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Irving Tyler is the chief information officer at IMS Health, the pharmaceutical market intelligence company, which had almost $2 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year. Tyler is responsible for developing management information capabilities and supporting IMS's business strategy.
Before joining IMS Health two years ago, Tyler was the CIO at Quaker Chemical. At the specialty chemical manufacturer, which recorded more than $500 million in revenue in its last four quarters, he used business intelligence to help the company manage its global operations.
In fact, Tyler says integrating business intelligence and analytics is the key to success.
Here he talks with CIOZone contributing editor Laton McCartney.
CIOZone: How did you first become aware of the value of business analytic solutions such as business intelligence at Quaker and how did you use them there in support of business processes there?
Tyler: My first role was as the director of finance and IT for Quaker's Americas region. Right before I came they had started an implementation of an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, and I soon discovered that technology was not able to deliver the insights needed to understand our business, which was in a state of change. So I started to study what best-in-class firms were doing to deliver more insights and discovered the concepts of data warehouses and business intelligence, which were brand new ideas.
We had used SAS (SAS Institute of Cary, N.C.) for some production quality analytics, and I decided to look at their tools to see if they could provide us with a broader analytical capability. I connected with SAS, and we built some fast prototypes of data warehouses and specialized multi-dimensional reports. They were highly successful, and it began our journey into using BI.
The key is that we were trying to look at our business in a number of new dimensions. We had the traditional regional perspective, but we were also trying to look at product lines and at product and customer profitability levels. Basic reporting could not provide what we needed. We needed to be able to take our transactional data and use it across multi-dimensional views and this is why BI was right for us.
CIOZone: How long was it before you began seeing results and what were they?
Tyler: We were able to gain quick success and discovered, for example, a number of product lines that we thought were profitable but in fact were not. We adjusted pricing and distribution approaches and in some cases changed the way we packaged our products. Later, as we moved into services the analysis was even more important.
CIOZone: Such as?
Tyler: Over time we continued to expand our use of BI. And as our firm moved toward a global business unit strategy we were able to provide highly insightful information to help manage this transformation. At that time we had over 15 different transaction systems around the world, and we used our BI platform as the common tool our business leaders relied on to make decisions and run the business across the enterprise. Without this approach we could not have supported the global transformation.
Over the years we also used this approach and platform to improve our margins, establish targeted pricing approaches, improve our management of raw materials and purchasing, etc. We even used the approach to help us manage our accounts receivable and improve cash flow. By the time I left Quaker, the use of BI was a daily effort in literally every part of our operations.
CIOZone: When you went over to IMS, that company was already a user of analytics. How did your experience at Quaker translate to IMS, and what changes have you initiated since your move?
Tyler: IMS is also a global enterprise and is in transformation to leverage its strengths globally. We are working now to deploy a common platform for advanced analytics to leverage our ERP and CRM (customer relationship management) systems. Similar to Quaker, our key efforts have been to get to a common set of global data warehouses and a common platform for reporting and analytics. We are in the middle of this effort and hope to complete it in 2008. IMS is a bigger firm (than Quaker) and is operating in more countries around the world.
CIOZone: When you embedded BI in all your business processes, how do you educate business unit heads as to the advantages of this and how to make the most of this? Do you email employees as you did at Quaker?
Tyler: You have the right point, i.e. you need to embed BI into business processes. This takes time and requires you to utilize a lot of different approaches. The key is to find the best way for people to use the information as part of their processes, i.e. so the use of BI becomes a normal activity. Something that SAS studied a few years ago showed that there are levels of maturity that any given firm might be at relative to BI. So you need to recognize this and adjust your effort accordingly.
CIOZone: You use Vignette Web solutions for managing content and unstructured information and other tools for managing structured data. How do you think this dual approach will play out both within IMS and other enterprises that are dealing with both structured and unstructured data?
Tyler: We use Vignette products for our knowledge management platform and for content management and are now working to use their portal platform for our intranet so we can integrate all of our enterprise applications. We use a combination of Microsoft SQL and Hyperion (now part of Oracle) for our DW (data warehouse) and management analytics at IMS and we also leverage SAP BW (Business Warehouse). I consider structured and unstructured data a part of BI. In the best situation, structured BI flows in a process through many channels where it is analyzed and utilized to assess business situations and make decisions, etc. and this added value information is moved through the process via unstructured BI tools like knowledge management and collaboration capabilities. We did this successfully at Quaker and we are working to employ the same approach here at IMS.
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