QUANTIFIED MECHANIX : Twin Cities Business Intelligence

American Medical Systems, located in Minnetonka, Minnesota is the world's leading independent company focused on developing, manufacturing and marketing medical devices.

The Challenge:
AMS want to build an environment to allow Strategic Business Intelligence data mining using the core financial data obtained from multiple general ledgers. They also desired the delivery of critical financial data to decision makers in real time.

Bottom Line:
AMS gained significantly better report performance to deliver the right data to the right people at the right time—all accomplished while taking the load off critical operations.

A Study in Data and Development

AMS Goals

Quicker ad-hoc reporting for the business group report writers and analysts
Reduce performance impact to the current ERP database.
Data delivered for reporting without a team full of technical development resources.
Expanded availability of appropriate GL data to a broader group of decision-making resources.

Quantified Mechanix Strategy & Tactics

Centralize all AMS financial data and optimize for reporting.
ETL and automation processes for delivering disparate financial data to the datamart.
Single metadata layer to allow business groups to analyze and create reporting without IT personnel.
Security model including portal authentication, folder and report as well as data level security.
Base line framework and repeatable process to allow AMS technical staff to build future solutions.

The Comprehensive Solution

In concert with the AMS technical and business teams, Quantified Mechanix documented financial analysis and reporting requirements. We then created a data design based upon these requirements, which included data definitions, source target map, and metadata mapping. The team developed an ETL to load the datamart. This included automated data validation and notification for all interested parties. Next, Cognos Framework Manager was deployed to produce metadata and data level security. The team designed and developed financial reports using AMS’s requirements and industry standards (SOX). Finally, to ensure everyone at AMS was on the same page, Quantified Mechanix provided customized class room training using AMS data.

Cost-to-Payback Ratio is estimated to be 100% annually, based upon:

Decreased business labor to create necessary reporting
Decreased support from IT staff to create and develop necessary reporting.
Increased performance on existing ERP platform.
More timely decision making capability.

Additional Benefits:
Quantified Mechanix created executive-level dashboards for real time revenue, expense, and budget data in concise, easy-to-consume self-service graphs and charts—plus an additional capability to drill into the details pertinent to increased or decreased performance.