www.worksmanagement.co.uk
March 2009
27
Manufacturing IT
Business intelligence
business is trying to do.” And Richard Neale of Business Objects (now part of SAP), agreed –but with the caveat that, for many purposes,that rules out spreadsheets. Why? “Because you don’t know where the data came from, orhow out-of-date it is.”And Chris Field, consulting manager withInfor, while conceding that Excel has perfectlygood pivot tables, added that as soon as youneed additional dimensions, such as customeror currency, you’re in the wrong tool. He alsoinsisted that ERP reports, similarly, have theirlimits. “ERP was designed around the task of getting data in fast, and spreading it aroundorganisations. But if you want to slice anddice information by product type, you needsomething else.”Manufacturers are pragmatic souls andMike James, production director of rail fastenings manufacturer Pandrol UK, spokefor many when he asked: “Why not go talk topeople in the business and get theinformation that way?” He also expressed thewidely held concern that releasinginformation without context to others couldopen a can of worms.Fair points. All agreed that BI is nosubstitute for face-to-face contact, hence thevalue of S&OP meetings. However, it’s plainthat, where companies are geographicallydistributed and/or where complexity and timeget in the way of informed discussion, BI toolsare invaluable for providing unambiguousinsight.And here are some other pointers. Nigel Pendse: “BI is good for confronting newchallenges and determining best directionsfor companies entering difficult markets.”Cathie Metcalfe of Gradient Consulting:“Sometimes BI tools can give management fresh perspectives.” Cosworth’s Dowding:“Part of BI’s value is communicating keyinformation and helping to guide behaviour.It’s also about shocking people withinformation.” John Hammond of SAP: “BI canprovide an early indicator of impendingproblems for senior management.” And SAP’sNeale: “BI replaces the manual processes of collecting data.”
Pace of performance
Already, it’s clear that BI has multiple roles, soit’s time for Pendse’s observations, based oneight years of BI surveys, the latest among2,150 respondents. One of his most interesting statistics: “86% of those with BIwould like to deploy it more widely – so theythink it’s worthwhile. However, what most complain about is slow query performance.”Odd though it may seem, while Google returnsresults searched against most of the world’sdata in a fraction of a second, it transpiresthat many BI systems take more than 10 timesas long to do their work – which turns off users and brings systems into disrepute.Pendse suggests looking at in-memory BIsystems, such as QlikView and TM1, which,although small, are fast.Other useful guidance notes:manufacturers that choose BI systems basedon multi-product competitive evaluationsgain more benefits and record fewer failures.Pendse suggests talking to business users, not IT sponsors or IT vendors – and certainly not relying on project specifications “that request the bleeding obvious”. What matters most, hesays, is getting the right shortlist (“so it doesn’t matter which one you choose”) toserve middle management – “not whichdashboard looks prettiest”.Not that anyone decries dashboards(screens with summarised and personalisedmetric views, usually with drill-downs andquerying). As SAP’s Neale says: “A dashboardis a perfectly valid way of providinginformation to business users, but so arereports and spreadsheets that sit on top of your information supply chain. It’s about getting views that are fit for purpose.”Just so, but as Pendse cautions, don’t patronise your managers – you’ll limit theirviews of the KPIs they need. And two othergems: if you have to train people to use thesystem, you’re likely to fail; and get yourinitial system in quickly. “Slash yourrequirements to the minimum, and get thething live within three months. If you don’t,the project will lose funding, or you’ll end updelivering something the business no longerneeds,” warns Pendse.So how is Cosworth tackling its BI project?Dowding explained that his company took aphased approach – getting its SAP ERP systemimplemented across all four businesses andtwo continents as quickly as possible, beforerevisiting it in terms of data, metrics andanalytics. Speaking of this second phase, hesaid: “Our objectives were to gain a betterunderstanding of past performance and usethat to predict the future. But we also wanteda system that would be as easy to understandfor the guys on the shopfloor as for themanaging director. And we wanted integratedmeasures driven by data from our ERPsystem.”Dowding believes that reconciling laggingindicators (such as supply chain performanceor waste) with leading indicators (sales ordeliveries) is critical, and warns that there areseveral stages to achieving that. First isidentifying the measurements required, andsecond is “understanding that data is only asgood as your least competent user”. Hence hisemphasis on the need for business analysis todetermine the right KPIs and thus what dataneeds to be collected and analysed. Hencealso his focus on education and training.Beyond these, he advises users to plan forthree further aspects: capturing data (ideallyautomatically), publishing exceptions andenabling decision-making.But there’s more to this than meets theeye. So much depends on whether the goal isincremental and essentially inward-lookingmanufacturing and business processimprovements (against parameters such as
»
Leave a Comment