Metia CEP Life Sciences Firm Enhances Performance Management, Saves Millions with Microsoft BI

Microsoft Office System Customer Solution Case Study

Life Sciences Firm Enhances Performance Management, Saves Millions with Microsoft BI

Overview “Our Microsoft BI solution is having an explosive effect and Country or Region: United States, everyone wants to participate. With BI at our fingertips, we Canada Industry: Life Sciences obtain better and more accurate corporate information and

Customer Profile enable self-service.” Sysmex America, Inc. is a leading life Marilyn Richards, Director of Corporate IS and Technology, Sysmex sciences company specializing in clinical diagnostic equipment. The organization Managers at leading clinical diagnostics company Sysmex had is part of Sysmex Corporation of Japan. no easy way to access information from multiple data sources,

Business Situation including ERP and regulatory compliance software systems. Sysmex needed a comprehensive Previously, it used specialist consultants to create reports, and business intelligence solution to replace costly, manual reports and achieve a the backlog grew as managers waited for IT to code reports clear view of organizational performance. based on rigid, pre-defined specifications. To increase efficiency,

Solution Sysmex chose an innovative, cost-effective Business Intelligence With the help of Simplement, Sysmex solution based on Microsoft technology and Simplement Data adopted an end-to-end solution based on Microsoft Business Intelligence. Liberator™. Within a few months, the company developed over 40 key management reports, achieving a “single version of the Benefits Complete and accurate view of truth” and empowering managers with actionable information. organizational performance By choosing Microsoft over competing BI solutions, Sysmex has Self-service business intelligence Savings of $2 million on licensing, saved approximately $2 million on licensing, specialist consulting and development costs consulting, and development costs. Saved thousands of man hours through automation Situation To choose the BI solution that best met its A leader in the life sciences industry, needs, the firm evaluated competing Sysmex America, Inc. (Sysmex) delivers technologies from SAP, Microstrategy, IBM quality clinical diagnostic equipment and Microsoft. Criteria included ease of manufactured by Sysmex Corporation, its development; ease of use; interoperability Japanese parent. The worldwide with other systems; security; and affordable organization achieves annual revenues of licensing and consulting costs. “We also more than $1.5 billion, and has had double wanted to quickly create new reports based digit growth for the past several years. on multi-source data, distribute reports across the business in real time and give Sysmex had outgrown its existing reporting our people self-service BI,” states Richards. capabilities. To make sound business decisions and support continued growth, it Solution needed a high-functioning and Based on the evaluation, Sysmex chose a BI comprehensive business intelligence (BI) solution from Microsoft and independent solution that would be easy to use, cost- software vendor Simplement. Simplement’s effective, and provide a “single view of the flagship product, Simplement Data truth.” Liberator, makes data from SAP systems available in real-time in the Microsoft SQL Every functional area in the company has Server platform, allowing users to work significant analytical needs. SAP is the with the data in a familiar Microsoft firm’s chosen ERP system, and Sysmex environment. needed a way to access that system’s information freely on a real-time basis. The Microsoft solution was chosen because of its low cost, simplicity, and ease of use. Ideally, it wanted a BI solution that would In addition, new features and capabilities in also solve other data needs, such as Microsoft SharePoint 2010, such as enabling work flows, and eliminating Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for manual data consolidations. SharePoint 2010, and Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel, were particularly Sysmex wanted to reduce time spent on attractive to Richards and her team. consolidating monthly financial reports. “Different regional units would manually Having an existing Microsoft Enterprise extract and transform data, which headquarters Agreement also provided benefit. “The would then cut and paste manually,” says Microsoft BI solution is part of our license Marilyn Richards, Director of Corporate IS and and beautifully integrates with SharePoint Technology at Sysmex. collaboration and workflow tools,” says “It was a painful process and our staff spent Richards. many, many hours collecting the data from distributed sources and pasting it into By using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 large, unwieldy spreadsheets,” she adds. Enterprise with Simplement Data Liberator, Sysmex was able to solve key data and reporting challenges as well as enhance BI

