For Wellington port operator CentrePort, deploying business intelligence hasn’t just been about introducing new number-crunching tools into the organisation – it’s also brought with it some profound changes to the company culture and organisational dynamics.

CentrePort has Hyperion BI tools sitting over both its financial system and its operational database, meaning the company can mine for business insights across all aspects of its business.

CentrePort CFO Will Gorrie says the company’s previous financial management reporting processes tended to be “patchy in terms of usefulness” and based on a push model – in other words the onus on distributing information was on the finance team.

“It was all about the finance team pushing numbers out to the business units,” says Gorrie.

“With that comes a sense of ownership and guarding of the numbers by finance, which is fine, but when you have a decentralised environment where you want managers to manage and you expect them to manage budgets then you need to push some of that power to them.”

Moving from push to pull
Through Hyperion the organisation now has a finance dashboard which sits over the accounting system and is accessible to line managers who can now “pull” reports out of the system when it suits them.

“So when they want to go in to look at their numbers and their financial performance – actual versus budget – they can go in and pull that data down,” says Gorrie.

“It’s significantly improved the accountability around budget management. They feel like they have more ownership now. They can see what’s going on – rather than finance sharing their information with them, it’s their information.”

An important flow-on from this is that senior management can also access the same reports, meaning financial performance discussions they have with line managers can start on a more informed footing.

On the operational side of the business, BI is providing the operations team with greater insights into performance and productivity levels across all aspects of the business.

For a port operation, two key metrics that give invaluable insights into the health of the business are the number of container movements per hour and the average cost of those movements.

Obtaining those metrics was previously a difficult process, but with BI now across the company’s financial and operational systems, they are now much easier to monitor, says Gorrie.

What is his advice for other organisations investigating the value of investing in BI?“First and foremost, a number of organisations go down the path but don’t really implement the tool as well as they might do,” Gorrie says.

“You can never under-estimate the cultural value of a finance team unshackling the system from themselves and opening it up to the organisation,” he says.

“As organisations grow, having institutionalised that type of data mining into the organisation will give significant benefits downstream.”

Going nuts over data
Prolife Foods – one of New Zealand’s largest importers and manufacturers of nuts, snacks, cereals and confectionary products – faced an issue common to many businesses. As the company evolved from an entrepreneurial force to a more structured business with an independent board of directors and new executive staff, its new management needed to get up to speed quickly and uniformly on the company.

For example, Prolife had been viewing company data by customer and brand and executives wanted to view data across entire product categories as well. However, Prolife didn’t have a structured BI programme in place and could not access this data quickly.

Like any information driven company, Prolife also needed to generate ad-hoc reports for departments from manufacturing to sales to warehouse inventory. These requests created a bottle neck for the IT department as reports had to be requested manually and could not always be generated when and how they were required.

Prolife was using Streamline for operational transactions and general ledger needs, as well as Microsoft programmes, but “with these tools alone we couldn’t get the information we needed out of them,” explains Matt Downey-Parish, Prolife’s IT manager.

“We wanted better decision-making based on real information, rather than gut decisions. The main driver was financial reporting, but we’re a small to medium enterprise and we didn’t have the systems in place to generate ad-hoc reports for all areas... Now we can generate reports exactly as people want them, when they want them,” says Downey-Parish. “It’s about getting everyone looking at the same information really.”

Solution provider Eagle Technology recommended Business Objects Edge (Standard Edition) and arranged in-depth ‘proof of concept’ (POC) sessions to show Prolife how the solution’s reports would be built and the obstacles they would address.

Crucial financial and sales reports were generated during these POC sessions, making managers “aware of the benefits that they can reap out of this system,” says Downey-Parish explains.

Initially, the company is focusing on stream-lining its sales and general ledger reporting. The solution gave Prolife the ability to close its books at the end of the month and to dig deeper into the details immediately.

Slicing and dicing data allows Prolife to understand and physically manage any exceptions that occur from the placement of orders to delivery. The benchmark in its industry is ‘delivery in-full, on-time and in-spec’ – or DIFOTIS – and the solution allows Prolife to develop tailored, real-time reports that show where and how they’re meeting DIFOTIS or where breakdowns are occurring.

“Right away we realised we’ll want to roll this out to other departments in the next 12 months. We’ll use it for operational decision-making in the warehouse, manufacturing and purchasing,” says Downey-Parish.

“It’s early days but we’re still very positive about what it will do for us in terms of end-users being able to generate reports that lead to action,” he says.

For more information, vendors, resources and case studies visit the Business Intelligence Research Pavilion.

By Simon Hendery

BI: Making the mainframe cool again?

If you consider mainframes to be legacy platforms from yesteryear – particularly when it comes to running trendy applications like business intelligence – it might be time to think again.

Cognos announced recently that its BI software will be available on the IBM System z mainframe running Linux.

“Trusty mainframes are alive and kicking and remain critical components of a company’s IT infrastructure, especially for mission-critical high-volume transactional environments, like financial services, where the mainframe has proven itself to be a trusted platform for housing large amounts of data in a secure and centrally managed environment,” says Madan Sheina, senior analyst at IT research firm Ovum.

“Research shows that mainframe revenues are rising and MIPS (million instructions per second) capacity is at an all-time high. We suspect that much of this growth is coming from existing mainframe users who are either upgrading or growing their mainframe usage.”

Sheina says the resurgence in interest in mainframe is also partly due to companies moving to consolidate their IT infrastructures. And mainframe systems like IBM’s System z, with its large capacity, are good consolidation tools.

“Since BI applications are growing in terms of data volume and performance, these are points not lost on vendors like IBM/Cognos and SAS Institute, both of whom continue to invest significant development dollars on this platform. For mainframe vendors in it for the long haul, like IBM, the challenge is to sell the mainframe into new customers/applications. BI can help them to do that.”

Sheina adds there are several benefits of running BI on a mainframe.

“First, it enables enterprises to confidently – and smoothly – s scale up the performance of sophisticated data analysis and other BI functions against larger volumes of data.

“Second, since more customers view BI as a mission-critical application, why not run it on a resilient and scalable mission-critical platform, which plays directly to the strengths of the mainframe, namely industrial-strength processing power, high-availability, reliability, security and centralized IT manageability.

“Finally, BI is still a growing market. Pushing the software onto the mainframe helps companies to both protect and leverage their mainframe investments – ie. using BI to drive legacy modernisation without replacement of the mainframe.”

So large-scale IT users with a thirst for BI capability or a general need for serious number crunching take note: don’t send that old mainframe out for recycling just yet.