Customer Success Stories _____________________________________________________________

Companies Increase Application ROI with Teleran

Allstate Insurance Speeds Business Analysis with Teleran           Corporate Express Slashes Costs and Drives Up Business Productivity       JPMorgan Chase Uses Teleran to Accelerate Marketing Campaigns           Merrill Lynch Selects Teleran to Improve Data Warehouse Performance           MetLife IT Gets Closer to the Business With Teleran       US Army Improves Recruiting Process with Teleran             Wells Fargo Leverages Teleran to Improve Consumer Marketing Campaigns       Back to top     Allstate Insurance Speeds Business Analysis with Teleran   Allstate is the nation’s largest publicly held personal lines insurer. The company provides insurance products to more than 14 million households and has approximately 13,000 exclusive agents in the U.S. and Canada. Allstate Insurance division’s customer base and profitability were being challenged by Internet-driven commoditization of the insurance industry. The Insurance division is using Teleran iSight to optimize business users’ analysis of customer household premium and claims information allowing them to better cross-sell and improve customer retention rates. Based on the Insurance division’s success with Teleran, three other groups within Allstate, Encompass Insurance Group (CNA Insurance), Allstate Life Group, and Finance have licensed Teleran iSight with plans for implementing iGuard as well. "I’ve learned more about the business use of our data warehouse from Teleran in two weeks than I knew about the system in the previous six months in my job." Craig Kovar, manager data warehousing Allstate Insurance Allstate Challenge To meet market pressures Allstate needed to better leverage their customer and claims data. Allstate IT was tasked with creating a large enterprise data warehouse to support a broad range of analytical applications such as: product profitability, customer profiling, cross-selling, pricing analysis and market segmentation studies. The Allstate enterprise warehouse started out with just 30 users initially, but rapidly expanded to include many departments as well as field agents. With this initial success, it was clear that the warehouse user community was going to expand into the 1000’s.    Allstate IT realized they needed to address several key challenges:  Maintain performance and service levels as user numbers dramatically increase Better understand and manage changing usage patterns across a wide range of user groups Control support costs as user numbers grew Document how business units were using the data warehouse to confirm groups were leveraging the data warehouse as expected Teleran Solution and Benefits iSight usage profiling has helped Allstate IT to support over 3000 enterprise data warehouse users while maintaining expected performance levels. Allstate has been using iSight service level reports to track overall performance trends by user group. This enables IT to tackle negative performance trends before they affected the user community.   Teleran Value to the Business Provide the appropriate performance and availability of business critical applications Speed business analysis to meet aggressive business objectives Assist in integration of "stovepipe" data to improve cross-sell and cross-channel analysis Document and improve the information value to the business Teleran Value to IT Reduce user support costs and improve IT staff productivity Alert and speed IT’s reaction to changing business conditions to keep applications relevant and valuable to the business Document IT infrastructure’s contribution to the business Integrating iSight into Ongoing Support and Maintenance Processes Allstate engaged Teleran Professional Services to assist them in accelerating the value Allstate is getting from iSight. In a two week process, Teleran helped Allstate integrate the use of iSight usage reporting into the various IT groups ongoing support and maintenance processes so that each group can better understand the service demands of their growing user communities.   Technical Environment Database: Oracle 9x Server hardware: Sun E15000 Client applications: Business Objects, MS Access   Back to top     Corporate Express Slashes Costs and Drives Up Business Productivity with Teleran   As a leading world-wide distributor of office furniture and supplies, Corporate Express must beat the competition with continuous improvements in merchandizing and ever more efficient logistics. Corporate Express purchased Teleran iSight and iGuard to improve the effectiveness of merchandizing and logistics analyses. The Company customer delivery policy is to guarantee the right merchandize gets delivered within 24 hours. So speed and accuracy are essential. Teleran’s software automates performance and service level management of these critical analytical applications so that Corporate Express can stay ahead of the competition and maintain customer satisfaction. "Teleran offers us an intelligent approach to managing our users and business intelligence applications."  Matt Pohl, Data Warehouse Director Corporate Express Corporate Express Challenge After consolidating databases on Sun E10000 servers, Corporate Express still needed to understand and resolve performance bottlenecks in its 600 users enterprise data warehouse. The data warehouse was supporting critical analyses of the core business departments: Sales, Merchandising, Marketing, Purchasing, Inventory Management and Accounts Receivable. Since the data warehouse is slated to support thousands of users, IT needed to quickly establish a process to ensure the new warehouse platform performed within specified service levels while at the same time managing the rapid growth in users.   