CentiMark Corp. Tops Competition With Customer-Facing BI Portal
Roofing Contractor Creates Self-Service Reporting Environment for Customers
CentiMark is a Canonsburg, Pennsylvania-based firm that provides commercial and industrial roofing solutions. With 65 offices across North America, it is America’s largest independent commercial roofing contractor, with 2009 revenues exceeding $404 million.
Many of CentiMark’s clients are large, property-intensive companies that manage dozens, or even hundreds of buildings. Installations are complex, and roof repair and maintenance is an ongoing process. To provide better service to these customers, CentiMark knew it needed tools to improve project management and streamline the contracting process from end-to-end.
A customer-facing business intelligence (BI) application, built on the WebFOCUS platform from Information Builders, was implemented to help clients more effectively manage the various projects in progress across multiple locations. Known as MyCentiMark.com, the portal is the world’s first facility roofing management environment, tapping into data stored in databases, data warehouses, and transaction systems to monitor such important information as budgets, proposals, recommendations, condition reports, works in progress, and job histories.
MyCentiMark.com has given the company an edge in its competitive market through improved communication with its largest customers. Additionally, sales staff can more precisely monitor each account’s activities, so they offer services that more specifically address each client’s unique needs.
How it Works
Developed using the WebFOCUS Business Intelligence Dashboard, MyCentiMark provides a complete inventory of each customer’s facilities, with a thorough itemization of past, present, and future roofing projects. It includes budget management tools, roof condition reports, open project proposals, lists of current and completed projects, and a history of repair work, including before-and-after pictures.
Each customer sees only the information that pertains to his business. Details about budgets, proposals, recommendations, condition reports, works in progress, and job histories are organized into a series of dashboard tabs, with an inherent workflow to structure the progression of each job.
Using the WebFOCUS Business Intelligence Dashboard, Centimark created MyCentimark.com.
To access this information, customers simply log in using any standard Web browser. No training or client-side software is needed.
Constructing the Portal
According to Greg Wilson, CentiMark’s senior vice president and chief information officer, it only took about 100 man-hours to build MyCentiMark, including establishing back-end connections with CentiMark’s SAP R/3 applications and proposal-generating system. WebFOCUS has several unique features that reduce development time and minimize site maintenance for customer-facing applications, including:
- WebFOCUS “guided ad hoc” technology makes it easy to create simple, self-contained Web forms that provide intuitive access to information
- WebFOCUS lets users retrieve information in any format, including HTML, PDF, and Excel
- WebFOCUS enables developers to create and deploy content as a service inside another application, so the data retrieval process can be easily blended into any Web site
With 800 registered users and many drop-ins, MyCentiMark receives thousands of visitors each month. “With a few clicks they can view inventory, conditions, prospective work, recommended work, current projects, and historical views of work completed – both for fixed-price contracts and for occasional repairs,” explains Wilson. “They can even export the data to an Excel spreadsheet if they want to do additional analysis, or automatically generate PDF reports.”
What’s required from CentiMark’s IT staff? “The workflow process is fully automated and there is no incremental effort required to set up a new customer,” says Wilson. “WebFOCUS automatically populates the dashboard from our SAP data warehouse as each user logs in.”
Typical users include engineers, facilities managers, financial personnel, and administrators who are responsible for commercial and industrial buildings. Because facilities management is not core to most businesses, these workers typically don’t have advanced software applications and databases at their disposal. MyCentiMark.com’s online tools greatly simplify their jobs.
“MyCentiMark makes it easier for large companies to manage their roofing projects,” claims Wilson. “As a result, we are obtaining business from Fortune 100 corporations with property-intensive portfolios who are looking for better ways to manage their operations. Our salespeople love to present this portal to prospects because it is such a unique differentiator in the marketplace. There is no question that it has enabled us to attract larger businesses. Half of CentiMark’s $400 million revenue is supported through the BI portal.”
Operational Reporting
In addition to MyCentiMark.com, Wilson’s team has used WebFOCUS to create more than 350 internal reports, including custom CRM solutions for CentiMark’s salesforce. “WebFOCUS is the only solution we use to present transactional information to our organization,” Wilson says. “SAP handles some financial reporting. WebFOCUS does everything else.”
About 500 CentiMark employees use WebFOCUS as part of a role-based intranet portal. Most of them are not aware that WebFOCUS delivers the information, since the WebFOCUS forms are embedded in other applications. Common queries include customer history searches, repair orders, project completion status, sales commissions, and much more.
“WebFOCUS is well integrated and completely unobtrusive,” says Wilson. “Most reports are simple Web pages and links. For example, a user might view repair orders from a certain date range and then drill down into specific profit centers. It’s all self-service. No training is required.”
CentiMark also exports call history data from its VoIP phone system to monitor the telemarketing force, along with sales dashboards to help manage fast-moving direct-sales personnel. This information helps managers fine-tune their revenue forecasts and keep their sales teams on track. "By mid-month all salespeople will have a certain number of opportunities, represented by sales proposals that have been presented to customers," Wilson says. "WebFOCUS rolls up the information to a dashboard, with green, yellow, and red indicators to monitor progress."
Selecting WebFOCUS
CentiMark’s IT team evaluated BI tools from Information Builders, Cognos, and Crystal Reports before selecting WebFOCUS. “We saw WebFOCUS as the most robust developer’s tool,” explains Mike Galupi, a BI architect at CentiMark and one of the company’s three WebFOCUS developers. “It has a great graphical interface along with sophisticated development capabilities. In addition, Information Builders went out of their way to create a proof-of-concept. They were more customer-friendly than the other vendors.”
Having a complete development environment is important, since Galupi and two other WebFOCUS developers integrate BI capabilities with lots of custom Java™ applications. WebFOCUS integrates well with Java and also has application-level connections to SAP. Yet despite its sophistication, WebFOCUS has a short learning curve. “It is similar to SQL when it comes to querying, while the Web piece is similar to HTML,” Galupi notes. “WebFOCUS is also very low-maintenance, and we have had no real issues with stability or performance.”
Integrated SAP Reporting
CentiMark installed iWay adapters to establish connections to SAP R/3 applications and a custom-built Oracle data warehouse. WebFOCUS enforces role-based authorizations defined in SAP, and can combine SAP and non-SAP data in the same reports. Because WebFOCUS features out-of-the-box integration with the SAP data dictionary, it’s easy to create user-friendly business descriptions without impacting the SAP environment. Additionally, by dynamically generating ABAP code via the SAP R/3 adapter, WebFOCUS enables complex reporting with cross-module joins, reducing the need for ABAP programming resources.
“We do tons of integration with WebFOCUS, with respect to SAP and many other applications,” sums up Galupi. “For example, you can be running a report and click on a link to open one of our sales proposals. That will access a Java application, which generates that proposal in PDF format. WebFOCUS allows us to think outside the box to create these types of applications. There are endless possibilities for what we can do with this tool.”