A Business Intelligence, Data Services and Data Analytics company with strong SQL database development and IT expertise

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 Fool Me Twice...

 In early 2007, a mid-sized (1,100 phones) call center swapped out its phone system for a modern upgrade that saved the company vast sums of maintenance dollars. They also moved to a new, more functional location that also happened to knock down 33% of their rent. Great moves; the future looked bright…….for a while.
A Business Intelligence, Data Services and Data Analytics company with strong SQL database development and IT expertise

Do or die

In 2011, a Cancer and DNA pathology lab with gross revenues a bit over $50M, was losing money. There were certain clients that, for some types of cases, were no longer profitable. Finance was sure of that; but determining the profitable from the non-profitable transactions was nearly impossible.....nearly.

 Do or Die
 In 2011, a Cancer and DNA pathology lab with gross revenues a bit over $50M, was losing money. There were certain clients that, for some types of cases, were no longer profitable. Finance was sure of that; a good CFO can see this in transactions crossing his desk but, accounting for it is an entirely new complexity – especially for their type of business. Try telling an account executive his customers are losing the company money and you can expect demands for proof….there was no way to know with certainty. No way to prove this theory. They knew about how much the average medical analysis cost, in time and materials, but their accounting methods necessarily obfuscated details. As such, there was no way to assign costs to any particular suite of tests. Further, since the lab was managed via one software platform, and the business was run on several others, there was no practical way to correlate those different data sets in any way that would allow meaningful comparisons. This meant several Directors and the CFO would have to spend days each month effectively locked in a room until they could synthesize a reasonable estimate of costs at the end of each month and fiscal quarter. And it meant they were doomed to either bleed money, or make risky decisions based on gut-feelings, or simply start slashing product offerings until they “found themselves” profitable again. Enter INFORModal; we defined the problem, and to us it came down to an issue of data collection and data modeling. We spoke at length with leadership, built a conceptual model of the lab work-flow processes and identified gaps in their data collection processes. We worked with management to fill those gaps (data previously uncollected). Armed with the process workflow documents, we defined business entities, data sourcing for those, and an overall schema that captured all the information we would need to overcome the current challenge and more. Receiving, workflow, billing, reporting, diagnostic results, etc., were all modeled and assembled in a coherent framework that clearly illustrated how the business works and how revenue is generated – a Data Warehouse. Based on factors like currently owned technologies and platforms, they selected the Microsoft SQL 2008 product stack for us to work on. Starting with a small build-out of only one test type in a single department, we built a robust ETL process that ran nightly, updating the Data Warehouse. Validating at each step, we expanded this to encompass all important lab and business operations. We built an OLAP CUBE for reporting and self-service atop the Data Warehouse and connected several Finance clients via Excel. The results were staggering; monumental. Within hours, the finance folks used the new data structures, which are now fully and finely cost-aware, to identify exactly which combinations of client, insurer, and case type were actually losing money. It then took less than 5 weeks to negotiate new partnerships, update client agreements, and modify work-flow priorities to turn a fiscal quarter doomed for loss into a near break-even. The following quarter ended a 9 quarter losing trend – in the black! Total time to complete including turn-around : 122 working days with multiple techs and some overnights! Today, we maintain a relationship with this client; they engage us for an average (rolling 12 month average, as of 1/1/2016) of 7 hours / work week to maintain data structures, help with data challenges and publish an occasional report.

 

A Business Intelligence, Data Services and Data Analytics company with strong SQL database development and IT expertise
In early 2007, somewhere in FL, a mid-sized (1,100 phones) call center swapped out its phone system for a modern upgrade that saved the company vast sums of maintenance dollars. They also moved to a new, more functional location that also happened to knock down 33% of their rent. Great moves; the future looked bright…….for a while. It turned out that they’d been in their “old” building for 22 years; every entrance and exit had cameras on them. Inside the building, folks “knew” where you were headed when you went this way or that, from long experience. Not so in the “new” building; now, when employees went this way or that, no supervisor could be clear as to where they might be headed. It was also true that while the “old” phone system was outdated and expensive to maintain, there had been a decades’ long development of management and supervisory practices and oversight built specifically from elements of that old system and the data available from it. At this point, 4 primary facts converged to conspire against the company: 1. Call centers live or die by their call performance – if employees are on the phone, business happens and revenue is generated. The opposite is also true. 2. Call center employees tend to be at the low end of the employment spectrum; call center work is simultaneously dull and emotionally draining; as a result, there is a strong cheating influence in most call centers. 3. No one knew how to convert the “meaning” inherent in the old metrics to similar intent in the “new” phone system reports. Because of this, no one knew how to catch “cheaters” (employees not actually on calls). 4. Because the new phone system was not connected to the native Oracle base (transactional business DB), there was no correlation between business (accounting, payroll, sales) and phones. Within 2 weeks the “word” was out among the employees; they couldn’t be tracked. Hacks and tricks were developed to “fool” the system into showing an active status, while they were really not working. Sales metrics plunged 15% in those 2 weeks – folks were clearly not on the phone. And the trend was getting worse. Having just completed a payroll automation project for this company, INFORModal was asked to “see what we could do” to address these issues. So we looked.... We found all that would be required was to “map” old trapped behaviors given the new phone system’s available data. In the process of doing just that, we had to enable some connectivity between the Microsoft SQL based phone system (Cisco’s UCCE platform) database and the company’s Oracle system. In doing so, we discovered that all the data required to run a real-time management system right on the sales floor was now possible – something they never had before. We proposed this and got tentative approval to proceed with anything less than 100 hours of billed time. In 78 total billable hours, we built a real-time (max lag 15 seconds) system that not only locked down employee behaviors, it allowed floor supervisors to “see”, via a simple web interface, which employees were currently scheduled, which were working both on and off phone, and a color-coded status to represent varying states for each. In this way, floor supervisors could, for the first time, monitor their teams’ behaviors in real time, increasing profitability significantly. This is the kind of goodwill value we love at INFORModal; asking a handful of extra questions can lead to rewarding revelations. It pays to think “outside the box”.

Fool Me Twice

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A Business Intelligence, Data Services and Data Analytics company with strong SQL database development and IT expertise projects successfully.