A company in the Metalworking Sector, a national leader, with its own distribution offices throughout the country, needs an effective way of working with the data generated by its finance area and which allows it to generate financial information quickly and in a timely manner for the decision making.
Before implementing the Business Intelligence information management system, the company did not really have an effective way of working with data generated by its finance area.
It used a tool for the generation of auxiliary accounting reports that were slow and inflexible, and there was a person's dependence on systems to be able to generate them manually, so the response time to deliver financial information was very slow and it was not appropriate for decision making.
The finance staff took much of their time in generating the reports, leaving very little for the analysis of the information, in addition to providing the information to the other areas of the company, through printed reports.
All this led to the closing of the company's accounting in 3 business days after the last day of the month, in which much of the information for the entire month was captured.
Proposed solution:
For all these reasons, the company required a tool to expedite this task, and chose to implement business intelligence software (Business Intelligence, BI) from a specific partner, the largest and most successful BI company in the world.
The tool was, in its genre, the friendliest and easiest to use for the end user and also made it possible to prepare more complete and specialized reports and analyzes.
Users needed to have predefined reports, that had the information updated to the day and that they could execute with just a click, but they also needed to be able to analyze the information when they detected any anomaly and even see the transactions that caused it.
The BI solution chosen was the ideal one for the client company, since it allowed them to:
- Having a menu with their predefined financial reports. In addition, once a report was opened, they had the ability to Drill Down, (see with a click on a data, all the data that compose it, both in value and in categories, etc.), and establish filters to analyze the information easily and quickly. With a single click they could run a report that showed them the details of the transactions according to the filters they had selected.
The work carried out was as follows:
- The definition and creation of the Datawarehouse The creation and design of reports The design of multidimensional models The basic and advanced training for users and personnel of systems in the methodology and BI products in Windows environment and in Web environment, of all the tools Support was also given in the process of culture change in the organization.
Methodology
The methodology followed was the one that marks the procedure for implementing Business Intelligence in all its breadth.
- Analysis prior to implementation Advice on choosing the most appropriate Business Intelligence application Direction of implementation project Business Intelligence, (BI) Analysis and evaluation of implementation.
The BI solution was supported by a DataWarehouse that was on a Windows 2000 server, with SQL Server 2000 database. The DataWarehouse was fed with data from ERP (BPCS), the payroll system, APS (MAPICS) and others operational support applications, through a process of data extraction to the SQL Server database server, in real time, using MQ Series from IBM and Data Transformation Services from Microsoft.
The implantation time was 2 months.
In the words of the Systems Manager of the client company: «We were looking for a way to reduce the time and cost of generating the financial information of the company and with this we wanted to improve the service level of the systems area towards users».
After completing the project, he stated: «The solution that we have implemented has given us a lot of added value and enormous flexibility, since it allows our users to be self-sufficient, and to generate their predefined financial reports, analyze them and go see the detail of the same, but also allows them to create new reports as needed »
Results
Since the BI software was implemented, the client company changed its organizational culture in the way of analyzing the financial statements of the company, since the information was updated 3 times a day. In addition, and with the use of BI tools, it could be consulted electronically in such a way that all the movements were reflected in the financial reports, practically at the moment they were generated, without requiring the assistance of the systems personnel.
The information was no longer delivered on paper to the heads of the different departments, and they had the possibility to consult and analyze it at the time.
The response time for generating auxiliary accounting reports was considerably reduced, leading to the closing of the accounting at 12:00 pm on the first business day of the month.
Once the project was completed, the Systems Director stated the following: «The solution we have implemented has given us a lot of added value and enormous flexibility, since it allows our users to be self-sufficient, and to generate their predefined financial reports, analyze them and go see the details of them, but also allows them to create new reports as they need »
Currently, the Director of Finance of the client company assumes that the reports are available and updated when they are required and no longer waits for the reports to be generated as before. Now he expects the finance staff to have explanations of the results. In his own words, “we have been able to free up time for the finance staff, so that they can now focus on analyzing the information and not on generating reports as they did previously. In the past, the reports showed us results at the end of the month and on many occasions we could no longer do anything to change them, now that we have the information updated daily, we can immediately take actions that allow the company to obtain better results. ”
