Buckman Labs Improves Knowledge Management With WebFOCUS


Snapshot

Organization Buckman Labs (www.buckman.com), a leading manufacturer of specialty chemicals for controlling the growth of microorganisms. Its products are used in a number of industries such as paper and pulp, water treatment, leather, plastics, wood, and agriculture.
The Challenge Establish an efficient reporting and ETL environment that can work with Buckman's existing information systems, security architecture, and data stores.
The Strategy Replace reporting system with an efficient parameterized reporting system; extend the software infrastructure throughout the organization; standardize on fewer reporting tools to simplify maintenance and minimize expenditures.
The Results A common reporting and ETL environment serving multiple needs, requiring less programming skill, and satisfying more types of business needs.
Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, iWay Software, and Consulting.

In 1945, Buckman Laboratories was launched with one product, one 50-gallon process vessel, and four employees. Today, the company employs 1,500 people in 90 countries, and its expertise spans a broad range of specialty chemicals, including microbicides, scale inhibitors, corrosion inhibitors, enzymes, polymers, dispersants, and defoamers.

In addition to producing more than 700 different products, Buckman Labs helps solve complex industrial problems. As the management at Buckman likes to say, the real product at Buckman Labs is knowledge. The firm offers stellar customer service thanks to a unique information-sharing approach called K'netix ­ an online knowledge network that dramatically reduces the time it takes to solve customer problems.

Mike Anderson, who serves as director of information systems at Buckman Labs, is responsible for making sure that information delivery is fast, global, and interactive. Software technology from Information Builders is helping him do the job. "Our job is to deliver information – any place, any time, in a connected fashion – via the Internet or whatever the prevailing technology may be at the time," says Anderson.

Anderson's staff of IS professionals plays a key role in the knowledge-transfer department. Their goal is to help every employee leverage knowledge and distribute it throughout the organization. "We support a global organization, but the knowledge base must be accessible at an individual level," Anderson explains. "One of the ways we accomplish this is with self-service reporting technology."

Reaching a Boiling Point

K'netix has evolved over the years as a way to share information about customer problems and find creative ways to address their issues. If knowledge is the basis of Buckman's corporate vision, then reporting technology is what drives that vision into the field.

Until recently, most of Buckman's reports were developed with another set of business intelligence (BI) tools. Unfortunately, as developers created more and more reports and the user base grew larger, this existing BI environment became unstable. Despite extensive efforts by the vendor and Anderson's in-house team, they could not get this reporting software to work properly with Buckman's security schema, which is based on Microsoft ASP pages.

"Our security architecture has been refined over the years so our developers don't have to write different reports for each individual," Anderson says. "We identify users at login, authorize them, then pass that information to the report server, which executes the query and accesses the data that user is allowed to view. We need software tools that work with the processes we have developed, and our existing BI tools were not able to accommodate this need."

A Catalyst for Change

Anderson and his team encountered WebFOCUS while evaluating ETL tools from iWay Software, a subsidiary of Information Builders. Information Builders offered to create a prototype to demonstrate how its business intelligence software, WebFOCUS, could work seamlessly with Buckman's software infrastructure. "WebFOCUS was able to work with our existing security architecture in a very efficient manner," Anderson notes. "Information Builders didn't offer us any magic formula. Their software just worked the way that we needed it to work."

WebFOCUS was also much more efficient. According to Anderson, Buckman's former BI environment required persistent connections to the database, which means it must allocate server resources for each connected user – even during idle sessions. The WebFOCUS Reporting Server, by contrast, uses nonpersistent technology to connect users to the server. That means users who are logged into the server do not consume resources until they submit requests. Nonpersistent connections, along with a multithreaded Java™-servlet architecture, make it possible for WebFOCUS applications to support large numbers of concurrent users without consuming significant server resources.

Introducing New Technology Elements

Of course, Buckman took a close look at Information Builders and its market standing before purchasing the WebFOCUS software. In addition to having a complete environment for reporting, business intelligence, and data integration, they discovered that Information Builders was one of three vendors in Gartner's "leaders" quadrant for BI tools. "Information Builders appeared to be a solid company that would be around for the long term," Anderson sums up.

