Let the Potential of Your Business Emerge
A Solid Partner
Focus. Consistency. Value. Paragon Solutions is an advisory consulting and systems integration firm delivering the full lifecycle of services, from strategy and implementation to systems integration – resulting in value realization. While our brand has evolved over the past 30 years, we have stayed true to ourselves and our clients. Through continued focus on the markets that we serve, a deepening of our competencies through organic growth, and delivering the best solutions to make our clients successful, we have established Paragon as a reliable, go-to solutions provider for many world-class firms. As we look forward, we know technologies will change, the economy will sometimes falter and new competitors will encroach on a client’s established business base. Our focus, consistency and value will offer our clients proven approaches to meet these challenges and remain competitive.
The Right Course Advisory Consulting
Paragon’s Advisory Consulting Services address the need for business consulting that is often required to better leverage a technology investment. Advisory Services team members bring deep industry experience, rigorous analytical capabilities and a pragmatic mindset to our clients’ most complex business problems.
Our Advisory capabilities span enterprise and business unit strategy, focusing on business process, human capital and technology-related issues facing organizations. The net result is an actionable plan with businessoriented objectives and goals for moving forward.
A Way to Bring It All Together Systems Integration
Paragon has decades of experience as a value-added systems integrator for mission-critical systems. Our experience of developing and linking together different systems and software applications helps deliver the value offered by enabling and emerging technologies.
Whether your organization requires a custom-developed solution, integration of off-theshelf and existing systems, or an on-demand service, Paragon has the methodologies and experience to deliver the solution to meet your business objectives.
STRATEGY ROADMAP An integral part of optimizing a critical business function is Paragon’s Strategy Roadmap. The Roadmap to Optimization™ employs industry best practice methodologies to derive a deliberate implementation strategy that will move organizations from their current state to an optimized operating model. Our Roadmap establishes the feasibility and scope of your integrated solution and stages a practical migration path of incremental initiatives to begin realizing business benefits. The Roadmap encompasses the process, people and technology implications of an implementation plan, making it an actionable strategy for both business and IT stakeholders. Let us lead your firm on the road to optimization and show you how Paragon provides
Value Envisioned. Value Delivered.
The Power to Go Full Force Process Optimization
Businesses have long been savvy to demand that technology investments improve their work processes. To that end, Paragon has developed a specialized focus in designing applications and integrating solutions that align to streamlining the way a business operates. Our specialized industry focus means we can share and implement best practices for key functions and work processes. True business process optimization can encompass a complex set of systems, information, workflows and departments. For this reason, process optimization initiatives begin with the identification and assessment of current processes and the desired process state. And since the optimization of a business process often requires supporting content, data and applications, process optimization efforts are often coupled with content management, data management or service-oriented architecture implementations.
Paperless Workflow
Social Workspace
CASE STUDIES
Technology advances in the sophistication of image and capture software have enabled firms to rethink how transaction workflows can be automated and streamlined. Paragon applies its industry, process and integration expertise to capture technologies to transform costly and inaccessible paper documents into instantly usable electronic business information, resulting in faster operational throughput with improved information accuracy. This extends the value proposition of capture solutions from simply reducing paper-handling costs and compliance risks to addressing line of business challenges such as growth constraint and revenue enhancement – real “move-theneedle” type initiatives. As a result of the improved, streamlined processes, organizations are equipped to use the productivity enhancements and compliance improvements for growth initiatives and competitive advantage.
Organizations with far-flung, distributed work teams often have processes that require collaborative, social workflow models for more efficient knowledge sharing, innovation and decision-making. These multi-thread processes require different approaches from the transaction-based models that are purely about accelerating throughput. Social workspaces help eliminate unnecessary information overload, while enhancing the team’s knowledge base, encouraging communication and supporting ad hoc process workflows. With its collaborative platform technology partners, Paragon has created solutions for global project teams to help them accelerate and improve the development and delivery of products and services, support research and development, and make better decisions.
