Semaphore Solution Flags Data for Execs

For more than five years, McKesson analysts have been distributing financial analysis and competitive information to 60 top executives throughout the United States each quarter. Until last month, these reports were paper-based, compiled manually by the company's internal staff from different sources.

McKesson, based here, has "a long history with Intel" as a customer, said John Amos, vice president of technology strategy at McKesson. That's why executives were interested when solution provider Semaphore Partners, BEA Systems and Intel approached the company about automating the process of collecting information and distributing the competitive analysis reports, Amos said.

The companies jointly presented a solution that would enable McKesson analysts to enter information into a system that automatically pulls appropriate data from different data sources, including McKesson's SAP ERP system and daily news feeds, and routes the data to a secure executive dashboard, said Greg Ovalle, vice president of business development at Semaphore. Executives could then access the dashboard through a portal using a desktop Web browser or remotely via Compaq iPaq wireless devices, he said.

With the paper-based system, executives couldn't always be sure they had the most current competitive analysis, Amos said. With the new solution, however, executives could have a "near-realtime view of our competition and how we compare to them," he said. In addition, Ovalle said the new solution "greatly cuts down on Excel-based spreadsheets and trips to Kinko's."

Semaphore built the solution using BEA's J2EE-based WebLogic app server and portal, as well as the BEA JRockit Java virtual machine, Intel Xeon processor-based servers and the iPaq devices, Ovalle said.

Ovalle said user experience was a key factor in the success of the solution. "We needed to make this user-friendly, so user adoption was a challenge that presented itself," he said. "A product with poor user experience leads to poor adoption and none of the hoped-for return on investment. All those ROI numbers people talk about at the beginning of a project are never realized unless you create the correct functionality and user experience."

Indeed, Amos said engineers on the project worked closely with employees who would be using the system to make sure they were satisfied with the finished product.

Ovalle said BEA's JRockit was a key factor in creating high-performance automation in the solution. BEA acquired JRockit when it bought Stockholm, Sweden-based Appeal Virtual Machines in February for the express purpose of making WebLogic more viable on Intel-based servers.

"Before JRockit, I don't think you could have done this [solution on Intel-based servers," Ovalle said. "Anyone that wanted to do this would have had to use Unix- or Linux-based servers. It's a non-evasive solution that can be used to leverage your existing Intel infrastructure."

Now that the solution is successfully saving time and money for McKesson, Ovalle said Semaphore and McKesson are "continually improving" the current solution and examining other opportunities at McKesson that can benefit from this same type of wireless and portal-based solution. "The positive outcome of this proof of concept has now become a catalyst for McKesson to identify other opportunities," Ovalle said.