Business Reporting Without Headaches
Bayer Consumer Care produces and markets Aspirin®, one of the world’s best-known medicinal products. Other Bayer brands include Alka Seltzer®, Bepanthen®, Bepanthol®, Canesten®, Berocca®, ALEVE®, One-A-Day®, Redoxon®, and Supradyn®.
Bayer Consumer Care Looks Toward a Healthy Future With WebFOCUS
Every day, thousands of Aspirin® and Alka-Seltzer® tablets find their way into markets around the world. The European headquarters of Bayer Consumer Care (BCC) in Basel, Switzerland is responsible for the distribution of these and other well-known health brands throughout Europe.
BCC generates revenues of more than 2.5 billion euros globally and, since 2005, has been the junction point between its production sites and local businesses. When the company wanted to optimize its decision-making efficiency and simultaneously ensure the most up-to-date reporting across its various Oracle, SQL Server, and SAP Business Warehouse (BW) systems, BCC turned to Information Builders WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform.
Data Is Transformed Into Information
For BCC, its raw data could not serve as the foundation for making important business decisions. The data required transformation into comprehensible, structured information that would be valuable as a basis for drawing conclusions and taking action.
Most of the employees who needed access to that information were what BCC labels, “0- to 1-click users.” In other words, they were business professionals who required simple, and at the same time, powerful reporting. To address these needs, BCC partnered with Information Builders to develop the Management Information System (BCCMIS). Hans-Joachim Schulz, who has many years of experience as a WebFOCUS specialist and is responsible for BCC’s finance and reporting, was chosen to manage the initiative.
BCCMIS is a robust solution that empowers Bayer’s European employees to easily access the data they need in real time. Each of the organization’s approximately 300 WebFOCUS users can customize their reporting environment simply by specifying and managing the various criteria of their reports. Generating reports is fast and simple regardless of the format – Excel spreadsheet, PDF, or HTML. Additionally, the ability to directly export reports to a presentation tool such as PowerPoint makes it easier for employees to prepare materials for discussions, project meetings, and external communications.
“We have developed an intelligent security concept that allows us to offer our users the greatest possible degree of flexibility and simplicity,” says Schulz. “As users register, the BCCMIS identifies their requirements and provides them with a dynamic interface that can be individually tailored to meet their individual needs.”
Ability to Meet Future Needs
An important advantage of WebFOCUS, according to Peter Bosch, head of Organization and Information at BCC, is its scalability. “We have been using the Information Builders solution for years now. It leaves all doors open for the future and can be tailored to meet our individual needs.”
WebFOCUS’ unparalleled scalability is evident in the many ways it can be expanded and extended. Designed to support an unlimited number of users, countless data sources, virtually any user type, and the widest array of reporting applications, WebFOCUS provides companies of all sizes with a reporting and analysis environment that can effectively meet their needs today, then grow and evolve as their business does in the future.
BCC leverages this scalability in numerous ways. For example, WebFOCUS enables BCC employees to produce detailed monthly sales reports from SAP BW. Completed reports include in-depth information right down to the stock-keeping-unit (SKU) level, which, for instance, indicates the individual packaging of various medications.
Sales figures reported from each of BCC’s international subsidiaries are combined and consolidated at various levels, including at each individual business unit. This information is then used as a basis for planning and managing European activities at each of the strategic business units, as well as for medical management, global brand management, and regional control capabilities.
In 2008, a direct link to SAP BW was established to ensure that cost-center reporting was more efficient than in SAP BW itself. All cost-center managers can retrieve reports and graphics for their specific cost center and/or individual divisions – with just a single click of the mouse.
BCC also plans to use WebFOCUS to facilitate the successful planning of the worldwide launch of several new medicinal products. WebFOCUS will link to the company’s AGILE® software from Oracle – a robust product-lifecycle management application – and generate information that will be used in presentations conducted by each of the company’s international subsidiaries. The new system will considerably improve – and provide greater transparency into – several areas of global business, such as product supply, marketing, and management.
Another pending project will provide users with powerful cost-of-goods-sold (COGS) deviation-reporting capabilities, enabling them to highlight and track relevant business indicators such as cost, budget, and currency. This will serve as a critical global management tool, as WebFOCUS transforms information into intuitive visualizations using waterfall graphics, making it easy for any exceptional circumstances to be easily determined.
Other types of cutting-edge visualizations can also be performed within WebFOCUS. Information can be presented with a variety of intuitive, visually appealing charts and graphs, such as 3D bar and pie charts, histograms, data constellations, and multiscapes. Users can gain further insight into vital business information by dynamically changing graphical views on the fly. They can select, zoom, pivot, or recolor their charts to uncover new relationships between the data they’re analyzing.
“There are practically no limits when it comes to using solutions from Information Builders. Whenever we need to deliver standard or ad hoc reports to our users, or access other databases, we rely on WebFOCUS,” Bosch concludes.
BCC is not the only pharmaceutical manufacturer to benefit from WebFOCUS. Fujisawa Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare, and other industry leaders have turned to WebFOCUS to increase operational efficiency, improve information flow, identify and leverage new market opportunities, and minimize the risk associated with product development, clinical trials, and approvals. As a result, they’ve gained a substantial edge over generic drug producers, biotechnology companies, and other competitors.