Empowering Antech Diagnostic team using OBIEE

Business Challenge VCA/Antech Diagnostics is the leading provider of pet health care services in the country with a nationwide clinical laboratory system and over 435 free-standing animal hospitals. In 2006, VCA/Antech Diagnostics had more than 4.9 million pet visits at VCA Animal Hospitals and provided clinical laboratory services to over 14,000 small animal hospitals nationwide. Together VCA Animal Hospitals and Antech Diagnostics provide excellence in veterinary medicine and diagnostics to a majority of our nation's pets. Their knowledge and service have earned them the trust and loyalty of a continually growing number of satisfied pet owners. Given the large volume of data being captured across the country by Antech Diagnostics’s labs and hospitals, the ability to organize, consolidate, and manipulate that data quickly and accurately is crucial to achieve the highest levels of diagnostic excellence. Slow and static reports, which were previously put in place using Oracle Reports to help provide information to lab technicians, have proven inadequate and slow. Users still have to perform manual calculations and steps to organize the static data produced in the reports. Updating the data in the data warehouse from the transaction system is tedious and time-consuming. In addition, users are dependent on IT for creation of new reports and variations of the ways data can be viewed. All of these challenges led Antech Diagnostics to investigate a more robust and powerful analysis tool.


Solution
Innowave Technology was interviewed in addition to other competing firms but ultimately Antech Diagnostics chose Innowave Technology for its creative solutions and innovative experience in the Southern California region. In less than a month, Innowave Technology and Antech Diagnostics implemented Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBI EE) in order to satisfy the ever-growing list of requirements and challenges facing the analysis of data. Antech Diagnostics purchased the OBIEE solution to help achieve higher levels of productivity and efficiency in daily tasks and address the inability to access adequate reports quickly. The features of OBIEE have removed the dependency on IT and empowered users to do their jobs quicker and with more intelligence at their fingertips. Antech Diagnostics had a business need to provide daily performance reports of all tests completed within its labs across the country to its lab managers. Previously, there was a traditional Oracle Reports solution in place for the development and presentation of this data. However, the sheer volume of data that needed to be analyzed (2 million records per day), the number of query parameters that needed to be supported, and the static nature of the output were all making the Oracle Reports solution ineffective. Innowave Technology’s strategy was to work with Antech Diagnostics to design a simplified data warehouse model solution based on the Snowflake schema already in place in order to leverage their existing investment. All query parameters were modeled as dimensions on the fact tables. A simplified ETL methodology was developed to load transactional data from the OLTP systems, allowing for efficient data loads in mere seconds that could be run each half-hour. Oracle’s OBIEE dashboards provided a flexible, parameter-driven dashboard to present the information in an organized, insightful manner.

Results
Innowave Technology achieved its goal of providing Antech Diagnostics a solution that satisfies their need to obtain the highest level of diagnostic excellence under the agreed upon timeline and budget. Innowave Technology’s OBI EE solution enabled the Antech Diagnostics users to achieve the following results:

• Save commonly-used parameters to streamline future analysis of data
• Drill-down within intuitive chart views of data and derive intelligence-at-a-glance which improved productivity by eliminating the need for any number crunching
• Create ad-hoc dashboard reports without a dependency on IT by selecting any of the pre-configured data elements provided in the dashboards and dragging them into the report
• Take advantage of caching and pre-aggregation features of Oracle BI Server to display complex reports in seconds instead of waiting for minutes with Oracle Reports
• Exceed the expectations for system performance by achieving just a thirty-minute lag time between the transaction system and the dashboard data!