Johannesburg, 27 Aug 2008
Progress Software has announced that International Healthcare Distributors (IHD) has chosen Progress EasyAsk software for operational business intelligence to improve its response to internal business and external customer queries.
Headquartered in Linbro Park, IHD is a provider of finished goods warehousing and fine distribution services for the healthcare industry. "Although we have had an active BI environment since 2001, we needed to respond to customer queries quicker," says Ian Bezuidenhout, information systems operations manager at IHD.
"While it remains an essential business tool, the standard BI reporting platform is not rapidly flexible enough to handle dynamic customer queries in a way that will help us to stay at the forefront of the pharmaceutical warehousing and distribution market.
"The healthcare industry undergoes constant change and shifting influence, largely due to an increase in regulations," says Bezuidenhout. "IHD strives to use the latest technological and methodological advances to meet these market challenges, from product batch tracking from manufacturers to end dispensers, temperature-controlled warehousing, stringent cold chain maintenance and an Internet-based ordering system called Futurewave."
"EasyAsk complements standard BI reporting tools and gives business users direct, quick and easy access to information," says Corey Springett, strategic business manager at Progress Software in South Africa.
Business people can ask natural language questions through a familiar and easy-to-use search box that hooks into multiple applications and platforms, from word processing and spreadsheet applications to any BI infrastructure."
IHD runs its standard BI tools with four BI developers, delivering 260 reports to 45 managers. Only 50 of these reports are frequently used. EasyAsk supplements these by adding rapid response to customer queries. Three specialists develop cubes for the BI environment.
"The people using EasyAsk have been excited to see the type of information they can quickly get from the system," says Bezuidenhout. "They can ask the system how many days to stock expiry, for example. Before using EasyAsk, business users had to rely on developers to write a report, run it and deliver the results to them. They could get standard reports that listed the stock expiry dates, but they would have to filter the reports. Now EasyAsk delivers the results that they're looking for immediately."
IHD is planning to expand the use of EasyAsk in the near future to access information across many different data sources and deliver results to a broader range of business users.
IHD recently launched its Client Zone initiative. The company aims to be the market leader in providing BI to its clients and users. EasyAsk will be an integral part of this initiative.
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