RetrievalWare search technology by approximately 2,500 scientific review staff within the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the FDA. The FDA's CDER uses RetrievalWare for enhancing scientific productivity during drug regulatory responsibilities, prior to drug approval and for post-marketing surveillance of drugs.
Recently RetrievalWare's use was expanded to provide easier access to an even larger breadth of research related libraries, including data from the Office of Generic Drugs and the Division of Counterterrorism.
Within CDER, RetrievalWare's enterprise search capabilities are instrumental in helping drug reviewers identify precise drug related details within FDA generated correspondence and within massive libraries of documents related to pharmaceutical submissions.
Under time constraints for reviewing data, CDER's scientific staff use RetrievalWare to extract specific information quickly during the extensive evaluation and approval process. In addition to other search functionality, RetrievalWare provides full content searches within PDF, XML, text and HTML documents, enabling reviewers to efficiently:
- Find prior drug product information, including previous FDA drug reviews and correspondence or documents
- Identify other similar drug products, which may already be available or awaiting approval
- Research across a set of drug product data for the probability of drug interactions
- Determine if pharmaceutical companies are complying with government regulations involving marketing, labeling and safety.
An essential component of the drug review process, the Adverse Events Reporting System reports on patients that have experienced adverse medical reactions to drugs. Integrated with the electronic data from this system, RetrievalWare also searches the system's 3 million reports, allowing reviewers to quickly and easily pinpoint adverse human reactions. RetrievalWare also helps reviewers find associated drug details required during drug submission reviews as well as identify problems with drug products already being marketed.
"Chemists, statisticians, drug safety evaluators, quality assurance specialists, medical officers, microbiologists, pharmacists and pharmacologists are some of the CDER staff that depend on RetrievalWare to identify precise research data from their search queries within CDER's enormous libraries," said Helen Mitchell, product manager, Enterprise Search, CDER/FDA. "The ability provided by Convera's technology to perform full content searches and/or metadata searches has helped improve the quality and timeliness of the drug review process by helping facilitate quicker access to details our reviewers rely on for drug evaluations."
Tower Records Saves $1.2 Million with TeaLeaf Technology
Tower Records is using the TeaLeaf RealiTea Web application management solution to manage the real availability of its music commerce site in order to increase sales and resolve customer support issues more quickly and efficiently.
Tower Records depends on its Web site to respond to between 50,000 and 80,000 user sessions per day, process up to 5,000 orders daily and contribute a measurable percentage of the company's total revenue. Tower Records found that its site analysis tools weren't providing the right information for the company to accurately understand what drives customer behavior and troubleshoot application errors that could negatively impact the purchase process. TeaLeaf RealiTea enables Tower Records to gather and analyze rich data from all areas of a user's online session to better understand the factors contributing to sales.
"With TeaLeaf RealiTea, we are completely confident that we are aware of all the technical, usability and business process issues that can affect our Web store's success," said Kevin Ertell, vice president of Operations at Tower Records. "Not only do we know that our servers are up and our pages are loading, but RealiTea ensures us that our customers are able to complete every single transaction every time. RealiTea paid for itself in about three weeks, and it saves $1.2 million per year in sales previously lost due to unknown application and transaction errors."
RealiTea enables Tower Records to pinpoint bugs and application errors that previously went undetected, helps its line-of-business managers identify issues that negatively effect site performance, and provides insight for speedy resolution of these problems. Further, Tower Record's customer service agents use RealiTea to pull up an individual's online session at the time of an inbound customer service call in order to immediately identify the issue while the user is on the phone, and rapidly solve the problem or escalate it to the appropriate resource for resolution.
TeaLeaf offers the first and only Web application management solution that helps IT operations rapidly identify, recreate, and diagnose application-level and business process failures. Because TeaLeaf captures and evaluates the complete session of every real user, it can immediately identify application errors and business process failures. By providing the means to replay every individual session, it can visually pinpoint the sequence of actions that preceded an application-level error, exactly as the user saw it. TeaLeaf provides the necessary visibility into what the real user does and sees, the required context to recreate the problem and what led up to it, and the means to correlate the problem back to the individual user or users affected. As a result, TeaLeaf can increase the availability of Web applications, reduce application support costs and protect revenue streams.
Cooper Cameron Selects Verity Ultraseek for Secure Searching of its Web Site
Cooper Cameron, a major supplier of equipment, systems and services to the oil and gas exploration, processing and distribution industries, recently revamped the design and architecture of its Web site as part of an overall company rebranding effort. "An important part of this front-to-back-end change was finding the best-of-breed search engine that would perform as advertised," said David Petty, Cooper Cameron's Web architect. "The 30-day trial offered by Verity for its Ultraseek search engine gave us the opportunity to take a close look at the product. We downloaded the Verity software and had it up and running in hours."
Other search software and hardware-based search appliances on the market were also evaluated but the ease, speed and effectiveness of Verity Ultraseek made it the choice for Cooper Cameron. According to Petty, speed of deployment was important but so too was the ability to deal with the complexities of the sites and the content they hold. "It is crucial for our users to quickly and accurately locate highly complex information about a wide range of topics of interest to the industries," Petty said. "Our resources on the Web are factors in creating and building strong relationships with customers."
Much of the information on the Cooper Cameron site is proprietary in nature yet it was important to expose site visitors to the company's wealth of valuable content. Verity Ultraseek allows Cooper Cameron's breadth of intellectual capital to be visible, while fully complying with the organization's security requirements for access.
An increasing amount of content on the company's site is generated dynamically. To deal with this effectively, Cooper Cameron uses the Ultraseek Content Classification Engine (CCE), a feature that allows dynamic documents to be organized into browseable topics for easy searching. The CCE displays search results and topics related to the returned documents, further enhancing the speed and accuracy of the search process.
Much of the content available on Cooper Cameron's Web sites is delivered dynamically from a database, not just as static web pages on servers. Ultraseek is able to crawl the database so users can get the most relevant search results quickly and easily. The Ultraseek Java XPA Search API aided the integration of Ultraseek with the database, bringing the full range of the search engine's capabilities into the application as well as further improving the site's dynamic content delivery performance. "With our prior search software it took three months of development time to design, build and test this same interconnection," Petty said. "With Verity Ultraseek's XPA Search API, we were able to significantly reduce the integration time with our database application."
Cooper Cameron is a company with nearly 8,000 employees conducting business in 150 countries. The company's Web site is used by more than 20,000 registered users, who typically seek highly technical product or industry information contained in 4,000+ documents stored within the organization's database. As Petty observed, "they are professionals who do not like to waste time." The just-installed Verity Ultraseek enterprise search engine enables them to find the right information in the least time possible.
This piece is brought to you by the Information Management editorial staff.
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