Hercules Tire & Rubber Gains Traction With WebFOCUS

Worldwide Automotive Supplier Revs Up its BI Effort to Keep Global Distribution Business on Track

From its genesis as a fledgling company born of the entrepreneurial spirit of the 1950s, Ohio-based Hercules Tire & Rubber Company has become the industry leader in marketing private label tires in the global replacement tire market. Hercules customers span 90 countries and include a diverse set of partners, from local retailers to regional distributors to international dealers that move large quantities of inventory.

Managing this vast distribution network is a challenging endeavor that calls for close, careful tracking. “We run a very complex supply chain that requires precise purchasing, shipping, warehousing, and fulfillment processes,” confirms Terry Kin, vice president of MIS at Hercules Tire & Rubber. “The better we can monitor that supply chain and keep the trading partners informed, the more efficient and profitable we will be.”

One of the key challenges facing the company centered around its Activant Eclipse environment, a distribution management application that serves as the foundation of Hercules’ core operations. Powerful as it was, this information system didn’t have sufficient reporting and analysis capabilities, which motivated the IT department to implement a new business intelligence (BI) environment based on Information Builders’ WebFOCUS platform.

WebFOCUS reports and dashboards have provided employees and other stakeholders with vital insight into sales activities and eliminated manual data-entry processes, which improved data quality. WebFOCUS makes employees more self-sufficient, giving them the insight they need to enhance critical business activities and complete their essential day-to-day tasks in a more productive and informed fashion.

Unlocking Proprietary Information

Hercules has built its business around Activant Eclipse as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Eclipse is great for transaction processing, but has limited BI tools and reports. According to Jeralee Seaburn, ERP manager at Hercules Tire & Rubber, the typical reporting exercise involves downloading multiple reports from Eclipse, pulling excerpts into an Excel spreadsheet, and performing lookups to build a custom report. “We are generating 40 to 60 reports each night to branch managers,” she says. “Many departments are drowning in information that isn’t being presented in a usable way.”

Hercules wanted to find a reporting system that would put the correct information into managers’ hands so they could get back to selling tires rather than sorting through piles of information. IT pros surveyed the market for BI tools that could access the UniVerse database underlying the Eclipse environment. “We were skeptical about getting data out of Eclipse since no other BI vendor had been able to do it,” Seaburn admits. “Information Builders was the first BI vendor to succeed.”

Based on its rich heritage of accessing hundreds of databases and file systems, Information Builders demonstrated how WebFOCUS could directly access the UniVerse database, either from the WebFOCUS graphical user interface (GUI) or from SQL statements. Kin, Seaburn, and their colleagues also liked the breadth of WebFOCUS and its many options for developing dashboards and reports to serve various levels of management, both at headquarters and in the field.

During the proof-of-concept, Information Builders used its UniVerse data adapter to access all of the sales information in the Eclipse ERP system and stage it to a Microsoft SQL Server database optimized for operational reporting. Then they went to work creating reports to help the company manage sales.

Seaburn describes this initial BI environment as a PDF compound report with sections for sales, customers, and products, along with custom analytics for their large branch offices. Executives and managers use this sales reporting environment on a daily basis. “WebFOCUS tracks each branch against budget, revealing year-to-date, month-to-date, percent-to-budget, and other essential information, all on one page,” she explains. “The report is automatically generated and distributed through WebFOCUS ReportCaster each day.”

To obtain this same information in the past, sales administrators had to run several canned reports from the ERP system and manually combine the output, which took about an hour per day. Now this tedious reporting cycle is automated. WebFOCUS generates the reports and combines the results into one PDF report. WebFOCUS ReportCaster distributes the report to all pertinent personnel via e-mail.

Making Headway With WebFOCUS

Seaburn and other reporting experts plan to create other reports for the sales dashboard. Once they are in full production mode, about 100 members of the sales staff will depend on WebFOCUS for various types of information, from sales reps to regional managers to store managers. ReportCaster automatically parcels out reports to each particular type of user based on their location and responsibilities. Seaburn says it used to take staff members several hours to pull this type of information together; using WebFOCUS it takes just a few minutes.

Hercules has also used WebFOCUS to re-create lots of existing Eclipse reports, creating more user-friendly, parameterized displays. Useful as they are, Seaburn sees these one-off report development exercises as “stop-gap efforts.” Ultimately, she wants to build general-purpose reporting applications for each department, using WebFOCUS guided ad hoc reporting technology to let the staff access, sort, and summarize information however they choose.

Hercules plans to create these business-oriented reporting environments for inventory, purchasing, replenishment, cash-on-hand, and accounts receivable. For example, inventory reports will monitor turnovers, sales adjustments, and quality issues. Distribution reports will track metrics such as cycle time between orders and customer fill rate, which refers to how often Hercules can completely fill a customer order on time. Accounts receivable and credit reports will use existing Excel algorithms to determine, for example, if a new customer is a high credit risk.

“These types of metrics are hugely important for a distribution company,” says Kin. “Our lean distribution events help us determine the best sequence and arrangement of products as we layout the warehouse. Currently most of this data is manually entered into Excel, which is not automated or repeatable. WebFOCUS will help spread that knowledge and insight where it is needed.”

“All of this information is in the ERP system,” adds Seaburn. “It’s just a question of determining which data elements to extract, how they relate to each other, and how they should be displayed in a parameterized report to give the business more autonomy and flexibility. WebFOCUS makes this relatively easy.”

Gauging a Successful Effort

The payoff for accurately tracking distribution metrics can be substantial. For example, increasing the fill rate from 85 to 90 percent through intelligent stocking would mean a one percent increase in sales, amounting to millions of dollars per year.

While the potential ROI is clear, Seaburn measures the success of Hercules’ BI initiatives by tallying up the time-savings associated with various analysis and reporting tasks. For example, the Daily Sales Recap report, which has been in widespread production for several months, used to take an administrator 30 to 60 minutes per day to create. Now it is virtually instantaneous – not to mention being accurate, since data entry errors have been eliminated. In another case, a report that took two hours to generate now takes five seconds. Perhaps more importantly, creating these reports in WebFOCUS preserves the knowledge of the organization in embedded reporting logic rather than relying on the knowledge in somebody’s head to complete essential tasks.

Hercules has been pleased with the service and support they receive from people throughout Information Builders’ organization, including the field staff, customer support, the education staff, and the Focal Point community. “Whenever there is a question or an issue, we know that somebody is going to be there to help us through it,” Seaburn says.

In a related effort, Hercules plans to take advantage of Information Builders’ iWay Data Quality Challenge to uncover data quality issues that are lurking in their product database. Seaburn says she simply needs to send their database to a secure FTP site and Information Builders will do the rest, using their powerful data profiling and quality management tools to assess its integrity. This free service will yield an in-depth report that provides accurate statistics about the quality of Hercules information, along with recommendations for cleansing it.

“We know we have some duplicate product names and product numbers, which means if managers are looking at sales by various groupings, such as brands, products, sizes, or other categories, the reports will be skewed and possibly yield inaccurate sales numbers,” she says.

Hercules is also interested in exploring the WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework (PMF). “It’s really slick and has a beautiful front end,” Seaburn adds, “with flashy dashboards, built in metrics, and prepackaged scorecards that reveal where you stand today versus yesterday.”

For a world-class distributor with a large share of the international market, this type of financial and operational insight will be invaluable. Hercules continues to push ahead with its BI and performance management initiatives to secure its lead in the international tire distribution marketplace.