B&W Group gains business insight with SAP

The Worthing-based company says it needed to deal with increasing quantities of product data and, because new media had opened up new distributors and dealers, it was time to get a better handle on its information. Paul Fryer, business systems manager at B&W, says: "We have been an SAP customer for over 10 years, with ERP, warehouse management, document management and plant management ensuring our back end processes were as efficient as possible. But we had not used a BI solution before." Fryer explains that all analysis was completed by pulling data from SAP and handling it manually in Excel – a lengthy process that, he concedes, often did not present the recipient with the required, timely view and was also prone to error. "The growth rate of our business, the desire to remain a leader in our field and to ensure we had accurate information from any part of the business in a timely manner were key drivers, pushing us to implement a business intelligence solution," he says. B&W implemented SAP BusinessObjects BI and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer over the summer, before going live recently. And the result: "The implementation was easy, with very little impact on back end infrastructure… Many of our senior management and sales representatives now use iPhones and iPads, in parallel with their desktop PCs, using standard applications from SAP. That means accurate information can be gathered quickly and easily anywhere in the world. "The flexibility and number of standard interface options has been a major aid to adoption. We now have a single version of the truth and can see where products are at any of our global sites. We have an improved understanding of demand and stock and sales levels. This is something we just couldn't do before and it has moved the business to the next level," states Fryer.