The Right Route

Export Development Canada develops information management strategy with SAS®

2005 Computerworld "Best Practices in Business Intelligence" Award Winner 2005 TDWI Best Practices Award Winner 

Trade finance and risk management services provided by Export Development Canada (EDC) connect Canadian entrepreneurs to the world by opening doors to new opportunities. As the country’s only financial institution devoted exclusively to supporting Canadian exporters and investors, EDC is guided by a federal mandate to support and develop the country’s trade and international business opportunities.

Last year, EDC fulfilled that mandate, in part, by helping Canadian businesses conclude (CDN) $51.9 billion in export and domestic sales and investments – up 13 percent from the previous year. As EDC continues to expand its portfolio and its customer base, however, it also creates large internal demands for more and more information.

Using SAS data warehousing and business intelligence technologies, EDC managers are meeting that demand with a complete strategy for information management. According to Arthur Pelletier, director of Client Services at EDC, the solution, which is supported by SAS software, facilitates customer self-service, provides quick access to last-business-day information and acts as a single, trusted source for enterprise-wide information.

"Managing business in an increasingly complex and evolving world demands better management of and better access to corporate information," says Pelletier. "With SAS, we’ve replaced many disconnected sources of data – application extracts, personal spreadsheets, MS Access databases – with an integrated structure that supports reliable and robust tools, processes and procedures."

Data as an organizational asset
As Pelletier worked with James Dorrance, his data warehouse project manager, to begin building the new SAS infrastructure, both men agreed that deriving measurable business benefits from the warehouse was the key to gaining momentum and support at all levels of the agency.

"One of the issues we faced early on was how to spread this notion that data is an asset to the organization," explains Pelletier. "If we can put a dollar value around this asset and express the value of this data in a tangible way that goes a long way toward resolving the inevitable data quality issues."

Dorrance agrees: "We hoped to foster corporate awareness and dialogue about information quality by illustrating a real-life situation where quality issues are effectively addressed by applying this technology," says Dorrance.

A complete, accurate picture of risk
So Pelletier and Dorrance decided the first business use of the warehouse would be to implement a new, monthly risk management report that analyzes commercial obligor credit exposure. As part of a three-report package distributed monthly to the board of directors, this information goes to the heart of EDC’s mission – delivering financial and insurance services that other lenders often deem too risky.

But to maximize EDC’s risk capacity for its customers and still remain profitable, EDC must be able to quickly and accurately calculate critical risk measures – such as portfolio concentrations and changes, probability of default, exposure at risk, and credit migration – for each of its commercial clients. And those calculations cannot be performed without access to complete, reliable credit data in the form of risk ratings, risk limits, board-approved limits and many other variables.

Before using the data warehouse and SAS software, the process for generating this crucial report comprised 257 sub-processes, including steps for data retrieval, data manipulation, data verification and rework. With SAS data warehousing, two-thirds of those processes have been eliminated, and 95 percent of the remaining steps have been automated.

According to Dorrance, the reduced workload frees up an equivalent of one full-time employee to do more analytical and value-added work, and it reduces the potential for error by eliminating points at which the data is touched and manipulated.

"Continued tracking of errors indicates an 80 percent reduction in errors and an expectation that the error rate will continue to decline," says Dorrance. This translates into a higher quality of information delivered to managers and executives, and a clearer picture of the company’s overall risk exposure.

The final report, which used to be delivered in a paper-based format, is now available online via SAS Enterprise Guide, which provides self-sufficient and easy access to enterprise data sources for business analysts and executives.

A complete return on investment
According to Pelletier, EDC has already realized a full return on its investment in this application. Now, as the warehousing team moves forward with more data quality and business intelligence efforts, they’ll continue to build on that value.

"Moving forward, the SAS data warehouse will be the main vehicle for disseminating corporate information," says Dorrance. His team’s data warehousing strategy includes a layer for extracting and transforming data from throughout the enterprise and delivering that information to smaller, subject-oriented data marts.

Warehouse management features in SAS – such as centralized metadata, common enterprise data management and custom library definitions – provide the tools and processes for a consistent approach for warehouse evolution.

Among other initiatives, Dorrance and Pelletier have created an operational reporting facility to support treasury operations; they have also developed unique data marts for aggregating business exposure and supporting detailed reports on EDC’s insurance portfolio. And by delivering a data mart that provides the basis for the corporation’s balanced scorecard and employee incentives program, employees can view daily scorecard updates instead of waiting more than 10 days for results as they did in the past.

"With the data warehouse initiative, technology is the easy part," says Dorrance, "but communicating the strategy can be challenging. Once we were able to show how quickly we could deliver value back to the business, however, the message was easy to communicate." Now, EDC executives have a growing interested in leveraging their data warehousing investment to support business intelligence that provides returns above and beyond simple efficiency improvements. With that strong corporate alignment around the data warehousing strategy, EDC can continue to count on SAS for obtaining accurate, timely and comprehensive information.

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