Siemens Molecular Imaging
PROBLEM
CTI needed to improve and replace many of its IT systems to keep up with its rapid growth and provide users with a high level of service. CTI’s IT department serves employees around the world who need to access data locked in the Oracle Applications’ database. These business users typically asked IT for reports on order management and units shipped so they could make timely, data-driven business decisions.
After implementing Oracle 11i in one of its pharmaceutical subsidiaries, CTI decided it needed an immediate solution to get business data out of Oracle. Due to the fast pace of company growth (50 percent per year), the pressure was on to find an out-of-the-box solution for extracting the data out of Oracle. “Development resources were scarce, and we needed a way to put report generation into the users’ hands,” said Project Manager Troy Staton.
The Director of IT Technology and Services, Walter Cromer, tasked Staton to find a solution that would meet CTI’s requirements. CTI did not have the time to employ an “army of developers,” and Cromer wanted a solution that would be ready to go “off the bat.”
SOLUTION
Noetix was the only solution CTI found that could immediately integrate with Oracle 11i and allow CTI’s business users to access data and create reports. After witnessing the Noetix demo and evaluation copy, Staton was impressed by the extreme ease of use and seamless integration with Microsoft Excel. No other solution that was evaluated included a comprehensive set of application database views—customized to CTI’s unique configuration of Oracle Applications—out of the box. “Other tools would have required us to create and build those views and then maintain them, which is quite a task,” Cromer said.
Although there was minimal time for CTI to prepare for the Noetix integration, the IT department was able to hand it off quickly to the pharmaceutical unit’s 30 business users with minimal required training. Because Noetix enables users to export reports into Excel, business users can take advantage of familiar Excel features and functionality.
In less than a week, CTI’s business users were generating their own reports without the help of IT. Cromer was then able to deploy his IT developers to other mission-critical tasks within the company. “With Noetix, our business users are able to get information out of Oracle Applications without involving the IT organization,” Cromer said.
RESULT
Today, Noetix handles the majority of CTI’s pharmaceuticals unit’s business user report requests, eliminating the time business users need to wait for IT to deliver those reports. Noetix enables users to access information in real time so they can communicate crucial information to customers about amounts of pharmaceuticals shipped and estimated time and date of arrival. CTI has several other manufacturing and service organizations that will be using Oracle and Noetix later this year.
Noetix has significantly reduced the need for IT to constantly develop and modify reports. Cromer notes that, “Noetix will deliver more information to line of business personnel and managers than our team could have ever done alone.”
