The EMIR Project

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[ Experience | Validus Holdings | Greene King | Element Six
Chubb International | Chubb Europe | Cedardata ]
– The EMIR Project – EMIR User Feedback –

The European Management Information Repository, or EMIR, achieved the goal of transforming the business culture of Chubb in Europe; making it one in which the use of credible, pertinent, timely and easy-to-used management information became as much part of day-to-day-life as the use of the Internet or e-mail. This change led to a turn-around in Chubb Europe’s performance (moving from record losses to record profits) and to strong results that have been sustained over the last six years.

From a technological perspective, EMIR was essentially a business intelligence / data warehousing initiative, leveraging Cognos PowerPlay as the front end (details of the full topology appear here). However, its cultural change imperative gave it a much broader scope than comparable projects.

The multi-year, multi-million dollar project was given the go-ahead by Chubb Europe’s Senior Management Team (SMT) in the middle of 2001. The first EMIR report family, EMIR Profitability, went live in June 2003; it is important to stress that the intervening two years also saw several interim reporting suites launched by the EMIR team.

Through the technical excellence of the system; its focus on answering pertinent business questions; and a highly professional approach to each of: pre-launch marketing of the system, the extensive training provided at implementation and conscientious post-training support and follow-up, EMIR became highly successful. Initial estimates of about 100 users were vastly exceeded and it now has around 500 users. Importantly, 93% of people who received EMIR training went on to become active users.

Seven further EMIR report families have since been launched, elements of the system have also been deployed to Chubb’s Latin American operations and detailed plans have been drawn up to do the same in Asia Pacific.

The user response to EMIR has been overwhelming and a selection of quotes may be viewed in the next section.

EMIR has been featured in a number of videos and interviews and case studies in the European and US business and technology press and has won two external awards.
 

19 thoughts on “The EMIR Project”

  2. […] My experience is that while having a snazzy BI tool (Cognos PowerPlay being the one I have most often used) in place can win you plaudits, this is only because it is sitting on top of a warehouse that embodies the business information that the organisation needs. The three keys to a successful BI implementation are: – […]

  7. […] Having succeeded in making the use BI part of an organisation’s DNA, I hope that this approach will start to become the norm and that BI will move to the strategic centre business; the place from which its true potential can be realised.   Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Will the economic crisis actually be positive for BI?BI Retailers’ #1 PriorityBI Suite (2) […]

  13. […] I don’t know Tony and so don’t want to focus too much on precisely what he wrote, nor to try to second guess what he meant exactly in this post. My approach will be instead to take a more personal angle and describe some of the thoughts that his comments provoked in me (I am using “provoked” here in a positive sense, maybe “inspired” would have been a better choice of word). If you want to read my comments with the full context, then please click on the link above. What I am going to do here is to present some excerpts from each of my two lengthier contributions. The first of these is as follows (please note that I have also corrected a couple of typos and grammatical infelicities): Rather than being defensive, and as a BI professional I would probably have every right to be so, I think that Patrick has at least half a point. If some organisations had avoided problems (or mitigated their impact) through the use of good BI (note the adjective) in the current climate, then BI people (me included) would rush to say how much we had contributed. I have certainly done this when the BI systems that I have implemented helped an organisation to swing from record losses to record profits. […]

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