“Gathering data was not an issue,” says Tony Day, general manager – customer services for U-Bix Konica Minolta. “But getting useful information out of our AS/400-based Business Planner and Control Software (BPCS) ERP system was a nightmare. We would joke that once data went in, it would never return."

The company had been able to build some clever front-end routines with Microsoft Access and Excel, resulting in some useful reports, but the process wasn’t easy and the various routines were accessible to only a very select few within the company.

“As we shifted the data from one system to another,” says Day, “inconsistencies would pop up and the reports would not necessarily balance with the reports generated by BPCS due to different logic and time-frames. We knew we needed to do something if we wanted to keep up with the marketplace.”

Due to the way the business had evolved, getting hard facts about service contract profitability was proving problematic. BPCS running on the AS/400 was extremely reliable and great for what it was designed to do, but as far as a basis for business intelligence and management reporting, it was woefully inadequate. “The reports that we were generating had so much detail that it was hard to see the forest for the trees,” says Day.

Time for a change
The catalyst for change was the service contracts. “Our new CEO was adamant about tighter controls,” explains Day. “He wanted to see trends in our service contract profitability, a significant part of our business. He wanted ‘slice and dice’ capabilities and was unhappy with paper-based reports. He tasked our group with improving our analysis capabilities.”

“We already had an excellent relationship with Trevor Middleton and his team of business consultants at Cosyn,” says Day, “and they outlined various options for us. They recommended that we look at iQ4bis. The more we investigated, the better it looked. The clincher was when they performed their ‘proof of concept’ (PoC) demonstration for us. We provided them with some raw data dumps from the BPCS system and in less than a week Cosyn gave us a full demonstration of iQ4bis with our own data. I immediately saw relationships, trends and patterns that I had no idea existed. I’d been looking at this data for years in various and sundry formats, but when I saw how iQ4bis presented the information, I was sold.”

Pricing was merely frosting on the cake. “Nobody has an unlimited budget,” says Day, “but the fact that we could purchase a site licence at a reasonable price point meant that we could roll out iQ4bis across the enterprise for a fraction of what we thought we might have to pay. We’d already seen in the PoC how easy it would be to extract the data from our AS/400 system so we knew we’d be able to implement iQ4bis quickly and easily. The actual decision to go with iQ4bis was a no-brainer.”

Fast implementation
“As it turned out, we were up and running in less than two weeks from the notice to proceed to generating reports,” says Day. “We now run a data dump every night from the AS/400 into Microsoft SQL Server using their DTS function. iQ4bis ties directly into SQL Server so we have a direct view into our entire database, updated daily. From there we can access all sorts of views and generate specialised reports to our heart’s content, usually with just a few clicks of the mouse. We can track our various business units on a day-to-day or month-bymonth basis and make adjustments accordingly. We now have much less stress at the end of the month when we have to do our regular reviews.”

iQ4bis has also extended the utility of their AS/400 environment. “Now that we can use the BPCS data on a regular basis,” says Day, “we don’t need to upgrade. We’re very happy with the way the system works for data capture and storage and now we can actually use the data for business planning and decision-making. iQ4bis has allowed us to concentrate on business improvement, not chasing information.”

Customising iQ4bis has proven to be equally stress-free. “We’ve been able to set up different views for different people, depending on their particular requirements,” says Day. “It’s really very easy. In fact, I’ve been able to build my own OLAP cubes for my own financial reporting requirements. The software is so simple to operate that it is actually more convenient for me to do it myself than to get the IT department to do it.”

And what about the service contracts? “We’ve been able to tighten up our management of service contracts significantly,” says Day. “We can now look at past performance in particular sectors and make much more accurate predictions in respect to costs and profitability. We can pinpoint which individual contracts or models are not profitable and design programs to address the issues and then monitor progress. In the past, most of our reports usually just resulted in more questions.”

Click here to register for free iQ4Bis Proof of Concept

For more information contact

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

October 2005