Harvard-Pilgrim ranks as one of the top U.S. health care companies. This data warehouse extracted and transformed the source data on an IBM ES 9000. The data warehouse resided in DB2 and was accessed by Cognos Impromptu.

Harvard Pilgrim was a highly challenging account. Previously they commissioned a “Big Five” consulting firm to build their decision support system. After spending 4 years and multiple millions of dollars the company still did not have a decision support system that met their needs. The result of this effort was the DSS architecture shown below (specific system names and subject areas have been removed for confidentiality reasons):

Harvard Pilgrim engaged EWSolutions to migrate this convoluted decision support system to an architected solution that could grow with their changing business needs. EWSolutions needed to migrate the decision support system presented above to an architected solution in a timeframe of 4 months (at this point funding was being stopped for DSS projects).

This project had an added complexity as a new CIO was hired right before the new DSS project began. Harvard Pilgrim was a Sybase shop that decided during this project to have a complete corporate shift from Sybase to DB2. During this time 60% IT staff turnover occurred. These two phenomena made this project even more complex. EWSolutions was responsible for managing multiple project teams and for setting the project’s vision and strategy. EWSolutions produced detailed project plans, scope documents, organized team members, and set project deliverables. The architecture below shows the systems that were completed (once again system names and subject areas have been concealed).

In addition, we provided all of the detailed planning and architecture for Harvard Pilgrim’s meta data repository. To further support this effort we standardized procedures across the various data warehousing projects to facilitate the development of the meta data repository. In addition, EWSolutions conducted a detailed evaluation of the tools that Harvard Pilgrim needed to build and support the repository. Lastly, EWSolutions mentored client management and key client personnel on the data warehouse development and meta data repository processes.

Client Testimonial

“What stands out most is *EWSolutions’* absolute concern for our needs. Previously we’ve hired several of the large consulting firms and they came in with their own preconceived notions on how we should run our company and with their own separate agenda. Unfortunately, this mindset led our company to less than favorable results. EWSolutions was very flexible in their approach and always kept our needs first priority.

EWSolutions did an exceptional job in helping us to launch our enterprise-wide decision support vision and strategy. Our project had additional levels of complexity since we had multiple project teams that had to work in concert, while we were experiencing a departmental reorganization and tremendous internal turnover. EWSolutions’ knowledge, breadth of skills, and versatility provided the support and mentoring which the data warehouse team needed in order to successfully implement their first iteration ahead of schedule. Solving business problems is very important to us and EWSolutions supported us in meeting that goal within a compressed timeframe. In a complex changing systems environment we were not looking for a cookie cutter approach, but rather someone who could advise us of the fundamentals needed in order to meet our business customers’ needs. *EWSolutions’* focus and concern for our requirements proved invaluable in helping us to construct a decision support system to leverage our information assets to attain a strategic advantage in the marketplace.”

Monica B. Cunningham, Director of Information Engineering

Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare