Kingspan builds better access to business data

Building materials giant Kingspan Insulation is rolling out Cognos ReportNet business intelligence software to eliminate ‘data islands’ and improve data efficiency company-wide. Kingspan says its plan is to improve speed and flexibility of reporting on sales data, by providing management with easy access to comprehensive strategic business analysis. Recent growth meant the company needed to enable key users to design and run their own reports as well as automate regular queries and get consolidated reports. Following a six-month trial with Cognos partner BI-Inform, the system has now been launched with 20 full-time users, 15 of which are creating their own reports using the Query Studio tool. Says Kingspan business systems manager Peter Smith: “We have been using Cognos PowerPlay for the last six years so we needed a tool that could integrate seamlessly, as well as having the power to pull together reports from data sources across all our departments. “We also needed to centralise data analysis to ensure everyone was seeing one version of the truth.” Kingspan is also looking to increase the number of senior sales staff, many based away from the office, who access reports. “We needed to remove our sales managers’ reliance on phone calls and Excel spreadsheets,” says Smith. “The next 12 months will be dedicated to extending the reach of our standard reporting and speeding up the sales process by educating our staff in how to create their own, ad hoc queries, so they can respond faster to customer needs.”