After installing the WebFOCUS software, Buckman hired Information Builders' Consulting to convert several dozen existing reports to WebFOCUS reports. "The consulting organization is one of Information Builders' strong points – they worked hard to help us complete this project and create a system that does what we need it to do," Anderson says. "We continue to use Information Builders' Consulting at strategic points to develop new capabilities, or if we encounter features with which we are not familiar."

Information Builders' Consulting worked in conjunction with two Buckman developers to establish a stable reporting system. Within 40 days, the development team converted 40 existing reports to WebFOCUS, reusing many of Buckman's existing SQL procedures.

Best of all, Buckman Labs was able to significantly reduce its total number of reports by using WebFOCUS to sort, summarize, and filter data based on selection criteria established at runtime. "For example, we might have one report with five parameters: salesman, industry, customer, product, and region," explains Anderson. "With our old BI environment, that would have meant one distinct report for each combination of parameters – salesman by industry, salesman by customer, salesman by product, and so on. With WebFOCUS, users can select these variables in any combination through a single parameterized report. So, in this instance, one parameterized WebFOCUS report could replace 20 existing reports."

An Organic Reaction

Today, well over 1,000 Buckman employees, from senior managers to sales associates, use WebFOCUS sales analysis reports worldwide. Anderson believes WebFOCUS will gradually make it easier to share and reuse reports among regions. For example, sales reps in South Africa could use reports created in Brazil with little or no modification. "The more our organization concentrates on learning and using one tool, the more valuable and extensive our experience will become," he says. "Going forward, WebFOCUS is our first choice for creating new reports and business intelligence applications."

Similarly, Buckman Labs plans to use iWay DataMigrator as its ETL software of choice. For several years, Buckman Labs has been creating an operational data store (ODS) of marketing, sales, and financial information from its Baan ERP system. Buckman maintains a diverse manufacturing operation, with facilities in the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, Canada, South Africa, Singapore, Australia, and China. The IS group supports the Baan ERP system in all these locations.

"There are many sources of data feeding into the ODS, all of which must be mapped into this data store," explains Anderson. "Formerly, we did this by hand, which takes a highly skilled programmer – you have to know the business systems extremely well so you can apply the correct business rules, and you have to understand the techniques of mapping the data. I would rather have all that technical knowledge encapsulated in a tool so we don't have to maintain this type of programming skill. That's what iWay will facilitate."

With its intuitive user interface, iWay DataMigrator will allow Buckman to create fast, flexible end-to-end ETL processes that perform the following tasks:

  • Aggregate, join, merge, and apply selection criteria to the information in its Baan ERP systems
  • Simplify data movement using automatically generated and managed FTP scripts or native transport protocols
  • Streamline the loading of data into the ODS via bulk loaders or row-at-a-time insert procedures
  • Execute, schedule, review, manage, audit, and create dependencies among ETL requests

Knowledge by Osmosis

With WebFOCUS and iWay, Buckman has acquired a business intelligence environment that can serve a broad base of users at the strategic, tactical, and operational levels. "So far we've been focusing on the strategic level with our sales reporting system," Anderson notes. "We will be using WebFOCUS at the operational level in the future to create inventory reports, bills of lading, and customized invoices from our Baan ERP system."

Buckman will also use WebFOCUS to automate many manual reporting processes, expanding the number of people who can effectively develop and deliver business information. "We want to standardize on WebFOCUS to create operational reports for everything from accounting to sales," continues Anderson. "Consolidating our overall reporting infrastructure will allow our organization to depend on fewer tools and enforce standards in the way information is accessed, delivered, and presented. We want to avoid the 'flavor of the month' mentality for reporting since that implies more maintenance, training, vendor licenses, and so forth. Having one reporting system that spans multiple operational domains is very attractive to us."

As the ODS becomes more accurate and complete, Buckman's knowledge network will also become more robust. From Anderson's vantage point, it is difficult to put a dollar figure on the value of this resource. However, the overall benefit is clear for everyone to see.

"K'netix is fundamental to the way we do business, so reporting and ETL figure prominently in everything we do," Anderson concludes. "By focusing on one integrated set of tools for reporting, analysis, and data integration, I believe we will have a much more efficient environment two or three years from now than we do today. That's where the ROI comes from – by focusing on a single, capable solution, then leveraging that expertise throughout the organization."