Claims Solution Increases Capacity and Saves Millions Paragon executed the assessment, design and deployment of an Intelligent Document Capture Solution for a large insurance client that was outsourcing its digital mailroom operation to a third party to manage costs of paper handling for incoming claims and associated correspondence. Paragon’s solution brought the entry of claims and correspondence back in-house and eliminated batch and reconciliation processing, resulting in: first year savings of $2.3 million, a reduction in turn-around by an average of 2.5 days, increased capacity by 63%, and a reduction in manual data entry from 65% to less than 2%. By reducing the throughput time, the client is now able to increase the number of claims processed with its current infastructure. Investigator Portal and Electronic Trial Master File (eTMF) Implementation Reduces Trial Start-up Time and Costs Paragon’s process-driven methodologies enabled a global pharmaceutical company seeking to increase efficiency and improve clinical site start-up time to achieve a 15-day reduction in clinical trial cycle time and a 15-25% improvement in the timeline from site identification to drug shipment. By identifying process optimization opportunities in the site start-up phase, implementing an Investigator Portal, and replacing a paper-based Trial Master File process with a more efficient and trackable electronic process, Paragon also helped the client increase management visibility, improve investigator interactions, and reduce site start-up costs. As a result of the processes implemented, the company realized an in-year savings of $1,000,000 in year one.
Surfacing Solutions Information Management
Managing today’s information assets requires a strategic, yet practical approach to the handling of unstructured content and structured data from creation to disposition. Paragon’s 30 years’ experience is steeped in the full life cycle of managing enterprise information with solutions that span building content and datarich solutions that meet regulatory mandates, to designing content management centers of excellence that leverage best practices and economies of scale for expanding organizations.
Governance and Compliance
Knowledge On-Demand
CASE STUDIES
Increasingly, firms have recognized that all corporate information, from desktop to data center, is an asset requiring formal governance strategies, policies and procedures to protect competitive advantage and reduce regulatory risk. Paragon helps cross-functional governance bodies support strategies and policies for distributing information inside and outside the firm. Each industry we serve has its own specific regulatory drivers and compliance mandates that are incorporated into our governance strategies and solutions. However, more often a number of consistent challenges are coming forward across all industries: content management governance, especially for collaborative platforms; information privacy; and information analytics. With our governance maturity model and solutions accelerators, Paragon is positioning firms to meet these challenges while managing their exposure to noncompliance and other regulatory risks.
Today’s knowledge workers need access to a variety of data and documents to complete their daily tasks successfully. Unfortunately, as the burden of information overload has increased for many firms, knowledge workers often find themselves struggling to find the right information at the right time – if they find it at all. With decades of experience addressing a host of enterprise information management challenges for globalscale firms, Paragon designs and implements solutions that support knowledge on-demand such as enterprise content management, information consolidation and archiving. As competitive pressures loom large for many of our clients, the differentiation of having the right knowledge when it’s needed can mean faster client acquisition, quicker time-to-market or better market positioning.
Enterprise-wide eDiscovery Strategy Helps Firm Proactively Manage Risk Paragon was engaged to ensure a defensible, enterprise-wide eDiscovery and litigation hold strategy for a global pharmaceutical company. The company possessed 4.7 terabytes of data containing millions of emails and was lacking efficient processes for the management of email and the timely disposition of regulatory requests. Paragon utilized its own eDiscovery Maturity Model to assess the current state analysis of risk, process and technology capabilities and define a strategy to reach an appropriate level of eDiscovery maturity acceptable to the client’s needs. The customized solution was integrated with leading eDiscovery and email management platforms, providing the client with: a discovery process in the collection of information, preservation (legal hold), analysis, review, and policy-based management of email; the ability to proactively manage risk;and reduction in internal and external costs. Records Retention and Consolidation Increases Compliance and Reduces Costs After decades of acquisitions, a financial services firm was left with hundreds of content repositories on different data stores, all of which were managed separately for records compliance. The firm engaged Paragon to create a center of excellence approach to identifying systems for retirement and for automating records retention compliance. Paragon’s solution, which was designed for nearly 100 terabytes of data, enables the client to control its information while reducing maintenance and internal system resource costs. The client is projected to save $2.5 million in hardware and software consolidation, with the estimated total savings over three years exceeding $10 million.
Discover What’s Ahead Information Insight
From analytics and data visualization to Big Data, Paragon builds Information Insight solutions to identify trends, decrease time-tomarket, improve business partner and customer relationships and help firms anticipate the direction of the marketplace before the competition. Business Analytics users are demanding quicker and better analytical capabilities, particularly in frontline operations. Other executives are looking to make sense of large data sets of information across business units. Paragon has experience in the delivery of next generation Information Insight to address multiple, disparate data sources and the changing business environment.
