Ameripath’s BI Challenges
Ameripath has an extensive diagnostics infrastructure that includes over 400 pathologists and doctorate-level scientists providing services in over 40 independent pathology laboratories and more than 200 hospitals. This data-rich environment has seen BI play an evolving role as Ameripath developers meet new standards for data accuracy and an increased demand from both their labs and from corporate users. In order to meet these demands and standards, Ameripath required a method to automatically ensure the consistency and accuracy of BI content in their ever evolving environment as well as proactively detect and correct BI performance issues.
The Solution
In recognition of this dynamic environment, Ameripath partnered with Motio, Inc. to ensure that their Cognos based BI initiatives provided accurate and consistent BI content. MotioCI™ has enabled the Ameripath BI team to configure suites of automated regression tests that continually verify the current state of the BI environment. These tests check each report for:
- Validity against the current model
- Conformance to the established corporate standards
- Accuracy of the outputs produced
- Adherence to expected performance requirements
The continuous verification of MotioCI has empowered Ameripath’s BI team to proactively discover issues very soon after they are introduced. By providing visibility into “who’s changing what” in the BI environment as a whole, MotioCI has also enabled BI team members to quickly identify root causes of these issues. Such visibility has led to much quicker identification and resolution of issues, increasing both productivity and quality. MotioCI has also served a valuable role in providing implicit configuration management for the content produced by BI team members. On many occasions, MotioCI has helped resolve ambiguities by enabling users to trace the lineage of each report, seeing its entire revision history and what portions/changes were made and by whom. MotioCI’s version control capabilities have also played an important role on several occasions when BI content was accidentally modified, overwritten, or deleted.
Ameripath addressed these demands with the testing features of MotioCI. Automated, continuous tests were configured to check BI assets and instantly help Ameripath identify issues that relate to:
- Data validity
- Corporate standards conformance
- Output accuracy