Velsicol Chemical to transform operations on company-wide business intelligence

Velsicol plans to use its new software to generate reports across the board – for sales, distribution, quality management, production planning, HR, financials, materials management and plant maintenance. The company says it needed a reporting tool that could work seamlessly with its SAP, and that WebFocus was the only tool tool it found that didn’t have implementation issues. Main problems, it says, were around getting field descriptions from the SAP tables and using SAP security rules. “We favoured WebFocus because it works well with the SAP environment and has comprehensive security, data access and drill-down and parameterised-reporting capabilities,” says Lee Goodrich, senior business systems analyst at Velsicol. “Additionally, Information Builders had the best pricing and they agreed to develop a proof of concept.” Interestingly, Velsicol had been using a reporting tool and says that while most users found it adequate for standard reports, it was limited in terms of drill-downs. They could change field limits and sort orders, but if users needed to add information or fields they had to go back to the developer, which was costly and slow. Its new software is quite different – it comes with flexible parameterised reporting options, but also Information Builders does not charge for users who running standard reports. And that, says Velsicol, means the company can afford to do what it really wanted – roll the system out to executives, plant managers, production managers, plant accountants, department managers, maintenance managers, quality managers and so on throughout the organisation. Velsicol plans to supply both standard and ad hoc reporting services via domain-specific dashboards, and may eventually integrate these reports with SAP BW (Business Information Warehouse). “We’re adopting WebFocus as our BI standard and we plan to roll it out throughout the business,” says Goodrich. “Ultimately, we believe [it] will be as pervasive as the SAP software itself, as we enhance reporting and information management activities throughout the enterprise.”