Prémalliance

Prémalliance—one of the leading social welfare providers in France—needed to modernize heterogeneous systems inherited from 4 different companies and make information available across the organization. Using Sybase technology, Prémalliance developed a powerful BI strategy which facilitated the transition to the new systems, while improving productivity and enforcing its customer-oriented approach.

Business Advantage

• The time required to create management reports was effectively reduced from two weeks to two days, and the manual processes to monitor beneficiaries has been replaced with an automatic system that provides necessary daily figures.

Key Benefits

• Delivers unified view of information from disparate sources
• Provides share and reuse of consistent information across the organization
• Increases time spent to analyse data instead of producing data
• Provides sophisticated management analysis
• Implemented in less than six months
• Reduces report times from two weeks to two days
• Reduces total cost of ownership

Sybase Technology

• Sybase IQ
• Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise

Industry

• Financial Services

Download the full success story in PDF format.

Bridging the Information Gap
Formed after several regional financial institutions merged, Prémalliance needed to migrate systems inherited from a wide range of departments operating in mixed, heterogeneous IT environments to a system that will facilitate the share and the reuse of information across the organization. The number of legacy systems and the associated data sources was a key challenge to simplify and streamline the access of information. It then needed to deliver that data as useful information across the organization. This posed a big challenge since Prémalliance has to build systems for its 4 key activities; pensions, income protection, health benefits and savings for more than two million people.

"Prémalliance used to have segregated, heterogeneous data-processing environments," said Bertrand Leseute, IT director at Prémalliance.  "We seized the opportunity offered by business intelligence to open up access to information and de-compartmentalize the company, in favor of a common customer-oriented approach."

To integrate data from across the organization, Prémalliance created a transversal BI competency center to select technologies and deliver solutions in line with client expectations and project calendar. "Looking at the transversal dimension of our project, we had to identify technologies able to cope with the processing power required to analyze millions of lines on healthcare consumption, while at the same time reducing the volume of data in our data warehouse, not to slow down application processes" added Bernard Ferrand.

The BI architecture includes an Operational Data Store (ODS) running on Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE). The ODS serves as an intermediate layer to collect and transform large volumes of source data. It also makes it possible to store the history of the data in a non-standard format.

With Sybase IQ and Business Objects, Prémalliance chose powerful data analytics software that could quickly deliver decision-ready information and reduce data volume for improved application performance. 

Easy Installation, Exceptional Performance
"Sybase lQ is easy to install, and we could see that it offered an undeniable level of performance," said Bernard Ferran, in charge of the back-office department at Prémalliance. "At the same time, its capacity to compress data is perfectly suited to our needs. Sybase IQ's flexibility enables the de-standardization of data to allow more efficient loading, the indexes can be overloaded, and with Business Objects, we achieve conclusive response times on substantial volumes."

Increased Efficiency and Productivity
With the Sybase-powered solution, Prémalliance simplifies access and aggregates data from a wide range of departments, allowing more time for analysis versus data production. About 100 users access the data in Sybase lQ through 150 standardized reports and 100 individual reports in the companywide system. 

The solution automates reporting of the management audit, monitors activity at the pension beneficiary level and tracks the number of files handled. It also serves to measure staff productivity, monitor the daily cash situation and ensure that procedures are followed.

Results: Efficiency, Access and Timely Decision-Making
The quality of work has significantly improved. In the case of contingency funding, some calculations previously required four people to manually retrieve the data, consolidate it into Microsoft Excel® spreadsheets, correct it and produce reports. Now, only three people are needed for the analysis.

The finance department has seen similar results. The effort to create various management reports was reduced from two weeks to two days. And the manual processes to monitor beneficiaries has been replaced with an automatic system that provides the necessary daily figures.

Leseute summarizes the solution's key success element: collaboration. "Close involvement by management enabled the development of a three-year strategic plan integrating the standardization of data-processing solutions at the group level and the creation of a decision-making support system across all departments," he said. "This is an excellent example of strategic collaboration between management and the IT department, leading to implementation in less than six months, as well as substantial economies of scale."