Business Analytics
Advanced Data Performance
Firms have increasingly demanded visibility to and synthesis of critical information for users and decisionmakers. The sought-after analytics vision has been to provide real-time insight to enable swift, decisive action. Admittedly, management reporting has been more defined by information technology professionals than business professionals, creating bottlenecks, latencies and unnecessary complexities. However, technologies available in the market today can now deliver on the decades-old promise of real-time management insight – providing information on customers, vendors and products – for anything that impacts the business. Paragon’s experience integrating mission-critical data sources, combined with innovative methodologies based upon Six Sigma tools for process and data analysis, yield a potent answer to the challenge of implementing today’s consumer-driven reporting tools.
Powering business intelligence and data-intensive solutions that meet our clients’ mission-critical objectives requires rigor far beyond the implementation of software tools. Paragon’s Advanced Data Performance competency does the ‘heavy-lifting’ to help clients collect, store, organize and synthesize information for improved business user consumption. Our proven methodologies for consolidation, migration, transformation and quality remediation address the challenges of unlocking the potential housed in large silos of data. Businesses that need the performance and scalability enhancements for future growth and competitive advantage can rely on our expertise to help them strengthen their operational decision support.
CASE STUDIES Centralized Data Warehouse Solution Improves Data Quality and Accessibility The tax department of a communications corporation that prepares approximately 73,000 tax returns annually for over 100 subsidiary companies sought the help of Paragon Solutions to improve the control and quality of data used to prepare returns. The tax department was operating redundant systems and receiving legacy data feeds from multiple general ledgers, accounts payable, billing, and fixed asset systems that were the result of acquisitions. Paragon designed and developed a data warehouse scalable to 120 terabytes to centralize and integrate data from over 50 billing systems. The solution provided standard reporting, an operations dashboard, proactive monitoring, data mining and advanced analytics to measure and improve data quality and timeliness. Business users now have an intuitive web-based user interface to obtain data that was previously only accessible to technical IT staff. The solution has decreased the amount of time required to prepare tax returns, improved the quality and audit-ability of tax returns, and saved the client millions of dollars in assessments, fines and penalties. Client Realizes Substantial Revenue Increase from Automated Scorecard and Reporting System In order to increase efficiency of its sales reporting process, a leading telecommunications provider sought to incorporate additional data sources into its existing transaction pricing scorecard and to transition from a manual scorecard reporting system to an automated process that would improve the quality, reliability and timeliness of data. Paragon designed an automated scorecard solution that delivers timely reports and requires minimal human intervention, thereby decreasing costs and improving efficiency in reporting sales metrics. Data that previously took a week to generate is now easily obtained in a day. In addition, Paragon’s enhancements to the price realization scorecard will result in substantial revenue and net earnings for the client, as the 2-5% projected improvement on realized prices will generate approximately $40 million in annualized revenue.
About Paragon
Paragon Solutions is an advisory consulting and systems integration firm that specializes in enterprise information management to help clients leverage information assets for better business results. The company does this through its industry practices, solution accelerators and specialized technology competencies that help clients achieve operational efficiency, business scalability and regulatory compliance. Paragon works with businesses that are focused in a few key industries − communications, financial services, healthcare, insurance, and life sciences. The industry-focused practices work with Paragon’s competency groups to address today’s client concerns in Process Optimization, Information Management and Information Integration.
For more information, please visit the Paragon website at www.consultparagon.com, or call 1.800.462.5582.
INDUSTRIES Our industry-focused practice teams possess the market domain knowledge and experience to deliver value to clients looking for a partner-oriented approach to business and technology solutions. Our client roster includes industry leaders such as:
Life Sciences/Healthcare AstraZeneca Celgene Daiichi Sankyo Emory Healthcare Johnson & Johnson Merck Novartis Sanofi Wellstar
Insurance
AXA Equitable Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of NJ Munich Re America Protective Life & Annuity Selective Insurance
Financial Services Bank of America BNY Mellon Citibank JPMorgan Chase The Vanguard Group
Communications
AT&T Comcast Cable Communications Time Warner Cable Verizon
For more information, please visit the Paragon website at www.consultparagon.com or call 1.800.462.5582
Corporate Headquarters – Cranford, NJ Chicago, IL - Boston, MA - New York, NY - Philadelphia, PA - Bangalore, India Copyright Š2012
Paragon Solutions is a registered trademark of Paragon Solutions, Inc.
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