WebFOCUS Helps NSK Keep Business Reporting in Motion
Enterprise Business Intelligence Joins Disparate Systems for Bearing Manufacturer
Japan's largest bearing manufacturer, Nippon Seikō Kabushiki Kaisha (NSK) produced Japan's first domestic-made ball bearings in 1916, and began exporting them abroad shortly after. It has also used its expertise in precision machining technology to diversify into automotive products, precision machinery, and mechatronic products. With its motto of "motion and control" NSK prides itself on its ability to create products that promote safety, environmental conservation, and connect people across borders.
NSK recently began migrating its mission-critical system to an open environment. At the same time, in an effort to minimize costs, NSK decided to consolidate and centralize its various disparate reporting tools with a single business intelligence (BI) standard that could be used throughout the company. To accomplish this, it needed a solution that could support a broad user community comprising end users, power users, and IT staff. Additionally, the environment had to offer rapid implementation, ease of use, global support, and fixed licensing costs.
The WebFOCUS BI platform from Information Builders met the criteria. Since the WebFOCUS implementation, NSK has unified its reporting environment to help contain costs and dramatically improve development productivity. The addition of List Creator, a spreadsheet generation application designed and developed by Fujitsu Ltd., extends the environment and enables the company to deliver greater value to end users.
Choosing a Single BI Platform
As NSK began to gradually downsize its mainframe-based systems, the company became concerned as each department started deploying its own BI application to address the specific information needs of its users. This approach created significant problems, including an increase in license and maintenance costs as well as dispersal of skills. Therefore, it decided to implement a new information infrastructure that would support company-wide reporting and analysis needs.
The company's IT Operations Department kicked off the search for a standard BI tool to be used among all NSK groups. Key criteria were defined, including global capabilities, a proven track record in enterprise-scale deployments, and the ability to easily expand to future users. It also had to be simple and intuitive enough for various business users throughout the company to generate reports and queries on their own, without assistance from IT staff. At the same time, power users needed to be able to efficiently conduct more sophisticated analyses whenever needed.
As part of the selection process, NSK conducted a thorough evaluation of several products, including SAP BusinessObjects, Microsoft Excel, and proprietary systems developed in-house. After careful consideration, WebFOCUS was chosen for a variety of reasons. "First, it offered all the functionality the company needed," says Nobuhiro Fujii, manager of Corporate Planning, Headquarter Division. "Second, it was highly user friendly, and third, it had a solid global reputation, which was important because NSK was planning to roll the system out to manufacturing plants and sales offices around the world."
"WebFOCUS was the most flexible tool among all the products that we evaluated," says Ikuo Miyaji, IT specialist for the ETA project team in NSK's Infrastructure Enhancement Division. "Users had very specific requirements and WebFOCUS was the only product that met all of them. Other tools were considered unsuitable, as they required too many man-hours for processing, or had functional limitations."
The most important factor in NSK's decision was WebFOCUS' processor-based licensing model. This allows the company to expand the number of users in the future without a sharp increase in related expenses.
NSK was also impressed by the proposal put forth by Ashisuto, Information Builders' premier partner in Japan. It included the implementation of a managed reporting environment, which would empower end users to easily generate their own reports, with little or no intervention from the IT team. The company felt this was critical, since an enterprise-scale system had to effectively support the different skill levels of its various users.
Successful Deployment Leads to Rapid Report Creation
The first application built with WebFOCUS was called RAS, a sophisticated sales management reporting system to be used by company sales professionals worldwide. RAS delivers inventory information as well as available-to-promise (ATP) analysis.
As RAS was being developed, a new need emerged for an enhanced spreadsheet application suitable for global deployment, which could work in conjunction with the reporting environment. Company representatives attended an Ashisuto seminar in which several case studies demonstrated how WebFOCUS works seamlessly with List Creator.
"There were three main reasons for choosing List Creator – its support for Unicode, its high printing capability, and its ease of development," says Tsuyoshi Ogata, an assistant manager of RAS promotion at NSK. "The first reason was critical, because it had already been decided that the new sales management system would be implemented in our China office, and Chinese characters had to be correctly displayed. Second, in order to ensure rapid print processing, we conducted comparison tests with other products to determine the maximum number of sheets that could be printed per minute. The third reason was proven after the implementation of List Creator."
Simultaneous implementation of the two products has already begun across NSK's global offices, beginning with branches in East Asia.
Two Innovative Solutions Working Together
The WebFOCUS/List Creator solution is used by more than 400 NSK employees, including sales management, production management, accounting, and HR staff members.
Combining List Creator's advanced capabilities with the cutting-edge data extraction and reporting functionality of WebFOCUS has reduced development man-hours to one-tenth the time of using conventional tools and Java™, or when each solution was used independently. "I create two to three reports of various levels each day. What is most useful about WebFOCUS is its easy accessibility to data," says Masae Suzuki, a developer from the RAS Promotion Division.
By standardizing and centralizing the use of BI across the entire organization, the implementation of WebFOCUS has helped NSK achieve all its goals – reduced overhead, improved simplicity and usability, and increased efficiency. The company plans to enhance the environment in the future. The first project is to leverage Quick Data, a WebFOCUS value-added option that facilitates the creation of reports directly from Excel spreadsheets. "This exciting new feature will allow the company to leverage existing logic, and give users a more convenient experience by providing them with the ability to create reports in the desired format," says Fujii.