Amerinet: Health care organization finds its own lifesaver in SEQUEL

Amerinet is the most innovative and effective health care group purchasing organization in the United States. They focus on helping members improve their operating margins and deliver savings through a comprehensive group purchasing portfolio. For example, in one recent year, Amerinet members saved more than $300 million. Members can choose from market-leading suppliers, ensuring they get the best match in price and quality. Their network of companies—Amerinet Central, Intermountain Health Care, and Vector—sets the standard in customer service, delivering personalized service at all levels of interaction to provide value to their members.

Dino Biondo is the Vice President of Information Services at Amerinet. “We’ve been using SEQUELTM for approximately 10 years now. I had found SEQUEL to be an enormously useful product during my tenure at other firms and decided to bring it to Amerinet as one of my first moves. Right now we have about 70 people using SEQUEL. They range from mid-level analysts to top management, and we continue to increase the number of SEQUEL users. We deploy SEQUEL through various formats: through the Web, from the LAN, through e-mail, and via FTP. We also use SEQUEL code embedded in programs. Its powerful data manipulation capabilities allow us to be responsive to a large number of third-party interfaces, including vendors, members, and others.

“A huge lifesaver for us is the new remote database access capability of SEQUEL. We recently migrated a major portion of our critical contracting applications from the IBM® System iTM to an ORACLE eBusiness Suite running on a Linux server. These applications are at the heart of our business. It is crucial that we have an easy and flexible way to consolidate the ORACLE database with our System i data. SEQUEL’s new remote database access gives us that. We use SEQUEL views and scripting to retrieve data from ORACLE and bring it to the System i. Once on the System i, we typically merge the ORACLE data with related DB2 data and generate numerous reports, ranging from simple to complex. We generate some of the more complex reports using the SEQUEL tabler to pivot the data and create spreadsheets. SEQUEL gives us one consistent and versatile interface whether we are using DB2 data on the System i or ORACLE data on Linux.

“SEQUEL makes it very easy to manipulate dates and we use this capability extensively. For example, we often convert ORACLE date data types to ISO format, or transform DB2 date data types to ORACLE.

“We support approximately 500 SEQUEL views and reports on a regular basis, with several hundred more that we run less frequently. We look first at SEQUEL to solve reporting and data transformation tasks before we consider RPG coding. It is just so much faster and more efficient.

“ SEQUEL is a tremendous product! … I would recommend it to anyone who has a System i.” – Dino Biondo, Amerinet

“SEQUEL is a tremendous product! I have been using it personally for more than 15 years, and I would recommend it to anyone who has a System i. The product is solid and the support is very responsive and professional.”