Medtronic's Parallel Universes

Medtronic, a leading medical technology company that specializes indevices such as pacemakers, has been using BusinessObjects since 1994 to helpwith decision support. The company's headquarters are in Minneapolis, Minnesota,and it has more than 14,000 employees worldwide.

Medtronic has been selling medical devices for half a century and usingvarious Oracle databases to store several hundred gigabytes of information onevery implantable device the company sells. Approximately 275 Medtronicemployees use BusinessObjects to generate large reports in batch mode.

"Our shortest query takes about five minutes," said KumarKannankutty, Medtronic's business systems project manager. Kannankutty ispleased with BusinessObjects' new Document Agent because it lets employees routereports to other employees via email or over Medtronic's intranet. Kannankuttyexpects that increasing use of electronic reports will save a few trees byreplacing the 50-page printouts some analysts receive daily. Medtronic hasassigned a database administrator-level developer to work on BusinessObjectsfull time, handling administration and new report development.

Although Medtronic has almost two dozen BusinessObjects 3.1 universesdefined, the 20 power users participating in the BusinessObjects 4.0 beta pilotprogram have migrated only one universe and defined just one new mega universethat gives them easy one-stop access to a maximum amount of data. According toKannankutty, Medtronic's current Oracle databases can't take advantage of allBusinessObjects 4.0's new features, so Medtronic will have to use new star andsnowflake schemas to redesign many of its existing BusinessObjects 3.1universes. These schemas simplify access to relational data, OLAP style.

BusinessObjects, like most reporting and query tools, lets developers andusers store report templates. Kannankutty estimates that Medtronic has about 100active, structurally unique reports. When Medtronics combines these reports withthe different universes, the company has about 300 different reports. About 70percent of Medtronic's users run canned MIS-prepared reports. The other users dofurther analysis, sometimes using the OLAP features that supportmultidimensional analysis and drill-down capabilities.

At Medtronic, new BusinessObjects users attend a one-day training coursebased on the standard BusinessObjects training manual. They then spend anotherone to one-and-a-half days training on the Medtronic-specific data anduniverses. Over the years, Kannankutty has made a few discoveries. He says thatusers are more comfortable with Excel terminology than BusinessObjects terms(e.g., pivot table rather than matrices). He's also learned thatdesigning reports with one tab that offers a two-dimensional view of data andanother tab that offers a drillable view of the same data is useful.

Overall, Kannankutty is enthusiastic about Business Objects and believesthe company has a sound strategic vision. He hopes to shift some of Medtronic's1000+ executive information system (EIS) users, who typically aren't interestedin investing two days to learn about BusinessObjects, to the Web-savvy,thin-client version of BusinessObjects when it ships. For more information aboutMedtronic, point your browser to http://www.medtronic.com.