Is the information at your fingertips?

These days, business intelligence (BI) isn’t simply about querying a database in order to get a meaningful business report to the management team on time. It’s more a question of software integration. Why? Because companies today typically have a mixture of different applications, from ERP systems to supply chain management, legacy software and financials. The information you need to look at may have to come from a plethora of individual systems and/or from a central data warehouse. Dormer Tools, for example, manufactures a variety of cutting tools including drills, reamers and dies. It has manufacturing plants in Sheffield and Worksop, employs around 300 people and has a turnover approaching £28 million. There are 15,000 product varieties; the firm sells more than 15 million of these each year and most are made-to-stock. Actual production is triggered by replenishment from a central warehouse. Kirk Gascoigne is the IT consultant at the company and head of a department of eight IT staff. He is responsible for implementing and managing the firm’s business intelligence software, which came from QlikTech. Dormer’s business runs on Movex packaged ERP (enterprise resource planning) from Intentia. Says Gascoigne: “As an ERP system it’s fine, but getting meaningful reports from it was becoming too time consuming. Staff had to know how to write queries to extract the relevant data and they were copying and pasting information into [MS] Excel spreadsheets to give to senior management. We needed 20 or 30 production and accounting staff to do all this.” So, to solve this, the firm built up a shortlist of business intelligence software suppliers with the intent of purchasing a system that would ‘sit’ on top of Movex and extract the relevant reports. The list included Business Objects, Cognos and QlikTech. “We actually purchased QlikTech’s software straight after the demo,” says Gascoigne. “We did a quick mock-up back at base and were able to start using the software virtually straight away without any formal training.” Low cost solution The software cost the company less than eur55,000 (£30,000) for a 140-user system including web server software (QlikWeb) for 130 users, 10 QlikView user licenses and a new IBM server. “The cost was less than half of most other vendors,” quips Gascoigne. According to Gascoigne, the company decided not to take data directly from Movex (on AS/400) into QlikView. “Instead, we set up a central data warehouse using SQL Server. All our reports are now snapshots of the Movex data. QlikView is rebuilt every morning before we arrive.” Most of the data in the data warehouse is from Movex but there’s also some from the firm’s home-grown sales order processing and inventory control system. “We can now analyse sales across the whole group,” says Gascoigne, “by customer, salesperson, country of sale, production unit or individual customer. “We also use the software for throughput monitoring. We know where all the jobs are on the shopfloor and if they are late. It helps with bottlenecks, scrap minimisation, all the important KPIs [key performance indicators] really. We used to use Excel spreadsheets before,” he adds. And the firm has been able to spot problems with certain machines or operators. This has led to re-educating of some operatives, but also eliminating discovered bottlenecks. Gascoigne: “That kind of thing is much more difficult to spot when you’re dealing with manual reports. It’s harder to see trends too.” Another manufacturer, Schefenacker Vision Systems, reckons it’s seen payback from its new BI software in just two months. The firm’s IT manager, Janet Arnold, comments: “We’re far more productive than before. We’ve cut the time taken to generate reports for senior management from two to three hours down to just 15 minutes.” The company has two sites near Portsmouth, one of which makes door mirrors for the likes of Ford, Volvo and Nissan. There are 820 employees in total and the firm turns over roughly £50 million annually. Its BI software, purchased from Cyberscience four months ago, is being paid for on a monthly basis – around £500 per month in total – and there’s been no initial outlay required. Training was additional at £750 per day, but no IT infrastructure upgrade was necessary. “We were having problems extracting data from our Progress database,” says Arnold. “You need skilled people to write their own queries. With the new software [Cyberquery] we can produce our profit margin analysis report, for example, in 15 minutes.” And that’s not all. She says that scrap reports are now taking just 20 minutes to create rather than three hours. “The biggest advantage though,” she continues, “is the historical data available to users. We extract data each night for a set of defined reports. There’s no need to keep running queries as the reports are simply refreshed with new data every day.” Basically, data from the firm’s ERP system (Mfg Pro from QAD), scheduling software and its EDI system are extracted using Cyberquery each night and pumped into a Microsoft SQL Server database. The company’s business manager Jonathan Hunt says: “The software has paid for itself in two months. There’s been no initial lump sum investment by us and no upgrade of our IT infrastructure. We implemented the software in two weeks [including integration work]; there was two days’ training required for our two IT programmers, plus another two days for four other staff.” Talking the right language? So business intelligence doesn’t have to be complicated and expensive. Hunt says his firm did look at all the usual BI vendors including Cognos, Brio and Microstrategy, but opted for Cyberscience as, “It was relatively inexpensive, quick to install, training was fast, and could be paid for on a monthly basis.” Many ERP vendors are currently battling it out with specialist BI software suppliers for extra business. One of these is Geac. The company’s world-wide BI product manager Sharon Crawford explains the firm’s current philosophy when talking to clients: “We try to talk in their language by explaining how we can help them track the performance of their plant and KPIs. We try not to use the phrase ‘business intelligence’ as most of the industrial people don’t know what we mean by this. So we always talk about their business issues. We think we better understand the needs of mid-market manufacturers than the specialist [BI] vendors do.” But the final word goes to US-based BI software and integration vendor Meta5’s president Jim Kanzaler: “Once you’ve built your data warehouse there’s always going to be more data you need to add to it . And what about the data that doesn’t reside in the data warehouse? As an IT or business manager you need to ask yourself: ‘How are you going to give your end users the ability to query information outside of the data warehouse as well as inside it?’.” Kanzaler says the answer is integration, and his firm has called its software a ‘BI integration product’. “It means the software is dynamically integrated with other business software tools,” says Kanzaler. “You can’t rely on simply cutting and pasting data between multiple systems. We can automate all of this for you.” According to Kanzaler, businesses used to be concerned with dealing with a backlog of reports. “Now the emphasis will be on how successfully companies can integrate multiple data sources,” he adds. So the message is think outside the box and think integration – not just software – when you consider business intelligence.