Competenz is the New Zealand training organisation for the engineering, food and manufacturing industries.

It’s the place employers go for training help, so they can improve their employees’ skills and boost productivity in the process. Competenz also provides access to government training subsidies. It recently sponsored the TV2 Just the Job television show which gave high school students a taste of different careers.

However, this is just part of Competenz’s work.

It arranges, assesses and moderates training for 18 industries, ranging from architectural joinery to gunsmithing and lock-smithing, to refrigeration and airconditioning, and more. It helps employers develop training and assessment plans, as well as providing the necessary resources and support for learners.

It’s quite a complex business, all in all.

Starved for information
Competenz underwent major restructuring in early 2008 and brought in a new management team but found it had issues around meeting its information needs.

“We were starved for information,” says David Alley, general manager for Competenz’s finance and corporate services.

“We had plenty of data in our Pivotal CRM application, so we could keep track of our client base. But to get any sort of in-depth analytical reporting, we had to make a request to our business analyst or the IT team.

Unfortunately, by the time we received what we’d asked for, our requirements had often evolved and we had to start the whole process over again. It was very frustrating, as we had strategic decisions to make regarding allocation of resources. We had to find a better way.

“We needed clear, concise, consistent information,” says Alley. “We also had very specific requirements and wanted a solution that we could implement immediately. One that could integrate cleanly with our existing infrastructure and one that would enable our management team and line managers to perform their own analyses quickly and easily, without relying on individuals.”

Competenz had been working with Aucklandbased Savio Solutions Limited, a CRM and intelligent business integration company, for a number of years as Savio supported its Pivotal CRM application. Director Sven Martin suggested Competenz look at iQ4bis to meet its BI needs.

“We had a very good understanding of their data and business processes. The new management team asked us to help them develop a plan to integrate reporting analytics and business intelligence (BI) capabilities into their decision-support systems,” says Martin.

“We prepared a ‘Proof of Concept’ (PoC) demonstration for David and his team. We took their Pivotal CRM data and built a fully functioning three-dimensional cube and a set of role-based views. We then showed them how to perform ad hoc analyses and drill-down into the data. But what really impressed them was how fast we were able to build the cube and how easy it was for them to perform their own analyses from the web-based interface.

“It was exactly what we wanted,” says Alley. “After the PoC we decided to buy the system and had Savio do the installation and initial implementation. We arranged a few workshops where we specified exactly what we wanted to achieve and then they developed a set of individual views for particular roles within the company. The best part was that we didn’t have to get too technical… we gave them some ideas and they delivered the final product.”

A single, unified view
The new BI system had an almost immediate impact.

“For the first time, we had a single, unified and consistent view across our entire organisation,” says Alley.

“All of a sudden we could look at performance by individual account manager, by region and by product.

We can now set realistic targets based on facts and figures, not guesses. Having access to reliable information has significantly improved decision-making, particularly around resource allocation.

“In our industry, industrial training, benchmarks are extremely important.”

“We need to know how many apprenticeships are completed in the specified time, where there were problems with drop-out rates, and which market sectors required the most support and resources.

“With some 15,000 apprentices and trainees on the books, 18 different industry sectors, 35 account managers and five area managers, tracking trends on a static report was a nightmare. Now we can drill down into the data quickly and easily, and compare and contrast the results.

Everyone from senior management to individual sales people now uses iQ4bis to monitor performance and allocate resources to the areas that will most benefit. It has helped us become much more efficient as an organisation.”

“Before we implemented iQ4bis, we would get a different set of numbers from different reports. There was no consistency in reporting, so we had to make decisions based on imprecise information. But now we can see exactly what is going on across all areas of the organisation and have complete confidence in the information we are getting.”

Cost-effective
Alley says the new BI system has also proved costeffective.

“The total cost of implementing iQ4bis was about the same as one year’s salary for a mid-level analyst,” says Alley.

“So, if you consider that more than 50 people are performing their own analyses and creating reports almost every day – resulting in far more productivity – the cost of each analysis has been lowered considerably. Plus, the selfservice aspect of reporting analytics means that managers can get the results they want almost immediately.
And, of course, the IT team has more time to spend supporting the infrastructure rather than generating reports.”

Use of iQ4bis has shown steady growth within
Competenz. “Once people see how easy it is to use, and the
information they can extract from the views and reports,
they don’t look elsewhere,” says Alley.

“There has been a quantum leap in the amount of
information we can now access. Before, it was hard to get
our hands on the facts and figures we needed to make
those hard decisions. Now, all the information we could
possibly want is just a few clicks away.”

Asj Smith            
General Manager- APAC
iQ4bis Management Software Limited
+64 9 366 2635
Visit our website www.iQ4bis.com

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