Business Intelligence for Enhanced Performance Tracking

Client Overview

A global leader in the pharmaceutical industry has established an enviable reputation for itself through its dedication to treating and preventing disease. The global giant has remained at the vanguard of pharmaceutical research and development. It has consistently developed innovative prescription drugs and human vaccines that have enabled the treatment of serious and widespread diseases across the globe.

Business need

The healthcare industry is rapidly growing and hence, fiercely competitive. In such a business climate, market information can be one of the most critical success factors to any company. The client knew it had to stay abreast of its competition. However, the company's decisions makers faced challenges when it came to planning and implementing a successful marketing strategy. In addition, the client also had to measure its progress toward fulfilling its goals. Typically, these 'measurements' become the company's Key Performance Indicators (KPI). With such clearly defined objectives, the client decided to implement a web-based KPI dashboard solution. But implementing this kind of solution across a large enterprise is challenging and the client called on Infosys to help.

Technology Challenges

Infosys used its proprietary Global Delivery Model (GDM) to take care of the typical challenges that any offshore project faces. However, the implementation also threw up the following specific technical problems that the team had to fix:

• The Oracle Data Access Provider had some inherent flaws that caused problems when it came to integrating Microsoft COM+.
• According to the solution design, the multiple business facades had to 'talk' to each other and this implied that a standardized format had to be used.
• The client mandated integration of Microsoft products with Oracle and this integration presented its own integration problems.

Infosys solution

The Infosys solution consisted of modules like Market Share, Share of Voice, Sales and Profit Loss to track the performance at various levels of business. Since the amount of data crunching was huge, Infosys adopted a multi-layered architecture, which guarantees that the system will be functional and not get obsolete for a long time.

The system consisted of three layers. The Web Layer handled the display of information, the Business Logic Layer, the workhorse of the application, provided business functions and the Database Access Layer handled all tasks related to storage and retrieval of data. Modifications could be made to any layer independent of the other.

Benefits

Since performance measurement was key, the solution had to ensure that top management could get quick and reliable data, which suggested both their position and also that of their competitors. The Infosys Solution:

• Ensured that raw data was made more intelligent and gave critical performance numbers that enabled the management to take sharp decisions based on hard facts and figures.
• The security system ensured that only those personnel who fitted in on a need-to-know basis could see the confidential data.
• The layered approach adopted ensured that this benefit was present and this scalability made it future proof to a large degree.
• The various layers complemented each other and delivered the required data at high speed.
• The design was done in such a way that the manageability of both the system and the data it provided was high and this ensured that the client was not distracted by false information.

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