Business Situation
Fresenius Medical Care would receive information from its worldwide operations from a variety of disparate systems in many formats. This meant that this business-critical information was not readily available to management in a timely and usable fashion. The company needed to create a Business Intelligence platform, which would allow information that would come from across EMEA and Latin America to be fully integrated and which would then make that information available in a structured way to the Management Team.

Working with Avanade, Fresenius Medical Care EMEA & LA developed a solution which facilitates the analysis and searching of data related to worldwide:

• Sales
• Stock levels
• Business indicators (example: scope of inventory)

The solution is also scoped to support the reporting of a broad range of company business information as users get more familiar with the functionality available to them.

The solution is made up of the following components:

• Tools for the extraction, transformation and loading of data coming from disparate systems and databases and Business Intelligence Systems (Microsoft SQL Server Data Transformation Services)
• A relational database for the archiving of consolidated data to support analysis activities (Microsoft SQL Server)
• An OLAP Engine (Online Analytical Processing) which facilitates extremely fast interactive analysis (Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services)
• Tools for the creation of an advanced reporting system (Microsoft SQL Reporting Services)
• Applications and desktop technologies to support analysis and data manipulation (Microsoft Office System, Excel 2003 ProClarity Analytics Dashboard Viewer and Web Viewer).

The creation of the Business Intelligence platform is the first step towards the creation of a technological/application infrastructure capable of accommodating the future integration and information needs of the Group . The solution also resulted in:

• Better return on the information, data and IT investments that the company had made in terms of improved company performance.
• Standardization of information coming from disparate sources facilitating comparison and analysis
• Enhanced and advanced reporting capabilities resulting in more timely information to management
• A single group-wide information analysis interface.