GP Batteries powers up decision making with IBM

Michael Wong, GP Batteries' IT director, says these are three critical areas for manufacturers in the current economic climate, as they seek new business insights to help re-think factory decisions, prioritise initiatives to maximise customer service, and increase supply chain visibility. "Our standardisation on IBM software for performance management will help improve the strategic decision making across the organisation and streamline our external reporting and compliance processes," says Wong. "The IBM Cognos team has been able to provide a single vendor solution for the whole performance management suite, eliminating the need for us to communicate with different vendors and the complexity of having to integrate several different solutions. They understood our business needs and have been working closely with us to meet our requirements," he adds. Prior to the implementation, GP Batteries was using a spreadsheet-based reporting process that required manual data entry and took two weeks to pull sales forecasting information, he explains. By the time the reports were delivered to the management team, data was already out of date. With headquarters in Hong Kong, production facilities in the North and South-East Asia, and sales offices in major cities worldwide, co-ordination between manufacturing and sales was being adversely affected, which in turn caused operational inefficiencies. GP Batteries' new performance management system consists of IBM Cognos 8 BI, Cognos TM1 and Cognos 8 Controller, all running on four IBM System x3650 servers. Under the agreement signed in December 2008, the deployment will be conducted in three phases starting in the middle of February. The project is expected to be completed by the end of 2009.