Centers of Excellence: Centralizing Expertise

Centers of Excellence

The “Center of Excellence” as a business model has an assortment of definitions and uses. In general, such “centers” are established to reduce time to value, often by spreading multidisciplinary knowledge, expertise, best business practices and solution delivery methods more broadly across organizations.

They have been identified as “an organizing mechanism to align People, Process, Technology, and Culture” or - for business intelligence applications - as “execution models to enable the corporate or strategic vision to create an enterprise that uses data and analytics for business value.” Still others define these centers as “a premier organization providing an exceptional product or service in an assigned sphere of expertise and within a specified field of technology, business or government…

Analytics Center of Excellence (ACoE)

Using a CoE to Improve Business Intelligence

In approaching how the Center of Excellence (CoE) concept might improve business intelligence (BI), analytics, and the use of data in science-based organizations, PerkinElmer Informatics has developed an Analytics Center of Excellence to deliver service for our customers.

As a framework, the CoE offers ongoing service coverage by experts from a variety of domains, including IT & architecture, statistics and advanced analytics, data integration & ETL, visualization engineering and scientific workflows. In many cases an expert is located at your facility and then leverages a wider range of remote staff, to provide support, reduce costs, and eliminate red tape and paperwork.

There are four pillars to our Analytics CoE for your organization:

  • Architecture Services
  • Governance Services
  • Value Sustainment Services
  • Training & Enablement Services

Cost Savings with Standardized BI Solutions

PerkinElmer’s Analytics CoE leverages TIBCO® Spotfire to help our customers get the most out of this technology as quickly as possible - from the experts. Very often - especially at mid- to large-enterprises - the question is asked, “Why aren’t we standardized on a single BI solution?”

It’s a good question.

Rather than investing time, effort, and money in evaluating, implementing, and maintaining and updating several BI solutions, not to mention training staff to use them, considerable cost savings can be gained from deploying a standard business intelligence solution across the enterprise. And the savings can be further supplemented because the Analytics CoE covers both foreseen and unforeseen needs. Under an Analytics CoE implementation, cost savings are derived from:

  • Economy of scale from a suite of informatics services
  • Reduced administration efforts for both customer and vendor
  • “Just-in-time” project delivery that engages the right resources at the right time

Reducing the Pharma Services Budget

After converting to the Analytics CoE model, a top 25 pharmaceutical company saved 50% on its services budget, relative to TIBCO® Spotfire. This was possible because the services were bid out once - not for every service engagement. Purchasing service engagements was significantly less fragmented, and the high costs of supporting multiple tools & platforms and responding to RFPs was greatly reduced.

Standardizing on an Ongoing Service Model

Centralizing around a formal service model focuses management of the vendor relationship on a single partner – who truly becomes a partner as they manage projects across multiple domains and departments.

The Analytics CoE model, also called competency centers or capability centers, oversees deployments, consolidation of services, dashboard setup and platform upgrades - all without the additional burden of new RFPs, vetting of new vendors, and establishing new relationships.

The benefits of standardizing on an ongoing service model, centered on a standard BI platform, include:

  • Holistic approach to deploying analytics solutions across the organization
  • Cost savings from reducing the number of tools used
  • IT organization isn’t spread too thin as it no longer has to support multiple systems
  • Greater departmental sharing
  • Improvements beyond the distributed model

In addition, there are numerous reasons for analytical organizations to adopt an Analytics CoE:

  • Program Management managing multiple project workstreams and chairing Steering Committee meetings to provide management insight into solution delivery.
  • High quality of subject matter expertise (SME) available for your projects; SMEs are pulled in as needed and are billed against CoE.
  • Significant savings over typical daily rates – up to 50%.
  • Flexible engagement period.
  • Hourly rate fees move from the FTE model to “pay for what you use” further reduce costs.
  • Multiple projects billed against Analytics CoE.
Are you ready for true service excellence in your data-driven organization? Find out if PerkinElmer’s Analytics Center of Excellence is a good fit.