KPI leverages AWS Redshift and Tableau to optimize spend for large health insurance company
| CIGNA Corporation offers various medical plans, including PPO, HMO, point-of-service (POS), indemnity, and consumer-directed products with annual revenues of $41 Billion and over 46,000 employees. CIGNA Corporation services more than nine million people. |  |
Business Needs
Cigna was using SAP Ariba for Indirect spend and needed an comprehensive analytics and reporting solution that gives users visibility into the downstream procurement operations and the upstream sourcing and contract management processes. Procurement and spend visibility analytics would allow users to reduce Spend by identifying price outliers and helps in Vendor consolidation opportunities by contract utilization and management and improve procurement cycle efficiencies.
Selection Criteria
Cigna evaluated many solutions including Cigna selected KPI Cloud Analytics solution for the following reasons:- Accelerated time to value (twice as fast) with a pre-built solution versus custom-built ones
- Three times lower implementation cost than a custom-built solution
- KPI’s capabilities to deploy the solution based on AWS and Tableau best practices.
What KPI Delivered
KPI delivered KPI Cloud Analytics for Ariba on the AWS platform with user self-service and visualizations on Tableau.
Data was extracted from Ariba to AWS S3 using SAP Ariba’s Integration tool kit (ITK). AWS Glue was then used to extract, transform and load (ETL) the data from S3 into AWS Redshift. KPI’s Cloud Analytics came with pre-built AWS Glue ETL scripts and a pre-built best practices Redshift and Tableau data model to enable user self-service and deliver stunning visualizations to Tableau users. The solution also included monitoring with AWS CloudWatch to ensure uptime.
Business Benefits
Cigna users got a state of the art analytics solution which allowed them to:
Reduce indirect spend by identifying price outliers, and vendor consolidation opportunities. Improve contract utilization and procurement cycle times. Have visibility into the sourcing to award process to identify any process bottlenecks to ensure that the sourcing process was as fast and efficient as possible.
The Cigna IT team received a solution that was based on an AWS and Tableau best practices architecture which can be extended to include additional data sources and also direct spend data sources to achieve consolidated spend with respect to various dimensions like cost centers, suppliers, locations in the future.
