Case Studies

Applied Decision Science for Business

Sagence Group helps clients by exploring what is and what can be by gaining a deeper understanding of their operations and by helping them innovate in their execution and customer relationships.

Examples of how the Sagence Group approach can work for your organization, what we call Decision Science for Business, are illustrated in the case studies presented here.

Healthcare

Medical Device Manufacturer

Business Problem:

A large medical device manufacturer's Remote Service Program lagged in adoption; in the first two years of the program, fewer than 10% of products were connected and less than 60% of connections were available. Challenges included the program ownership across modalities as well as a skeptical field service organization.

Solution:

The firm created and instituted best-practices methodology optimized for field efficiency and cost reduction. Strategic Solution Services were implemented to maximize adoption success and included IT authorization, facility preparation, and field deployment. A team of dedicated remote services specialists was assigned for 30 months. The team consisted of technical inside "sales," technology and network specialists, field engineers, program managers, and logistics coordinators.

Benefits:

Connected 4,000+ systems across 5 modalities: NucMed, MR, CT, X-ray, Ultrasound
Established a 95%+ availability rate for newly connected systems
Improved customer adoption rate by over 50%
Reduced the total cost to connect each system by over 40%
Enabled an $11M annual value stream for the firm

Commercial Food & Agriculture

International Food and Agricultural Products Producer

Business Need:

The meat processing industry, which is very mature, is a classic oligopoly with few players and enormous capital barriers to entry. In spite of a robust market, beef remains largely an unbranded consumer commodity with tremendous pricing pressures; typical returns are in the low single digits. In this environment, the competitor with the best insight into both their cost structure and pricing latitude will quickly gain an advantage. One company in particular, an international provider of food, agricultural, and risk management products and services, was faced with extremely tough industry and competitive pressures and needed a detailed cost structure linked to their pricing analysis to determine the optimal production and sales volumes.

Solution:

After conducting a strategic assessment as well as detailed cost structure and pricing analysis, information was gathered to design and develop a Business Information Warehouse (BIW) that integrated the company’s sales and production data. The enterprise data warehouse was thoroughly tested prior to deployment and analyzed again after deployment to ensure that the new infrastructure provided sufficient improvements as measured by the new metrics and analytics. The information provided by the new data warehouse provided insights into both cost structure and pricing, while the data warehouse itself helped to reorganize the company’s management structure, thus enabling new decisions and streamlining of the decision-making processes.

Benefits:

Determined the optimal mix for production and sales efforts
Gained competitive advantage for customer acquisition and retention
Improved bidding strategy for raw material
Increased yields by more than 10% ($20+mm EBITDA annually)

Consumer Food & Beverage

Worldwide Consumer Food Manufacturer

Business Need:

One of the world’s leading food and beverage companies needed to develop a global Master Data strategy and the roadmap to implement this strategy. The company viewed global Master Data as a necessary foundation for it to compete in maturing markets and to grow globally.

Multiple master data files existed across the company’s business and there were no management and governance processes in place. The need for global data synchronization with its customers and the introduction of RFID technology further created the urgency for global Master Data.

Solution:

Sagence Group worked with the client executive team to develop the global Master Data strategy and roadmap by analyzing three factors:

Future state of the global Consumer Product Group industry structure
The client’s business strategies, business information needs, and required information capabilities
Current state of the client’s Master Data environment

A strong business case was developed for the optimal Master Data investments, technical architecture, and roadmap to continuously delivered value to the business while incrementally enriching the infrastructure and enabling enterprise information management disciplines. The roadmap was composed of a change management plan, Master Data organization structure, and management and governance processes to support and maintain future client business and organizational growth.

Benefits:

A comprehensive Master Data strategy and roadmap were developed for the food and beverage company. The company is now viewing data as its most valuable asset and is beginning to execute the recommendations to support their future business strategies. Many business applications will be enabled through implementation of the Master Data strategy, including simplification of the business processes and delivery of accurate, timely, and synchronized data.

Higher Education

Private Medical College

Business Need:

A private medical college in Wisconsin, which provides both adult and pediatric patient care, uses multiple applications and systems to run their business, including an enterprise finance and human resources application, a clinical data system, a performance metrics application, and multiple smaller applications and data sources. These disparate applications and systems were linked to a performance management system with limited data integration, resulting in sluggish data delivery. Support of this system involved dedicated senior financial resources manually updating and reconciling application level data.

Solution:

The medical college’s performance management system was transformed into a mission-critical analytic and reporting application by rebuilding it with a more efficient architecture on a new Business Intelligence platform based on industry best practices and standard enterprise-level tools.

Creating this solution involved a strategic assessment followed by thorough business and requirement analysis. The information gathered from these tasks was then used to design and develop the application. This new reporting application was rigorously tested to ensure that it fully supported all necessary business units across the organization before deployment.

