A Complete Customer View

Continued

One dashboard that Machak’s team built enabled Eaton Steel’s logistics unit, Atlas Trucking, to break down its revenue by month and by account, allowing the accounting staff to tie that revenue directly to the company’s general ledger. Likewise, a salesperson might want an overview of a customer’s engagement with the company across all units, or just the customer’s past requests for chemical analysis of steel products. Plant managers, meanwhile, are benefiting from dashboards that enable them to track spending on equipment maintenance and supplies and are using that data to look for opportunities to combine purchases and obtain better deals from vendors.

The goal is to make the company more responsive to customer needs. And while Eaton Steel hasn’t yet quantified the business benefits of its BI investment, Machak says early signs are that it’s delivering the hoped-for impact.

A Competitive Advantage

Making incremental investments to layer BI capabilities over application architectures is the right strategy for the times, says Howard Rubin, a senior advisor at IT consultancy Gartner. Rubin says companies lacking discretionary income are advised to focus on the one area that can best help them navigate a recession: getting to know their customers better by integrating as much data as possible. “Anything that enables you to get more-accurate information is exactly the thing you need to do in a recessionary economy,” he says.

That message isn’t lost on Regal Beloit. The US$2.25 billion-a-year maker of motors, power generators, and mechanical motion control components has grown to encompass multiple business units running on three different versions of Oracle E-Business Suite. Add to that an array of enterprise resource planning systems, niche applications, and data from multiple data warehouses, and Regal Beloit had an information hodgepodge that made it difficult for employees to get a complete view of customers—and that slowed effective decision-making.

Regal Beloit’s executives assembled a BI team, led by Sree Pillai, the company’s director of BI, and gave it a tough challenge: create, within 100 days, a consolidated data warehouse and a self-service BI application that let employees draw data from them to build their own custom dashboards.

Sree and his team deployed Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and several Oracle Business Intelligence Applications—for financial analytics, sales analytics, and supply chain and order management analytics—and then assembled data on inventory, receivables, shipping, and invoicing to populate a single data warehouse. As they moved on to more-complicated tasks—such as providing the sales staff with visibility into forecasts versus actual sales, as well as visibility into customer inventory information pulled from the company’s domestic and international plants and its multiple warehouses—they hit a snag. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition did not provide out-of-the-box support for the demand-planning module of Oracle E-Business Suite or Regal Beloit’s homegrown planning application.

The solution lay in the open architecture of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, which allowed Sree’s team to extend the application and map target data to the data warehouse. The ability to handle custom integrations was the key to Regal Beloit’s selection of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Today, with all the needed datasources linked to the BI solution, the wisdom of that reasoning is clear.

“Business users had been spending a lot of time gathering data and very little time analyzing it,” says Sree. “Now they’re able to spend very little time gathering data and can focus more on analyzing the data and finding the root causes of problems.”