Cardinal Healthcare Increases Customer Loyalty through Information

Cardinal Healthcare wants to market its information

More and more companies are discovering that there's as much of a market for the information they possess as there is for the products they produce. And the healthcare industry is no exception. As hospital/healthcare organizations grow through consolidation and as cost-control pressures increase access to accurate, consolidated data about purchasing patterns and savings opportunities has become more critical than ever.

As one of the nation’s largest suppliers of healthcare products, Allegiance Health Corporation (a subsidiary of $25 billion Cardinal Health, Inc.) understands the importance of information to its customers. That's why the company has taken a leading role in offering cost management services to healthcare organizations and medical purchasing groups. It's also why Allegiance turned to Dunn Solutions Group to ensure that their latest online offering dubbed the entelligenceTM information system was brought to market fast.

The entelligence system enables customers to take advantage of Allegiances vast data warehouse, which is built from the companys enterprise-wide SAP deployment. "We're very fortunate that the IT restructuring we did in the late 90s left us with a fully integrated, end-to-end ERP system," explains Allegiance business intelligence systems manager Mark Ciekutis. "That ensures that we can effectively collect all the information we need from every aspect of the business into a single, comprehensive data warehouse."

In addition to having created this powerful, highly flexible Oracle-based data warehouse, Ciekutis and his team had already rolled out access/querying tools for internal users based on e-business software leader Business Objects award-winning analysis tools. But to roll out an extranet Web application to customers and, potentially, other business partners Allegiance would need a browser-based solution. That meant using Business Objects new WebIntelligence software, which provides scalable, secure access to corporate data resources from standard desktop browsers.

Dunn Solutions Group joins the team

Ciekutis faced a couple of problems. For one thing, none of his internal staff was familiar with the WebIntelligence product. For another, most of his technical staff was already fully committed to existing projects. On top of that, he was up against a pretty tight deadline. "I had to get this up and running in just three months," he recalls. "That just wasn’t enough time to free my developers from existing projects to get them up to speed on the SDK and then execute the project."

One of the reasons that the entelligence project was going to require real familiarity with WebIntelligence was that Allegiance needed to preserve the look-and-feel of the overall cardinal.com e-business site. "It's very important to our corporate branding strategy to seamlessly integrate all of our online offerings, in terms of both underlying functionality and visual presentation," notes Ciekutis. "In order to accomplish that with entelligence, we really need to get under the hood with WebIntelligence and modify the interface to comply with Cardinal/Allegiance standards."

With the clock ticking against him and a lack of available internal resource to get the job done on time, Ciekutis turned to Dunn Solutions Group. From previous projects, Ciekutis knew that Dunn already had experience and expertise in Data Warehousing and Business Objects products. And, since those earlier engagements had been successful, he felt confident that Dunn would come through for him again.

"Sometimes when you bring someone in from the outside, you dont get what you expect," Ciekutis admits. "But, with Dunn, we’ve always gotten what we’ve needed: people that will be productive from the start and professionally get the work done on time."

In fact, according to Ciekutis, he often got more than he expected from Dunn’s data warehousing specialists. "One of the things you really appreciate as an IT manager is when you send a consultant off to do something, and they come back with not only what you asked for, but also with some suggestions that they came up with as they did the work," says Ciekutis. "That's what we got from Dunn."

The company immediately sees increase in revenue and customer loyalty

In addition to making his three-month deadline with a fully functioning e-business site, Dunn is also now providing vital transfer-of-expertise on WebIntelligence to Allegiance staff members who Ciekutis is now able to move to the entelligence team. "We've worked with Dunn Solutions Group like this in the past, and its’ always been a very valuable part of the engagement to us," he notes. "Especially since we see WebIntelligence as a strategic tool for us over the long term."

The bottom line? Allegiance brought a new e-business site to market quickly and is well positioned to further leverage its existing information assets to capture market share and increase sales to its existing customer base. "We definitely got our moneys worth from Dunn Solutions Group," Ciekutis declares. "And were looking forward to continuing to work with them as we extend our e-business strategy."