Continental first adopted a data warehouse strategy to fuel its data management and reporting activities. Today it is a central repository for information from nearly 30 source systems across the enterprise.

One of the many areas of success Continental has experienced is in baggage management and identifying fraudulent lost baggage claims. Now Continental is testing the use of Wi-Fi and mobile PDAs to help baggage handlers better integrate their data. Continental reports that its multi-million dollar investment (whose ROI far exceeded 500 percent) in real-time business intelligence has reaped $500 million in increased revenues and cost savings over the last six years.

To stand out in the competitive Taiwanese financial market, Fubon Financial Holding Company needed a way to work across division lines to manage customers. "Like most markets, customers expect a lot and our competition is tough," C.F. Lin, Fubon's CRM project leader, told CRM Magazine. "Being able to stay ahead of our competitors and provide a superior level of service is paramount to achieving a leading position in the Taiwanese market."

The company worked to hone its CRM with a switch from product-based marketing to needs-based marketing. Consultant recommendations—combined with employee workshops and retraining—have led to response rates as high as 60%. Fubon estimates an overall ROI of 850%, with a 20% improvement in telemarketing conversion rates, 30% improvement in assets-under-management and three to five times more profitable leads. For this achievement, the company was awarded CRM Magazine's CRM Elite award for business analytics.

Harrah's, which began in Reno, Nev., 67 years ago, is the world's largest provider of branded casino entertainment. The company owns or manages more than 40 casinos in three countries, primarily under the Harrah's, Caesars and Horseshoe brand names. At the heart of Harrah's operational excellence is their data warehouse, a repository of customer, transaction and sales and marketing data that helps identify industry trends.

According to a recent Fortune article about technology ROI, "(Harrah's) has saved $20 million a year in overall costs while increasing same-store sales growth by 14%. It has used the clearer picture it now has of its customers' interests to create incentives. ...As a result, the number of customers playing at more than one of the company's properties has soared by 72%, increasing cross-market revenues from $113 million to $250 million in the first year."

Highmark

As one of the largest health insurance companies in the United States, Highmark found it needed ways to understand its cost drivers better so that it could hold the line on premium increases—thereby retaining customers, enhancing its competitive position and protecting its financial strength. However, the $8.1 billion non-profit company had three data warehouses running within the enterprise to support the business needs of individual organizations. Queries run through them often produced different and sometimes conflicting results.

To better integrate and leverage information, Highmark recently created what may be the first active enterprise data warehouse (EDW) in the healthcare insurance industry that captures claim information within one day of an event (such as an office visit or hospital discharge), as opposed to the traditional lag of three to six weeks found in most health insurer data warehouses. The new active EDW at Highmark enables near real-time analysis of business, clinical and operational opportunities, going beyond traditional retrospective analysis, automated event/trigger-based intelligent applications and more actionable member interventions. The new integrated EDW also enables the improved and more comprehensive controls necessary in today's HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley environment.

Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) is a comprehensive healthcare network headquartered in Nashville, Tenn., and holds the distinction of being one of the first hospital companies in America. According to HCA, 90% of inpatients gave high customer satisfaction scores in recent surveys, indicating they would return to an HCA hospital if they needed to be hospitalized again. HCA is composed of locally managed facilities that include approximately 191 hospitals and 82 outpatient surgery centers in 23 U.S. states as well as England and Switzerland.

Delivering high-quality healthcare bolstered by efficiency is no small task, as HCA can attest. Initially HCA was operating data marts on a variety of platforms for its business intelligence infrastructure, but sharing and blending data was complicated and time-consuming. So HCA opted to build a more efficient infrastructure. For its Enterprise Data Warehouse the company chose Teradata as one of the database platforms and added business intelligence tools for data management, analysis and reporting.

HCA's strategy for the data warehouse system was to begin with a single subject area—physician practice management data—and then expand the warehouse to include patient financials, supply chain, human resources and financial reporting data.

Since implementing its data warehouse solution, HCA has seen measurable improvements in payor reporting and analysis, speedier month-end reporting cycles and faster, easier access to information across the enterprise, allowing analysts to dig deeper than ever before.

The company has also been able to use information to refine its supply chain, resulting in a $15 million annual reduction in pharmaceutical purchasing costs, a $3 million to $4 million reduction in supply procurement costs and the ability to reduce inventory by $3 million in 2003.

As a result of their efforts HCA won Computerworld's 2005 Business Intelligence Perspectives "Best Practices in Business Intelligence" award in the category Creating a BI Vision and Strategies for Improved ROI. Known as the "Voice of IT Management," Computerworld offers this award to those organizations that have created a strategic vision for success, as well as strategies for implementing the BI vision, risk management and cost/benefit justification.

As noted in their award submission, HCA used their BI investment to drive bottom-line improvements such as reducing pharmaceutical purchasing and medical supply procurement costs, as well as decreasing inventory with anticipated reductions of up to 20 to 30 percent.

These savings only hint at the actual scale of ongoing process improvements. Recently, HCA reduced monthly revenue reporting cycles from four days to one, t he number of financial analysts dedicated to monthly closing went from eight to two and the number of analysts dedicated to quarterly closing went from 12 to four. These developments resulted in the company's capacity to analyze, understand and respond effectively to complex market developments.

With an e-commerce program and four distinct banners, Canadian retailer Hudson's Bay Company (Hbc) has strong support for its statement that it offers "everything Canadians need to live their lives." Ninety percent of Canadians shop at least one Hbc store. But that broad customer base and varied set of banners present a challenge to the 335-year-old company. As reported in Teradata Magazine earlier this year, the company began transitioning to a data warehouse platform in the late 1990s, in hopes of getting a better view of customer demand and activity. In 2003, the company began a shift to a single, enterprise-wide data warehouse. The company has quantified a 300% return on its initial investment, with reduced inventory requirements, lower labor costs and fewer lost sales during promotions.

Switzerland's telecom market is sophisticated, requiring disciplined marketing. Sunrise TDC Switzerland offers integrated solutions to residential and business customers and seeks to put the human touch back into telecommunications. But how do you communicate—and customize—that message when it takes 12-16 weeks to manually generate a single marketing campaign? Sunrise knew a change was in order. The resulting integrated CRM system offered improved customer data, more accurate segmentation and better campaign management. Now the company has an organization-wide CRM vision. Sunrise TDC Switzerland has achieved a 14% increase in cross-selling and up-selling take rates and a 70% increase in take rates among business customers, with churn decreasing by 30% to 80% in some cases.

Verizon Wireless

DM Review's online coverage of its 2005 awards program notes that Verizon Wireless was named a DM Review World Class Solution Award Winner in the category of business intelligence, stating, "Verizon Wireless wanted to implement the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) to be the foundation to support a 360-degree view of the customer, all 47.4 million of them. It would be the point of integration for historical and current data from all major customer touchpoints. The EDW would also integrate a wide variety of other types of data to serve as the foundation for performing revenue, value and usage analysis on customers, products, services and equipment ... With the help of the data warehouse, they are meeting the company's strategic goals of having the lowest churn rate in the industry, increasing revenue, lowering costs and improving profitability. An additional benefit is a reduction in the calls to customer service. ... The total current/ongoing BI/EDW applied value is conservatively over $100 million of business value." T