Case StudyCase Study

How Yellowfin helps Children’s Cancer Institute improve survival rates.

SummaryDeploying Yellowfin’s Business Intelligence (BI) platform across its disparate data sources has enabled Children’s Cancer Institute to:

• Enhance the delivery of research aimed at improving childhood cancer treatments

• Empower researchers and business users to quickly and independently analyze, share and act on a unified view of their data to improve effectiveness and efficiency throughout the organization

• Deliver deeper, consistent and real-time insights across the research, operational and business aspects of the organization

• Design and build reporting solutions that add real value to the business in hours, not weeks

CompanyChildren’s Cancer Institute is the only independent medical institute in Australia solely dedicated to research regarding the causes, prevention, treatments and cures for childhood cancer.

Children’s Cancer Institute is located at the Lowy Cancer Research Centre, affiliated with UNSW Australia and works closely with Sydney Children’s Hospital Randwick. The Institute is rapidly expanding and now employs over 200 staff and students, including 150 scientists.

In 2015, Children’s Cancer Institute and Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network were proud to announce a national personalized medicine program, for children with high risk cancer, called Zero Childhood Cancer. The program will give hope to children across Australia who are at highest risk of treatment failure, by identifying the best possible tailored treatments for them (more information at www.zerochildhoodcancer.org.au).

Copyright 2016 Yellowfin International Pty Ltd

“Research experiment data is easier to analyze and

review, which goes towards improving the lives and

survival rates of childhood cancer sufferers”

– Children’s Cancer Institute Executive Strategic Operations Manager, Elaine Neeson

Technology: On-premise, MS SQL Server, Oracle

Industry: Health / Not for Profit

Location: Australia

Why Yellowfin?Children’s Cancer Institute researchers and scientists were heavily reliant on spreadsheets for data storage and analysis. Identifying the inefficient and error prone nature of these practices, Children’s Cancer Institute embarked on a project to gradually move important data into more sophisticated databases. It soon became apparent the Institute would also require a database-independent tool to combine reporting from multiple disparate sources, thus enabling Children’s Cancer Institute to produce reports offering insights across the research,

operational and business aspects of the organization. The reports produced also had to be easy for non-technical people to access, understand, share and act on.

“We maintain and support a mixture of databases serving various applications ranging from Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL to MySQL,” said Children’s Cancer Institute Business Systems & Information Manager, Tracy Hogg. “The previous method of reporting involved a combination of basic SQL Reporting Services reports, spreadsheets and application-specific reporting tools. In some cases, functionality was simply unavailable, with researchers unable to generate the reports and consequent insights required.”

Children’s Cancer Institute’s technology infrastructure included

a mix of physical and virtual servers, providing services across a range of different platforms, operating systems and devices.

“It’s a typical heterogeneous environment,” said Hogg. “We needed a Business Intelligence and analytics tool that would talk to the many applications and databases we need to support our research and run our business.”

Collectively, the team at Children’s Cancer Institute identified a pressing need for better BI, reporting and data access across both the research and operational aspects of the organization.

“Yellowfin’s ability to easily connect to a wide range of data sources, and present

dashboards to the user that have a

consistent look and feel, meant it could be

embraced by the entire Institute”

- Children’s Cancer Institute Business Systems & Information Manager, Tracy Hogg

Case Study

Copyright 2016 Yellowfin International Pty Ltd

What was achieved?A trial of Yellowfin was deployed and instantly proved successful due to its ease-of-use, flexibility and efficiency.

“Yellowfin’s simple, intuitive ‘out-of-the-box’ design and layout was a driving factor when compared with other platforms available,” said Hogg. “The user-friendly interface and functionality of the software meant there was only a small learning curve for the end-user.”

As a result, Yellowfin was quickly embraced, delivering more effective reporting and data analysis across the entire Institute, including the research teams, finance department, marketing and fundraising teams, as well as executive management.

“Yellowfin has delivered beyond expectations and has proven instrumental for researchers and business users to improve their efficiencies and effectiveness,” said Hogg. “Yellowfin’s ability to easily connect to a wide range of data sources, and present dashboards to the user that have a consistent look and feel, meant it could be embraced by the entire Institute.”

Yellowfin’s ease-of-deployment within Children’s Cancer Institute’s existing Windows environment, 100 percent Web-based interface and architecture, as well as APIs for embedding Yellowfin content into third-party Web applications, were important attributes impacting the Institute’s selection of Yellowfin.

Metrics being analyzed and reports generated span many facets of the Institute, including human resources leave balances, research experiment data analysis, biobank sample and storage management, ethics reporting, fundraising trends and analysis, as well as budgeting and finance reporting.

The Zero Childhood Cancer program is further increasing the need for the Institute’s data to be highly accessible to users as it scales up, and Yellowfin reports enable that accessibility.

“Research experiment data is easier to analyze and review, which has led to further improvements in research efficiency,” said Children’s Cancer Institute Executive Strategic Operations Manager, Elaine Neeson. “This all goes towards improving the lives and survival rates of childhood cancer sufferers – the very reason every Children’s Cancer Institute employee comes into work each day.”

According to Neeson, not only did Yellowfin improve the Institute’s reporting environment, it also “opened our eyes” to new possibilities for additional reporting, as well as the reality of the Institute’s data.

“Yellowfin has enabled the team to amend processes to boost efficiency, pinpoint trends and focus on required improvements. All this has been possible because users can simply click a button to view a report, rather than spend that time creating the report itself,” said Neeson. “Yellowfin makes it possible to design and build useful reporting solutions that add real value to the business, in hours rather than weeks. It has enabled us to track and monitor key metrics in real-time, which were previously only available by monthly reports, or not at all.”

Case Study

Copyright 2016 Yellowfin International Pty Ltd

“Yellowfin has delivered beyond expectations and has proven instrumental

for researchers and business users to improve

their efficiencies and effectiveness”

– Children’s Cancer Institute Business Systems & Information Manager, Tracy Hogg