24 across the business. Today, Sysmex into reports and share performance identifies the SAP data it needs for BI information with colleagues via the firm’s purposes and Simplement Data Liberator SharePoint intranet. Currently, more than makes it automatically and continually 150 employees will access performance available in SQL Server, eliminating the information via the new portal. need for batch extraction windows. SAP data is then integrated seamlessly with data To facilitate self-service reporting, Sysmex from other sources and natively consumed is deploying Microsoft SQL Server by familiar and powerful Microsoft BI tools. PowerPivot for SharePoint and Microsoft Sysmex ‘s IT team uses Microsoft SQL SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel. These Server 2008 Management Studio to technologies will allow Sysmex business create data views that currently feed over users to pull performance data directly 40 front-end reports, which are developed from the data views into SharePoint in SQL Server Reporting Services and Microsoft Excel, where they can slice and published using SharePoint. Data and dice them to understand performance views are the new fundamental unit of work trends and display results in reports and for IT departments focused on data workbooks. brokering and self-service BI. They are re- useable building blocks that can be PowerPivot gives Sysmex business users consumed by Microsoft SQL Server 2008 the power of cubes without waiting for the Reporting Services, Microsoft SQL Server IT team to build them in the traditional 2008 Analysis Services and PowerPivot to way. The Simplement tool automatically create reports and KPIs. transfers SAP’s security model to the Microsoft BI platform. This gives business Building on the data views, Richards’ team users access to self-service BI within the has quickly created critical management familiar Excel interface, while ensuring that reports and deployed them in SharePoint. IT retains overall control of data The reports incorporate top-level governance and security. “When business information such as profitability, cost of analysts see PowerPivot, they say it is all sales, inventory, and delivery times. “The they’ve ever wanted,” says Robert MacLean, new reports give us a complete and Principal at Simplement. “What makes it clear view of organizational business even more compelling is the fact that non- performance for the very first time,” says technical personnel can pick it up with no Richards. “We could never have achieved training whatsoever.” these results within just a few months if we had chosen another system,” she adds. Richards adds: “PowerPivot has made the Richards speaks from experience; she has vision of true, self-service reporting a reality implemented BI systems from a variety of for BI users.” vendors at a number of different firms. Benefits Sysmex managers now use intuitive tools With Microsoft BI, Sysmex is achieving its within SharePoint to quickly drill down primary objective of a single, accurate view of performance, from sales and costs to

34 servicing, compliance and pricing. The new more accurate corporate information and solution is also helping Sysmex increase enable self-service.” efficiency and productivity, enable pervasive and self-service BI, and achieve Cleaner business data dramatic operational cost savings. Because of the platform’s comprehensive reporting features, Sysmex has been able to “It’s unbelievable how much we’ve saved identify and resolve a number of latent with Microsoft BI compared to other data cleansing issues. “We didn’t expect the vendor choices” says Richards. “Add up solution to increase the accuracy of our licensing, specialist consultancy, and data,” says Richards. “However, this has development, and we’ve saved nearly $2 been an unexpected and very welcome million by choosing Microsoft.” benefit for us.”

Self-service and automation deliver Support for SharePoint workflows huge time savings Using real-time data from Simplement, Sysmex employees can view top-level Sysmex is supporting valuable SharePoint customized reports quickly and easily using workflows. “Now, when a purchase order is PowerPivot. This reduces development entered in SAP, a SharePoint workflow workloads for IT by thousands of hours per ensures that the right people are informed year, and allows IT to focus on adding value and approvals are obtained,” says Richards. in other ways. “Giving management and Once purchase orders are approved, staff real-time views of the business Microsoft BizTalk Server writes the results empowers them as professionals and frees back to SAP automatically, which delivers up time and manpower,” says Richards. significant time and cost savings.

In addition, the new solution has enabled Reduction of ongoing support costs Sysmex to replace the manual creation of Sysmex now creates accurate reports corporate financial reporting to the parent without the need for custom ABAP company using automated Microsoft BI development. “Building custom reports and reports. These are accurate and up-to-date, cubes around SAP data requires extensive eliminating manual extractions and data ABAP/BW development, which typically is manipulation. very costly for us,” says Richards. “By contrast, it’s incredibly quick and easy to Improved productivity and performance develop in the Microsoft BI environment, The availability of accurate performance and Microsoft developers are far more data is creating a stir at Sysmex with economical. This contributes to the increasing requests for new scorecards, significant ongoing savings we are reports and plans for a BI steering experiencing,” she explains. committee. “Our Microsoft BI solution is having an explosive effect and everyone wants to participate,” says Richards. “With BI at our fingertips, we obtain better and