Benefits:

Migrated from a manual and labor-intensive information management system to an automated process, freeing up valuable senior financial resources for more productive uses
Reduced information delivery time dramatically, allowing performance management analytics to be more timely and relevant
Gained competitive advantage for customer acquisition and retention
Increased user adoption of the performance management system
Increased ROI through the scalable and extensible information management system that the college has now extended to meet other analytical needs

Manufacturing

Global Manufacturer

Business Need:

Product, vendor, and customer data for a $5.6 B global distributor and manufacturer of scientific products was held in multiple systems. This situation contributed to pricing and product data errors, customer issues, and offline workarounds by individuals to manage contracts, product details, and other day-to-day activities. In addition, because of the absence of documented data management processes, it was difficult to determine where the problems lay.

Solution:

Conducted a current state assessment of the end-to-end product, vendor, pricing, and customer data management processes. Business needs for improvements in data management were identified.

Recommended an ideal future state and management strategy for enabling improved and enhanced data capture and analytics. Additionally, executed a technical assessment to ensure that the technology and data management organization would be in alignment. Outlined an enterprise data management organizational structure, with detailed roles and responsibilities.

Benefits:

Provided a clear understanding of the major data quality and data reliability issues that existed within the company. Recommended a future state that included process and technology changes. The company is now implementing those recommendations as a first step toward an enterprise-wide Master Data program.

Financial Services & Insurance

Financial Services Company

Business Need:

One of the largest bank-based financial services companies, headquartered in Ohio, was looking to significantly improve their current business model in order to deliver the best client service possible in the most consistent manner. However, to help drive this initiative, a complete management model, comprised of process, system, and employee behavior was required.

Solution:

Produced a customized interpretation of a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Creating this interpretation involved the construction of designs for the information management architecture and data warehouse for the CRM. The information used to develop these designs was gathered through a business assessment of their current reports and metrics, data analysis, business architecture for business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing, and an overall corporate BI tool strategy. Systems and technologies integrated in the solution included: Siebel CRM, SAS, Cognos, DB2, LDAP, and Microsoft BI tools.

Benefits:

Created a client-focused culture and management model that cuts across the enterprise
Increased value and understanding of client acquisition and retention
Improved financial performance and resource allocation
Provided a greater competitive advantage
Enhanced usability of Information Management assets
Aligned the company’s information management needs with its business needs

Pharmaceuticals

Pharmaceutical Company

Business Need:

One of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Japan was undergoing a significant expansion in its sales force and was beginning to see the following issues arise as a result:

The organization as well as its systems and processes were experiencing stresses in supporting the current and projected information management needs of the company.
Information quality was substandard and delivery of key performance measures was often late.
The IT department was not aligned with the various internal business units creating lack of support for key initiatives and dissatisfaction with the information management platform.

Solution:

Performed a strategic assessment of the company’s information management requirements and capabilities to determine opportunities to increase operational effectiveness. Assessment findings identified an organizational misalignment of IT with financial, marketing, and sales organizations. Infrastructure, ROI, and business analyses were also conducted during the course of this initiative. The information gathered from these analyses along with the technical assessment identified the information architecture as the source of data quality and latency issues. The project team recommended a specific technology solution and implementation roadmap. The technology solution included the deployment of Cognos, Oracle DBMS, and IBM Data Stage for the integration of data from SAP and Oracle.

Benefits:

Formed new Information Management organization that maximized investment in information management capabilities
Migrated to a technology platform that reduced data quality and latency issues
Created a scalable and extensible platform to meet the pharmaceutical company’s forecasted growth
Improved performance metrics tracking and reporting

Retail

Electronic Retailer

Business Need:

Competition in electronic retailing was heating up with the proliferation of cable and direct broadcast TV capacity. This industry growth was forcing more sophisticated merchandising and greater control of procurement, forecasting, and inventory levels.

Inconsistent reporting of sales and cash activities made performance monitoring difficult in an environment that relied upon real-time information. In addition, limited visibility to sales item history, current and anticipated inventory levels, and performance information on vendors made the task of merchandising very difficult. Limited and inflexible customer analysis capabilities left customer service with sparse or non-existent information on top customers. One leading interactive multi-channel retailer in particular had specialized demands that could not be met with off-the-shelf software.

Solution:

A data information factory system was designed and built to support an enterprise-wide Information Warehouse with specific subject area data marts. The creation of this information system involved strategic analysis to understand how IT interacted with the company’s business model. This process helped the retailer recognize areas with sufficient support as well as those with weak or no support.

Each data mart that was created for this initiative answered specific, high-impact questions for key functional groups. These questions were gathered from various types of analyses that were conducted on each of the key areas. Initial focus was on financial metrics, sales history, and inventory levels.

Benefits:

Consistent tracking of hourly and daily performance
More rapid response to buying trends, performance of show hosts, and product buyers
Better inventory control through understanding of product categories and product sales history