This Molecular Imaging company is a leading supplier of products and services for positron emission tomography (PET), a diagnostic imaging technology used in the detection and treatment of cancer, neurological disorders and cardiac disease. PET’s whole-body imaging capability helps physicians improve their ability to determine the location, extent and stage of cancer, neurological disorders and cardiac disease.
PROBLEM
They 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. The 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, they 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 the Project Manager.
The Director of IT Technology and Services tasked the Project Manager to find a solution that would meet their requirements. They did not have the time to employ an “army of developers,” and wanted a solution that would be ready to go “off the bat.”
SOLUTION
Noetix was the only solution they found that could immediately integrate with Oracle 11i and allow their business users to access data and create reports. After witnessing the Noetix demo and evaluation copy, the Program Manager 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 their 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,” the Director of IT Technology and Services said.
Although there was minimal time for them 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, their business users were generating their own reports without the help of IT. The Director of IT Technology and Services 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,” he said.
RESULT
Today, Noetix handles the majority of their 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. The company 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. The Director of IT Technology and Services notes that, “Noetix will deliver more information to line of business personnel and managers than our team could have ever done alone.”