Teleran Solution and Benefits Teleran’s iSight profiling has enabled Corporate Express to improve their load-time window service level agreement (SLA) by 66%. Corporate Express’ SLA for availability requires that the data warehouse be up and running by 7:00AM each morning. Prior to Teleran they often did not complete their nightly data load process until 8:30AM. Reducing availability by 1 ½ hours each day had significant negative impact on the productivity of business departments around the world. iSight usage reports enabled IT to identify and reduce the amount of unused information (dormant data) in tables and columns that was being refreshed in the data warehouse as well as reduce little used indexes. As a result, the load time window was reduced to well within the 7:00 am agreement deadline. "Teleran’s user communications capability helps business users be more efficient and smarter in their use of information. And, iSight application usage reporting provides us with very tangible information that enables us to negotiate more favorable contracts with application vendors and reduce support costs."  Matt Pohl, Data Warehouse Director Corporate Express Technical Environment Database: Oracle 9x Server hardware Sun E 15000 Client applications: Cognos, MS Access   Back to top     JPMorgan Chase Uses Teleran to Accelerate Marketing Campaigns   JPMorgan Chase is a leading global financial services firm with assets of $741 billion and 30 million consumer customers. JPMorgan Chase Consumer Credit group develops and markets the bank’s consumer credit products including mortgages, equity lines of credit, auto loans, as well as credit and debit cards. The Consumer Credit group licensed Teleran iSight and iGuard to help them better support and accelerate their marketing analysts’ customer profitability and direct marketing campaign analyses. The bank has been able to improve direct marketing returns through faster more effective campaigns.   JPMorgan Chase Challenge The bank needed to leverage their consumer credit customer information more effectively to increase cross selling, reduce risk and improve profitability in the highly competitive consumer credit market. The JPMorgan Chase Retail Bank data warehouse is expected to grow significantly over the next several years to support many hundreds of users across bank divisions. The IT group’s challenge was to manage access to this critical bank asset to meet specific business objectives. "We required warehouse management facilities to help us to operate the data warehouse as a service business within the bank. We must understand what information is important to our customers."   "As IT professionals we need to know what our customers are thinking and doing with the information to be able to continue to provide value to the business. With Teleran's help, we can assure that our data warehouse is a critical business asset that drives bank revenue and profitability."  Harvey Berger, VP, National Consumer Services Teleran Solution and Benefits Teleran helps JPMorgan Chase IT manage its user community and drive up the business value and return on investment of the data warehouse. iSight usage monitoring assists IT in delivering the right information is being delivered quickly. This ensures the timeliness and accuracy of the mission-critical analyses and makes its knowledge workers more productive. iGuard query controls and user guidance blocks inappropriate queries that had prior to Teleran tied up system resources and frustrated users. iGuard messaging is used to guide users to create more efficient and effective queries, reducing help desk calls and improving user productivity.    The addition of Teleran to its data warehouse has enabled the bank to document and prove its data warehouse value quickly, adapt to changing requirements, reduce administrative costs and maintain user satisfaction. Teleran helps Chase IT staff: Monitor and manage the rapidly growing data warehouse to better understand and quickly meet the business demands of the users Maintain performance as user queries change Expand warehouse service across bank operating groups while controlling IT support costs Maintain warehouse performance as users increase and data volume expands Minimize effects of poorly structured queries to maintain high availability and performance Increase data warehouse availability by shrinking load time windows via iGuard policies "The key factors in our decision to select Teleran were that their value proposition met our specific business requirements, they are a close partner with Sun and they have excellent customer support."   "With the bank's growth plans and its management focus on realizing data warehouse business benefits, Teleran is a "must have" element of our data warehouse implementation strategy." Harvey Berger, VP, National Consumer Services Technical Environment Database: Oracle 9X  Server hardware: Sun E15000 Client applications: SAS, Cognos, Business Objects, MS Access   Back to top     Merrill Lynch Selects Teleran to Speed Data Warehouse Performance   Merrill Lynch is one of the world's leading financial management and advisory companies, with offices in 37 countries and client assets of approximately $1.4 trillion. Merrill Lynch Private Clients Group sells financial services to over 11 million high net worth individuals world-wide. Teleran’s software ensures that critical customer-focused analytical applications meet Merrill Lynch’s key business objectives of satisfying and retaining customers and growing the business. "To effectively manage this critical resource, it is essential for us to understand who is using it, when, and how. With iSight, we are better equipped to meet business objectives by delivering the appropriate data in the right way."   "As our user community grows, iGuard policies have enabled us to guide and support more people at a reduced cost, maximizing the business value of our applications."  Joe Pomerantz, first vice president of global data management Merrill Lynch Merrill Lynch Challenge Private Client applications are supported by the "Midas" data warehouse and include customer segmentation and profitability analysis, cross-selling as well as product-oriented analyses. Midas supports almost 2000 business users across departments including Marketing, Market Research, Sales, Compliance, Accounting and Audit, Operations and Customer Service. The challenge Merrill Lynch faced as the number of business people accessing Midas rapidly expanded was to maintain and improve the availability, performance and effectiveness of this business-critical system.   The support demands of many new users required additional management facilities that Merrill Lynch tried to develop in-house. However, this system proved to be expensive to maintain and in the words of John Crawford, VP Business Applications, "only delivered value to IT not the business users." In addition they needed a system that could also actively manage users who do not have an in-depth knowledge of the database as well as a chargeback back mechanism to provide actual resource usage statistics to support their complex budget justification process.   Teleran Solution and Benefits iSight usage monitoring provides Merrill Lynch quantitative information about what people use what data and when. From this IT support organizations can understand how Midas is performing and can redesign the database tables to perform better and deliver the right kind of information. In addition, IT uses iSight information to prioritize business intelligence development and maintenance projects.   iGuard query controls and user guidance are used to guide users who don’t have in-depth knowledge of the database, improving ease of use and keeping users from accessing information they do not need to access and to provide meaningful messages directly to users tailored to their specific issues rather than cryptic system messages.   Teleran’s value to Merrill business users is clear: applications perform better and business-critical information is more accurate and timely. This enables the Private Clients’ group to better understand and sell to their large customer base, increasing revenue, profits and customer satisfaction. Teleran enables Merrill Lynch to understand, track and proactively react to changing business user demands.   Technical Environment Database: DB2 UDB 8x Server hardware: IBM SP2 parallel systems Client applications: Hummingbird GQL, Cognos PowerPlay and Impromptu, MS Access, SAS   Back to top     MetLife IT Gets Closer to the Business with Teleran   MetLife demutualized and became a publicly traded company in early 2000 to compete more effectively in the new financial services market. MetLife purchased Teleran’s software suite to ensure their customer focused business intelligence applications meet their business objectives of increasing cross-selling to existing customers and gaining new customers.  "Teleran iSight is our ‘eyes and ears’ to understand and optimize how our business users are leveraging our information." Bob Sickenger, IT project lead MetLife  MetLife Auto & Home Challenge Going public forced MetLife to streamline operations, improve processes, reduce administrative costs and grow profitably. The Auto and Home Division’s challenges were to focus on customer relationships, increase the lifetime value of customer, reduce risk and improve service in an increasingly competitive market. Home & Auto’s strategy to meet these challenges was to leverage information and technology.   IT developed a data warehouse to support applications including householding analyses, customer profitability and campaign analysis as well as cross selling. IT’s challenge was to service a growing set of demanding business users with a very limited number of IT staff.   Teleran Solution and Benefits MetLife Home & Auto group licensed Teleran iSight and iGuard to profile and manage MetLife actuaries, underwriters and financial analysts use of premium and loss information. Teleran’s iGuard protective features will enable MetLife to expand the data warehouse significantly as they open their applications to hundreds of claims adjusters and field agents.   Teleran delivers the following benefits to MetLife Increased staff productivity  Providing IT staff daily reports to help continuously adjust and improve query performance Keeping lower priority users from impacting the performance of high priority business users Meeting service level agreements through improved understanding of users patterns Improving overall system performance and availability by implementing user policies to prevent inappropriate queries from slowing down the system Technical Environment Database: IBM UDB 8x Server hardware: IBM SP2 parallel system Client applications: Brio, Cognos Impromptu, and MS Access   Back to top     US Army Improves Recruiting Process with Teleran   Because of recent world events the Army recruiting process has become even more important to maintaining the preparedness of its more than 480,000 soldiers worldwide. To sustain this level of staffing, the US Army Recruiting Command (USAREC), located at Fort Knox, Kentucky, provides the command, control and staff support to over 8000 Army recruiters in 1655 recruiting offices across the US. USAREC developed the Army Recruiting Information Service (ARIS) to create, measure and improve the effectiveness of the US Army recruiting process.   