Silvon partners with Notability

Silvon Software, the business performance management and analytical software vendor, has partnered with US-based server manufacturer, Notability Solutions, as a business partner for its Stratum suite of analytical applications. Notability focuses on the AS/400 (iSeries) marketplace, in which Silvon already has a well-established European presence. Silvon is very manufacturing-focussed with 90% of its worldwide sales to this sector. The company’s European md, Mark Mahara, comments: “Analytical applications are fast becoming the must-have technology for corporate organisations seeking to derive greater value from their ERP and e-commerce investments. “As a pre-packaged application, Stratum is fast to implement and delivers a swift return on investment,” he adds. “And the cost-benefit justification for an analytical application is usually clear cut. For companies undergoing realignment through mergers & acquisitions the timescale required for implementation and the ROI timeline are particularly attractive. Overall we find that users can immediately appreciate the practical commercial value of the application.” And Stratum is comprehensive. It has integrated modules for sales, marketing, manufacturing performance management, procurement performance management, e-business, customer relationship analytics and financials. It also includes a relational data warehouse, DataTracker, an on-line analytical processing engine, closed-loop processing functionality, a built-in planning application, and enterprise connectors for extracting, transforming and loading data from ERP, CRM and other web-based business transaction systems into the data warehouse for analysis purposes. The product line also features hundreds of pre-built, best-of-breed analytical views and reports based on supply chain-specific business models. And Suomen Rehu, one of Finland's largest livestock and pet feed manufacturers, this week selected DataTracker to provide customer analytics and enterprise-wide sales budgeting. DataTracker will draw data overnight from BPCS running on an IBM iSeries 400 server. The implementation is initially for 40 sales users but the firm has made plans to extend this to include finance users later in 2001. The contract is worth £70k (including services) and was delivered by Silvon and its Scandinavian business partner, WM-data. The company is based in Helsinki and employs 250 people across seven factories, with an annual turnover approaching £100m. DataTracker, integrated with the firm’s BPCS software, will deliver vital customer analysis information across the sales team, and will provide the company with enterprise-wide budgeting software. Mahara explains: “Suomen Rehu had previous experience working with WM-data and were already confident of our ability to integrate an analytic application with BPCS, their core business management system. They felt that the implementation of DataTracker would have minimal impact on the running of the business. “Most significant though, Suomen Rehu identified the potential to roll out Data Tracker into other areas of the business in the future such as inventory, production performance management and finance … our applications aren't limited to functional areas of the business but are specifically designed for enterprise-wide adoption,” adds Mahara.