This post is a brief writeup about an OEM partner McKesson, one of US’s oldest and largest healthcare company who has managed to reel in revenues by embedding SAP BI solutions Web Intelligence and is really looking forward to to the new capabilities it will bring to drive user adoption. The complete SAP Insider article can be read here
At 175 years old, McKesson is the oldest and largest USA health care company (14th Forbes Fortune 500), distributing medications to over 40,000 locations, and servicing more than 70% of mid-large size hospitals with its information management systems. Since lives depend on accurate information, McKesson takes the management of its more than 100,000 daily orders shipped, involving over 1.5 million lines of data very seriously.
One McKesson business unit, the Revenue Management Solutions (RMS) division, found a way to turn that massive collection of data into actionable business intelligence (BI) for customers. By analyzing the collected data for trends, McKesson RMS also saw how it could improve its own business agility and better anticipate and react to changes. For the delivery mechanism, McKesson RMS selected SAP BusinessObjects solutions largely for the self-service capabilities that provide users with a feeling of ownership and serve their customers better.
The real IT challenge for McKesson RMS in developing this new customer-focused BI solution was to design a user interface that could access all of its back-end data and display the vital information in a format that healthcare professionals could easily digest. While the RMS division does not use SAP ERP on its back end, McKesson as a company largely runs SAP solutions in other parts of the business. So McKesson RMS chose to leverage SAP BusinessObjects solutions in developing the new product, McKesson Practice Focus™.
“SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence allows us to offer a self-service BI model to customers,” says Orthous, who co-authored a book on the solution.1 “Using McKesson Practice Focus, users can come into a secure portal and download more than 100 best-practice reports, or view their performance in areas such as denial codes or physician productivity in intuitive dashboards. In addition, users can change the reports if they want, so we’re not just creating and providing reports in a printed format.”
But the desire to make changes arises quickly after users get a taste of the standard reports. “The minute these customers start getting into that kind of data, they begin thinking about different ways of looking at it,” says Orthous. “SAP BusinessObjects solutions allow them to do that on their own. They can go in, change a report, and they can reuse that asset on an ongoing basis, which increases use. When you create and own a report, you use it more than if someone else creates it and forces you to use it.” Read the complete report here