The ARIS project is managed by the Chief of Web Applications and Technology for the US Army, and is supported by 500 analysts who have access to and analyze current recruiting campaigns, demographic data, field office reports and personnel records to improve recruiting programs across the country. Effective recruiting profiles and programs are distributed to the 800 Army recruiting offices around the US. A showcase federal agency web-based application, ARIS is viewed as a model for other DOD branches including the Navy, Air Force and Marines who plan to outsource their recruiting analysis to ARIS.   US Army Challenges Government agencies like the US Army are increasingly working in data intensive environments. Ensuring that the right information is used to enable Army personnel to make fast and informed decisions and to better to achieve their recruiting objectives was critical. In addition, as more information was made available to more people within the agency, effective access controls needed to be put in place to ensure that personal data is protected and privacy policies are enforced. Other challenges USEREC faced included A large number of users creating unpredictable ad hoc database queries that slowed overall performance of the application Power users needed to launch long running, complex database queries that slowed performance and reduced system availability for all users The need to maintain performance service levels and meet project objectives as more users and data were are added to the system Secure system from access from unauthorized applications within DOD Increase hardware efficiency to control costs Teleran Solution and Benefits The US Army, working with Northrop Grumman’s Information Technology division, a Teleran partner and reseller of Teleran products, selected iSight data usage monitoring to audit all recruiters’ interaction with the ARIS database that contains all the Web portal data. iSight usage metrics are used to ensure that data privacy policies are met as well as to maintain system performance by identifying system bottlenecks. iGuard policy-based user controls and real-time messaging enforces data privacy, protects the system from inappropriate, resource consuming queries and guides users while they interact with recruiting information. iGuard improved the productivity of Army recruiters across the country while reducing help desk calls and IT support costs. Other benefits Teleran delivered include Improved recruiting application service levels Streamlined database performance tuning Enhanced information security/privacy auditing and enforcement Increased server and storage hardware efficiency Decreased total cost of ownership Technical Environment Database: Oracle 9x Server Hardware: Sun E15000 Client Application: BrioPortal   Back to top     Wells Fargo Leverages Teleran to Improve Consumer Marketing Campaigns   In 1852 Henry Wells and William G. Fargo founded Wells Fargo & Company to meet customers' express and banking business needs. Today with $315 billion in assets and 134,000 employees, the bank is one of the largest and most admired financial institutions in the world. Increasing competition in commercial banking has pressured Wells Fargo's margins and has intensified the need to maintain its rapid growth. The bank has invested significantly in developing business intelligence applications and data warehouses to aggressively compete in this market. Wells Fargo licensed Teleran to ensure that its critical analytical investments effectively increase the Bank’s profitability and growth. "Given the tightening state of the economy, we need to leverage software investments even more. Teleran helps us do just that." Bill Lee, Director IT Wells Fargo Wells Fargo Challenge To meet these business objectives, Wells Fargo Consumer Banking depends on the 600 person Business Modeling Group (BMG). BMG analyzes trends in the consumer data to better understand, segment and market to high value customers, as well as increase cross-selling to existing customers.    BMG’s 15+ terabyte marketing database contains a history of all the Consumer Bank’s transactions including customer transactions, house-holding information and syndicated demographic information. Wells Fargo IT needed to manage this large and ever increasing database and its growing user population while maintaining service levels in line with business demands. Because IT can not expand its staff at the same rate as the business demands, it needs to find ways to significantly increase its efficiency and productivity.   Teleran Solution and Benefits With Teleran the Bank IT staff has been able to support the rapid expansion of users and data with only 50% of the staff (10 professionals) typically required to support an application and user community of this size. This is an efficiency that translates into an annual savings of over $900,000 in staff cost avoidance (assuming fully loaded costs of $90,000 per IT staffer.)   Not only does Teleran deliver IT productivity benefits, but also brings tangible productivity enhancements to the BMG business users. Wells Fargo licensed iGuard to apply controls to new users to keep them from making common errors that reduce the effectiveness of more productive, more experienced analysts. The anticipated increase in business productivity of the 600 BMG group from these iGuard controls is significant, according to Bill Lee, Director of IT at Well Fargo.   Technical Environment Database: Oracle 9x Server hardware: Sun E15000 Client applications: Brio and Cognos   Back to top   *All company names and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.