Netcare, the South African medical care group, is building a data warehouse to be able to uncover medical and business trends and present managers with a single view of activities throughout its 43 clinics nationwide.
The group also wants to be in a position to have the right information on hand to be able to react quickly to changing requirements within medical care in South Africa.
"We want to get everyone talking the same language," says Heather Henderson, MIS manager, Netcare. "We need a centralised base of information, so we`re combining the different information from different business unit sources.
The data warehouse will be based on an Intel server and an SQL database utilising Cognos business analysis tools. Henderson envisages that more than 300 Gigabits of data will be added annually to the warehouse, with the data initially being generated by the group`s billing and stocking systems.
"The medical industry changes so rapidly we need to be in a position to respond to these changes quickly ourselves. One of the reasons we`ve decided on Cognos tools is that they enable us to change things quickly.
"We need to look at historical data to analyse trends and see what is happening in the company, " she adds.
The group has been using Cognos` PowerPlay multidimensional business analysis tools for more than three years and has recently upgraded to the Web-based version of PowerPlay enabling users to access the daily, weekly and monthly reports they needed to see and manipulate and drill down into the data if necessary.
"We decided to deploy the Web version because we were having problems with our paper-based report in that we were not getting information to our users. Our data had become too large," she says.
Some of those reports contained as much as 800 pages and apart from making it difficult for users to find the information they needed, there was also a major cost paper and printing overhead involved in preparing the reports, but also in distributing them nationwide.
"Cost was not really the issue. Every user has different requirements, so we wanted to make our reports a pull rather than a push system, where our users could get to the information they needed quickly and effortlessly. It had to be something that was easy to use and easy to deploy. PowerPlay Web met these requirements," says Henderson.
The new 50-user system is said to be meeting expectations with users, particularly those in finance and the regions, finding the ability to view their screen based report in whatever format they want to very useful.
"More users are getting greater value of the reports now. Instead of having to extract information from the reports manually for further analysis they can carry out additional analysis of the data quickly and easily by exporting it into an MS Excel spreadsheet.
"They`re also now able to drill down into the information themselves, which they could not do before. They can down to different levels and different types of information such as when looking at income reports being able to drill down to each individual hospital, medical aid or even doctor," she says.
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