WebFOCUS Delivers Cost-Effective Operational BI Solution

UK healthcare provider extends business intelligence solution to sales staff

"WebFOCUS generates the information required to allow our teams to meet the needs of their customers and to support our profitable growth in a very cost-driven market."- Gavin Sorbie, Information manager, Covidien UK.

Leading healthcare products supplier Covidien UK, with over 2,000 customers and annual turnover approaching £150 million, is bringing timely market knowledge to more than 400 sales, marketing and finance staff using WebFOCUS from Information Builders. Part of global medical supplies manufacturer Covidien (formerly Tyco Healthcare), Covidien UK sells and services a diverse range of products through its surgical, medical, respiratory and imaging divisions. WebFOCUS ReportCaster has automated the scheduling, generation and distribution of all routine sales reports. Sales updates on all its 12,000 products are emailed to 300 field-based staff in 14 specialist teams. This information is also made available via an intranet portal. Regular business updates and alert-driven emails are also provided to their marketing and finance users, providing timely, accurate information for critical decision making.

The ease of use of WebFOCUS allows sales people with no technical knowledge to drill down from top-level data into customer and product level reports, accessing information that is less than 24 hours old. Information Builders' licensing model allows Covidien UK, a business that has increased enormously over the past ten years following acquisitions by its parent company, to assimilate new users without additional cost. WebFOCUS' flexible configuration has allowed data from merged companies to be integrated quickly and easily into core business reports from day one. Currently the UK's third largest provider of medical devices, Covidien UK's ability to provide top quality healthcare products has seen its revenue increase annually by 6-8% in recent years in a highly competitive market. The company is continually expanding its use of Information Builders'Web business intelligence software to track its performance and to be proactive in the face of changing customer and business needs.

Business Intelligence at the Sharp End

For many years Covidien UK has exploited the scalability and adaptability of WebFOCUS to drive business growth. Unlike some competitor solutions that are complex to use and generate only static reports from pre-determined data, WebFOCUS does not require the construction of rigid cubes. If required new data sources can be integrated with ease, allowing flexible reporting across all available data. Reports can be created dynamically from a wide variety of data sources. Simplicity of configuration and a GUI front end means that users with a reasonable knowledge of the data but with limited technical expertise, can create, modify and run their own reports when they need them without requiring input from an organization's IT experts. Covidien UK's information team manage their WebFOCUS systems and provide business analysis support with just two people located within their commercial organisation. "In many years of using WebFOCUS I have required very little help from our IT department to support our business intelligence applications," said Gavin Sorbie, Information Manager, Covidien UK. "Our WebFOCUS applications have user-friendly, intuitive interfaces, which mean that 100% of our customers can benefit from them with little or no training. They can access the latest data whenever they need without having to refer to a complicated user manual."

Low TCO Avoids Annual per User Licence Fees

Information Builders' CPU-based licensing model delivers significant cost efficiencies over the per-seat charges levied by competitors. Covidien UK avoids having to spend hundreds of pounds each year for each of its 400 users. This allows the company to make information available to everyone who needs it, even occasional users.

"Using a traditional licensing model, delivering information to the entire UK business would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds each year. This is not affordable and therefore you are inevitably compelled to restrict the number of users."said Gavin Sorbie. "The WebFOCUS model provides a fixed cost for the platform. The only limit to the number of users therefore becomes the capacity of that hardware platform." WebFOCUS's ability to run on commodity hardware, combined with Information Builders' low maintenance charges makes it a much lower-cost solution than market-leading alternatives."

Multichannel Sales Visibility

Covidien UK uses WebFOCUS ReportCaster to generate and broadcast hundreds of different reports automatically each day. Its report bursting functionality tailors output to each user's job function and responsibilities. Sales executives each receive a daily breakfast report online detailing performance against target, among other things. Evening bulletins to the sales teams highlight the orders entered for each of their customers that day. Marketing teams receive regular feedback on sales campaigns and promotions while finance managers get updates on revenue and outgoings. Over the years information from new sources, such as acquired businesses, has been integrated quickly and seamlessly into the reported data. ReportCaster can also be configured to flag up anomalies such as low-margin or below-cost sales to the relevant managers, enabling corrective action to be taken before profit is impacted. Covidien UK also uses WebFOCUS to integrate, analyze and report on sales made via its distributors who handle a significant percentage of sales in certain product lines, thus allowing clear sight of sales performance at hospital level.

Personalized Intelligence

Users access WebFOCUS via Covidien's existing identity management tools. Reports can be run and delivered in a variety of formats HTML, PDF, MS Excel spreadsheets, MS Excel pivot tables (and many more) to meet the preferences of the users. Ease of configuration means WebFOCUS can adapt to support a business that is constantly changing. "We are continually restructuring our sales teams in response to market requirements and business opportunities." said Gavin Sorbie. "Our systems allow us to work with the divisional management to explore alternative structures and, when implementing a restructure, to deliver the information in both old and new formats. This greatly assists in effectively managing this potentially disruptive type of structural change."

ROI in Weeks not Years

Covidien UK has used Information Builders' Professional Services consultants for ad hoc support and development as needed. "In developing out intranet tools we initially used a Professional Services consultant to work with us. This delivered a basic sales reporting application in WebFOCUS, going live within one week. This approach also provided us with a good basic training in the use of the Developer Studio toolset. Subsequently we developed our applications in-house, using a few additional days consultancy when required,"said Gavin Sorbie. "Their expertise enabled us to achieve a return on our investment in weeks. With competitor solutions the ROI would have been measured in years."

Covidien UK is continuing to expand its use of WebFOCUS to deliver easy to use information tools to support people at all levels across the organisation.

"WebFOCUS has and will continue to enable our employees to make timely, intelligent decisions to support the profitable growth of our UK businesses." said Gavin Sorbie.