Leading Health Care Organization

Health-care organization which has an integrated health delivery system such as well-baby and prenatal care, immunizations, and screening diagnostics; hospital and medical services; and pharmacy services.

The company is using Concur a centrally managed Expense processing system.

Implement Cognos tools to build reports, analytical cubes and create alerts to provide management and employees with a total reporting solution.

	Reduce overall system complexity to control costs.
	Increased Back office efficiency.
	Increased processing efficiencies with web-based, self-service information availability.

	Windows 2000 Server
	Cognos PowerPlay
	MS-SQL Server 2000
	Cognos Impromptu
	Oracle
	IIS 5.0

Country/Region: USA
Audiences: General User

Executive Summary : The Company is America's largest not-for-profit health care organization, serving 8.1 million members in 9 states and the District of Columbia. An integrated health delivery system, the Company organizes and provides or coordinates members' care, including preventive care such as well-baby and prenatal care, immunizations, and screening diagnostics; hospital and medical services; and pharmacy services.

The company is using Concur a centrally managed Expense processing system. Associates submit travel/expense request to management. Management approves or rejects the request. Upon management approval, the planned expense is assigned a PTA (Pre-Trip Authorization number). Once the associate generates the expense, they post those expenses against the PTA number using a web based interface that would list all available expenses from the charge card and allow the associate to assign them to the expense report. The Associate then submits the expenses for reimbursement. A back office Audit process evaluates the expenses against the Company defined Policy to see that the expense meets the requirements. Once the expense report passes management approval and audit approval, it is approved for reimbursement. The reimbursement process will submit payment to the Credit card provider for all approved corporate card expenses; and all approved out-of-pocket expenses will be paid via the associate's payroll check. The company uses hosted service from Concur, and Concur provides the company with weekly output files, which are downloaded into an Oracle database at the client side. These tables can be accessed via the Cognos Report Net to generate back-office audit and management reports. Certain reports will be generated by directly accessing the databases using Cognos Report Studio. Ad hoc reporting requirements will be met using Cognos Query Studio, analysis would be done by creating expense data "cubes" using Cognos Power Play and publishing the cubes onto the same web site for users to use data for analysis.

The Nrit team's expertise with Cognos and Concur (T& E Solution) products was a major plus. The ability to coordinate with Cognos (as a Premium Certified Partner) was another critical factor in the company's decision process. Another plus was the importing of the pre-built Impromptu catalog directly into Cognos Framework Manager, the modeling tool used to create the Meta data layer. This was critical since it helped avoid substantial rework in terms creation of the joins, presentation layer etc. Nrit was asked to implement the following products for the project:

Cognos Report Net (For Enterprise wide Reporting using the intranet) Cognos Powerplay Enterprise Server (For multidimensional Analysis on the Web)

ReportNet offers comprehensive capabilities that will deliver on all enterprise-reporting requirements with a single solution. ReportNet provides unrivaled reporting coverage, meeting all the reporting needs within the organization. A single reporting solution to cover the spectrum of business to production reports. These include multi-object, multi-query, multi-page reports. Leveraging the capabilities the web, ReportNet enables creation of dynamic web reports, including Web embedded applications directly in the body of reports.

Nrit enabled the company to implement Cognos tools to build Financial and Metrics reports, analytical cubes and create alerts to provide management and employees with a total reporting solution. This enables the management to track, trend and analyze its travel and expense information across the various business units. The availability of this information enables the company to keep track of its expenses, allows for greater efficiency in processing expense reports, allows it to monitor compliance to company expense policies and also enables detection of fraudulent usage of company provided credit card.