ASG-Safari.OLAP™: A Leading Healthcare Organization Becomes a Safer Place
Industry: Healthcare
Business Challenge
In early 2000, a leading healthcare organization embarked on an initiative to improve the methods used for tracking and providing Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) information to its facilities throughout the world.
EHS is an extensive worldwide function within the organization. This initiative is charged not only with protecting employees, but also with protecting the environment through its stated green initiatives. In addition to providing injury and illness statistics for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the EHS system also tracks the non-conformance log. Non-conformance issues are those in which injuries have occurred because procedures were not properly followed.
This organization needed an efficient and easy-to-use method for providing EHS information to its global facilities. The deployment and scalability issues of the former client/server application made global deployment exceptionally difficult.
The first attempt to address the challenge came in August 2001. The company launched a Web-based EHS application. Because it was Web-based, it eliminated the deployment and scalability issues encountered with the previous application. This solution was also significantly more powerful, providing extensive incident reporting, as well as audit and non-conformance information.
However, the power and the amount of information provided by this first attempt also posed a problem. It was critical to quickly and easily enable team members to obtain useful insight into the issues most important to their particular facility. The organization realized that this new EHS application, while powerful, had the potential for being unable to easily capture all of a user’s reporting requirements. Therefore, they evaluated a variety of methods for providing core data to its user community, while permitting them to customize their view of the data and evaluate what was most important to their facility. It was determined that a better, more useful solution was needed.
ASG Solution
This leading healthcare organization had previous experience with other custom software solutions, so they were familiar with the difficulty associated with capturing all stated requirements in the first pass, especially considering that the EHS application was a global solution with many stakeholders. When evaluating different types of solutions, they determined the tool must be powerful, easy to use, and reasonably priced. A variety of options were considered, including “traditional” reporting tools, Web- charting tools, and a variety of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) solutions.
Ultimately, ASG-Safari.OLAP™, with embedded Databeacon analytics and reporting capabilities, was selected because the solution provided the required comprehensive data analysis and could be easily integrated with the ASP-based EHS solution. Further, the solution was easy to deploy, easy to use, and was priced significantly lower than comparable applications. In addition to the bottom line price value, the overwhelming learning curve often associated with other solutions was avoided. Because ASG-Safari.OLAP was quickly deployed and there was no need for continued or repeated training, the cost savings extended to the overall implementation.
Measurable Results
ASG-Safari.OLAP was implemented over a four-month period by linking it to the ASP-based EHS system with a back-end SQL Server 2000 database. The user community, comprised of Facility EHS Managers, Business Division Managers, Region Managers, and VPs of Manufacturing, adapted to the new solution quickly. These users are responsible for reporting on aggregate data to show proof of improvements or to highlight opportunities for improvement.
Satisfied users have stated that ASG-Safari.OLAP provides interactive reports that are clear, more intuitive than previous solutions, and easier to analyze. Further, reports may be quickly updated when the underlying information or assumptions change. This is a major improvement from the former situation which required each data set be rebuilt from its foundation, rather than simply updating the data cube.
They publish a sustainability report on a regular basis that provides EHS-related information to various external organizations. ASG-Safari.OLAP crunches data from the underlying EHS system and provides the background analysis. In addition, information from ASG-Safari.OLAP is used internally as “lessons learned” for its 64 locations throughout the world. More than 370 users are currently utilizing ASG-Safari.OLAP as a strategic tool to analyze key EHS information.
Not only does this leading organization now possess increased capabilities for providing information that is more accurate, they are also realizing estimated annual savings of $20-$30k through its implementation of ASG-Safari.OLAP.
