Making All the Right Moves With BI

Plus Relocation Boosts Global Business With Powerful Reporting and Performance Management

After losing three major contracts in a row, key decision makers at Plus Relocation Services were baffled. For nearly 40 years, the company has helped move corporations and their employees down the block or around the world when relocation becomes necessary. The staff is committed to pleasing its clients on a daily basis, and in an industry where speed and efficiency rule, Plus Relocation has made a name for itself by tailoring its services to each client's specific needs.

"We are customer-intimate by design, as opposed to commodity or price-driven," says Chairman and CEO Mick Lee. "We are able to design programs to fit the needs of corporate clients in a customized way."

So why was business slowing down in the spring of 2007?

When asked for feedback, three prospective clients informed Lee and his team that the company's reporting shortfalls were the primary reason for their decisions to select other vendors. These three accounts alone represented more than $2 million in lost revenue.

"We consistently heard that we needed to improve our customer-facing reports and dashboards. That's why we weren't winning key accounts," admits Lee.

Plus Relocation decided to tackle these business intelligence (BI) issues by adhering to its own admirable vision statement: use best practices to satisfy customers and become the best relocation company in the world.

Settling Down With a New BI Solution

As a small company from the Midwestern United States, Plus Relocation was confident that a strong business intelligence platform could improve its ability to attract customers and boost international relocation capabilities. According to Matt Butz, business application manager at Plus Relocation, the company's former customer-facing information systems lacked usability and sizzle. "We wanted to present a more modern technological face to our customers with graphics, menus, and flexible reporting capabilities," he explains. "We thought the right BI environment would boost sales and encourage collaboration."

In the search for a business intelligence solution powerful enough to revamp the company's information systems and flexible enough to create easy-to-use dashboards for internal and external users, the team was attracted to WebFOCUS. Butz says the decision hinged on Information Builders' proven success in Web-based reporting and performance management, coupled with the extensive functionality of its data visualization software. Armed with an integrated set of business intelligence tools, they were ready to make their move.

Unpacking New Reports and Graphs

The team rolled out a new customer dashboard in January 2008 called InformAgility. Information Builders Professional Services helped with the first iteration of the dashboard to accommodate a tight timeframe. Lee credits the consultants with helping Plus Relocation develop a vision for business intelligence that improves their business on every front. Plus Relocation also purchased an Information Builders Education Passport, giving their personnel unlimited access to local training from Information Builders' Education department.

Information Builders helped the development team build a variety of self-service reporting capabilities for everyone, from procurement staff to the CFO. The reports and dashboards won accolades from clients around the world, many of which helped to further streamline the design during subsequent phases. The team received extensive feedback from Google, National Semiconductor, Target, EMC, Xcel Energy, and other customers.

Once the basic architecture was in place, the development team used WebFOCUS Enable for Adobe® Flex® to add reports, graphs, and other visual representations of the data, including graphical drill-downs that let users filter and manipulate information according to their needs.

Plus Relocation is now able to share more information with clients even as it publicizes its expertise through increased transparency. "The dashboards keep clients abreast of everything we are doing on their behalf," explains Lee Waage, Plus Relocation's business application manager.

For example, if an employee moves from San Francisco to Singapore, the employer can estimate how much that relocation will cost and then use InformAgility to track expenses against that estimate. A customer-facing dashboard presents statistical information about employees, policies, and costs. Over the long term, this makes it easy for clients to analyze outsourcing data to create better relocation packages, keep track of expenses, and stay on budget throughout the year.

WebFOCUS parameterized reporting gives clients the flexibility to identify pertinent information and slice-and-dice the data on demand. "Instead of limiting users to a few different viewpoints, each parameterized WebFOCUS report allows them to view the data in thousands of different ways," says Lee.

In addition to increasing collaboration with customers, the new BI system enhances internal business processes. For example, Lee and his team formerly had to manually review expenditures with each client at the end of each year before making recommendations for enhancing their relocation programs. Now, InformAgility provides this information on a self-serve basis, so clients can view the expenditures themselves and make budgetary adjustments throughout the year.

Plus Relocation also used WebFOCUS Enable for Adobe® Flex® to integrate graphics into its proposals, including interactive reports, dropdown menus, and dashboards. These Active Reports – embedded right into the proposal documents – reveal Plus Relocation's BI capabilities during the early stages of the sales cycle, when they respond to RFPs.

"History has taught us that if we can get a seat at the table and talk to potential clients, we almost always win the bid. Now technology is helping us to get that seat," says Waage.

Thanks to these embedded BI capabilities, Plus Relocation recently won a bid from a well-known semiconductor company. "A lot of the credit is due to WebFOCUS and the work our developers have done with it," says Lee. "The BI software has a big impact on our sales presentations, as well as increasing the loyalty of existing clients."

Turnkey Performance Management With WebFOCUS PMF

In the near future, Plus Relocation plans to deploy WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework (PMF) to complement its existing Balanced Scorecard initiative. According to Waage, there are four pivotal aspects to the initiative to date: grow profitably, deliver customer satisfaction, provide a world-class workforce, and improve organizational effectiveness.

"We currently use an Excel spreadsheet to manage Balanced Scorecard objectives and goals," he explains. "We plan to replace this spreadsheet with WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework so we can better monitor our progress with respect to these performance objectives."

For example, growing profitably will require the use of discrete metrics such as new account sales, increasing margin, referral capture rate, global expansion, start dates, and due dates. Using Excel, staff members can only note that a task has been completed when the corresponding goal is reached, such as when sales reach a certain milestone. PMF, on the other hand, will enable the team to continuously measure its progress towards goals, and even capture information from the database and automatically update a dashboard with numeric values to monitor performance and create accountability for achieving goals. "The better we can automate that, the quicker we can get the corresponding business activity on track," says Waage.

Making Plans for the Future

In summary, this powerful business intelligence system gives Plus Relocation the competitive edge it needs to acquire and retain new clients. The staff can offer better services, keep close tabs on each client's budget, and communicate more effectively with customers about the costs and potential issues associated with particular moves. So far, there are 179 external/client users and 57 internal/employee users.

"Our WebFOCUS dashboards give us reporting capabilities that our competitors simply don't have," says Lee. For example, employers who purchase and resell their employees' former homes can track appraisals, listing prices, and any offers for each property. They can drop in different pricing structures to perform ‘what-if' scenarios – a valuable capability in today's housing market.

In the future, the team hopes to convert the external-facing dashboards from HTML to FLEX®, which will make the self-service environment even more appealing to end-users. They also plan to roll out a performance management environment to help managers set strategic goals, conduct planning exercises, and link daily activities to long-term business objectives.

"We've only scratched the surface of Information Builders BI and performance management capabilities," says Lee. "I'm also interested in using predictive analytics to recommend different tracks for our clients. We can help them make revisions faster using Visual Discovery, which will enhance customer intimacy and encourage collaboration."

Finally, the team plans to use WebFOCUS to merge information from Plus Relocation's suppliers with its own database in order to build a more comprehensive storehouse of relocation information. Corporate clients will then be able to track orders of home goods, investigate real estate prices, and monitor relocation activities without ever leaving the Web portal.

"In this economic environment, we have to work harder to get new accounts," concludes Lee. "We want to maintain our growth by earning new accounts and by continuing to delight our customers with better service and enhanced reporting technology. This new system aligns with our vision statement to be the world's best relocation company."