Mercury Medical finds an easy way to generate reporting information across its five distinct divisions

Company overview
Established over 50 years ago, Mercury Medical is a comprehensive health care company specializing in anaesthesia, respiratory and critical care products and services. The company is headquartered in Clearwater, Florida and also operates a regional deport in Atlanta, Georgia. Mercury Medical is recognized for its excellence in manufacturing high quality medical products.

Mercury’s core business encompasses hospital sales, biomedical clinical services, emergency medical services and home care. It is also responsible for producing Mercury Medical manufactured products (MMP), and rental equipment, and offers medical gas certification.

Challenges
With five distinct company divisions acting, in many respects, as separate businesses, Mercury Medical needed a way to easily generate reporting information across every division.

However, Mercury Medical’s previous reporting system was an antiquated combination of Excel spreadsheets and static ERP reports. When sales team members needed reports, they often had to ask customer service employees to generate them, usually on a monthly basis.

Mercury Medical wanted to empower more of its employees, particularly its sales team and higher management, with access to important data in the formats they needed. It wanted to be able to access data from any platform, and for reports to be generated automatically to save time and resources.

In addition, Mercury Medical needed its reporting solution to be cost- effective and user friendly, freeing its IT staff of three to concentrate on delivering business applications instead of troubleshooting.

Approach
Mercury Medical leveraged IBM Business Partner BlueNET Technologies’ experience and expertise to implement a solution tailored to its needs, in a timely fashion. The company decided to purchase IBM’s leading midmarket IBM Cognos Express platform and implemented a flexible, integrated and user-friendly solution perfectly suited for future application consolidation and business growth.

Benefits
Utilizing IBM Cognos Express, Mercury Medical moved from static/printed reports sent via post or e-mail to interactive web-based dashboards that can be customized by users.

The IBM Cognos Express implementation helped sales representatives to improve account management and to better understand buying trends, allowing them to gain further inroads into their accounts and to increase their sales.

The Cognos solution supports every distinct division of the company, and has empowered end users, including the sales force, with the ability to see exactly the data they want at any time, instead of waiting for customer service representatives to generate reports on a monthly basis.

After the solution implementation, the company saw impressive results within a couple of days, including many more people being able to immediately access the data and use the reports. Mercury Medical’s users can now take advantage of a more user-friendly solution, which gives them the ability to author reports once and to distribute them to all users, including mobile users.

The IBM solution has automated daily, weekly and monthly reporting with data that is available immediately, freeing customer service representatives and report generators to focus their energy on more important business matters.

IBM Business Partner BlueNET has provided training for employees, who can now develop and run customized reports in a matter of hours.

Leslie K. Freeman, Director of IT, Mercury Medical, says, “BlueNET initially gave us a demo applying IBM Cognos Express to our data, complete with user-friendly, interactive, and automated dashboards. Everyone was blown away by the innovativeness and low price point of IBM Cognos Express, and the technical expertise of BlueNET. We instantly knew this was the perfect solution for us, and it became just a matter of ‘how soon can we start?’”

About BlueNET Technologies
BlueNET Technologies Inc. is an end-to-end Information Technology (IT) solution provider offering a wide variety of services including Business Intelligence (BI), Business Process Management, Enterprise Integration, Multichannel Services, Financial Planning & Forecasting, Data Warehouse, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems development and implementation.

About IBM Business Analytics
IBM Business Analytics software delivers actionable insights decision-makers need to achieve better business performance. IBM offers a comprehensive, unified portfolio of business intelligence, predictive and advanced analytics, financial performance and strategy management, governance, risk and compliance and analytic applications.

With IBM software, companies can spot trends, patterns and anomalies, compare “what if” scenarios, predict potential threats and opportunities, identify and manage key business risks and plan, budget and forecast resources. With these deep analytic capabilities our customers around the world can better understand, anticipate and shape business outcomes.