CoreTech’s Client-Centric Business Model Plays Key Role In Helping Ceridian Performance Partners Serve Customers Better	Industry Human Resources

Highly customized Business Intelligence solution enables Ceridian to meet deadlines and deliver quality reporting

When a company can not provide its customers with key deliverables, something fundamental needs to change in the way it does business – or it may not be in business much longer.

Ceridian Performance Partners, a business unit of the Ceridian Corporation, is a leading provider of workplace effectiveness services and training. The company offers businesses, managers and employees a full range of services, including employee assistance programs, in-house legal and financial counseling , elder care and child care resources and referrals, and expatriate services. Users can access consultants and services online, by phone or in person and receive informational materials electronically, by fax or mail, and on audio or video media. More than 4 million employees currently have access to Ceridian Performance Partners’ services.

One of the basic components of Ceridian’s service on behalf of customers is providing regular usage reports. These reports show companies how their employees are using Ceridian’s services and break down usage in a variety of ways, including age, gender and service type. This information is particularly critical to Ceridian’s sales representatives, who must demonstrate the value of Ceridian’s services and assure that customers renew their subscriptions.

Business Growth Brings New Challenges
Ceridian merged with another company, increasing its client base to an impressive 6,000+ active customers. While this growth brought welcome additions to Ceridian’s service offerings and revenue stream, the company’s information technology infrastructure was not up to the task of supporting the additional reporting requirements.

Up until this time, Ceridian was using a Microsoft Access 2.0 database to store all of its customers’ usage data and generate the requisite reports. After the merger, the inadequacies of the system became even more pronounced. Reports contained inaccurate or missing data, turn-around time was unacceptably slow, and the visual presentation left much to be desired.

When Ron Sindaco came on board as Ceridian Performance Partners’ Vice President of Information Technology, he recognized that the reporting function needed significant improvements but that the company’s internal staff did not possess the resources or the talent to accomplish this task.

In the spring of 1998, at Sindaco’s recommendation, Ceridian enlisted the services of CoreTech Consulting Group to assess its situation and offer an effective Business Intelligence solution. By early that fall, CoreTech was installing custom software, and the system went into full production in early 1999.

The Business Intelligence Corporate Advantage
At CoreTech, Business Intelligence is broadly defined as the process of leveraging data to support quality business decisions. This process includes four components: 1) Corporate Goals - identifying the strategic and tactical goals of the corporation, 2) Critical Success Factors - determining the critical success factors used to measure the achievement of those goals, 3) Data Management - defining the data elements required to support the analysis of the critical success factors, and developing the technical infrastructure to collect, cleanse, reformat, consolidate and store the required data, and 4) Information Delivery - developing the reports to present the results of the analysis of the critical success factors to the end-users.

In Ceridian’s case, usage reports are critical to successfully meeting the company’s ultimate business objectives. CoreTech understood that any effective solution would need to do more than simply store data. It would have to allow that data to be easily accessed, manipulated, analyzed and presented to support Ceridian’s tactical and strategic goals.

"When it comes to Business Intelligence, CoreTech has the most knowledgeable, professional crew around," said Sindaco. "They don’t waste time making excuses or pointing fingers. They really want to get the job done and get it done right."

For Ceridian’s Business Intelligence solution, CoreTech created a custom reporting environment using tools from Arden, Sybase and Cognos. The project posed various technical challenges along the way, and external forces radically altered the course of action followed. One major factor that influenced the project’s evolution was that the CoreTech team was employing new technologies, including a Release 1 version from Sybase selected by Ceridian, and combining these technologies in unprecedented ways. CoreTech’s IT consultants had to be ready to address the impact of using these new technologies in concert and incorporate the results as they went along.

Further complicating matters, at the same time that CoreTech was implementing these new technologies, one of the key vendors went through an internal reorganization that eliminated local product support personnel. Other vendors lacked the support staff to answer the complex needs presented by the Ceridian project. It was too late, however, to back away from products and systems in which the company had made significant financial investments and organizational commitments.

The Value of A True Partnership
Rather than be daunted by these obstacles, CoreTech stepped up its efforts and rose to the challenge. "CoreTech picked up the ball entirely and ran with it," recalled Sindaco.

"We would never leave a customer high and dry," explained CoreTech Business Intelligence Practice Specialist Alan Hall. "We were going to be in there until the end, until everything was in excellent shape."

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