PivotLink Puts Analysis Capabilities in the Hands of Users
Founded in 1890, The Bartell Drug Company is the oldest drugstore chain in the United States. Still family owned and operated, Bartell Drugs employs more than 1,600 people and has 56 retail stores in the Seattle area.
Challenge
The company’s existing on-premise business intelligence solution did not support real-time sales report generation. Every time a sales person wanted any kind of report on sales performance they would need to make a request through IT and then have to wait hours, if not days. Additionally, new HIPAA mandates required additional data that would mean costly upgrades to the existing system.
“A company of our size doesn’t have the IT resources to drain and business users don’t have the time to rely on IT for changes,” says Lisa Leonard, Vice President of IT for Bartell Drugs.
What Bartell Drugs needed was a busines intelligence solution that could:
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Generate reports using the data in existing systems, without requiring re-entry
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Give users across the extended organization access to reporting features, eliminating reliance on IT
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Provide a high-level of security and HIPAA compliance for pharmacy data
Solution
Bartell Drugs decided to look for a reporting solution that would be fast to implement and did not require a lot of IT support. The company was impressed with the PivotLink Business Intelligence Platform for its speed and ease of use.
“Our typical user is not technically sophisticated at all,” says Leonard. “PivotLink is very user-friendly and it is easy to get data in a format that can be analyzed and changed in a self-service fashion.”
Both staff and executives use PivotLink to generate reports specific to their needs. Power users are buyers in the merchandising department who use PivotLink on a daily basis. Buyers can look at various configurations of sales results for more than a half million pairings. For example, they can look at how advertised items sell before, during and after an ad is placed, and can compare results for different time periods and stores.
“Our buyers are trying to drive sales and PivotLink has become an important part of their daily tasks,” said Leonard.
For accounting, PivotLink has simplified a variety of tasks. “PivotLink is able to manage massive amounts of data,” said Samantha Baker, accounts receivable supervisor. “Insurance companies remit their payments in different ways – by patient, date or RX number, to name a few. Now we can sort the data in PivotLink in the same order that the payment came in, and we’re able to keep the data with the processing information, unchanged, as long as we need it.”
Accounting also uses PivotLink for research several times a day – to locate a patient by store or plan, and to determine how a prescription was billed, re-billed, and/or reversed. With PivotLink’s SAS 70 Type II certification, it is easier for the company to meet new HIPAA data documentation requirements.
“Before PivotLink we searched for a needle in a haystack of paperwork,” said Baker. “Now, with a couple of clicks, we know more about the prescription than we could ever know before.”
Results
For Bartell Drugs, sales analysis is quick, thorough, and completely in the hands of individual users. Reports that used to take as much as six hours can be generated in seconds. Users can easily modify basic reports to get exactly the information they need to analyze.
For the accounting department, PivotLink has liberated staff from the mounds of paperwork typically required by health insurance plans for prescription drugs. Not only can PivotLink retain all the data they need for reconciliation and research, they can find what they need in seconds, which saves Baker as much as three hours a day.
And acceptance among employees is high. “PivotLink is so straightforward people actually use it,” said Leonard.
Benefits
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Reduced reliance on IT department for report creation
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Ad-hoc reports generated in seconds rather than hours
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Integrated data from existing systems with no need for re-entry
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Achieved compliance with new HIPAA regulations
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Dramatically reduced in time needed for account research
