Building Energy Efficiency With Business Intelligence
TAC, LLC Uses WebFOCUS and DataMigrator to Support Reporting Needs of All Users
TAC, LLC-based in Loves Park, Illinois-is an affiliate of TAC, the building-management and energy-services arm of Schneider Electric. TAC is a leading provider of solutions that deliver business value to customers by enabling them to do more with less energy.
TAC continues to succeed, guided by the mission statement: "Help people make the most of their energy, while providing added value through building services for energy and security." With more than 80 years of experience in the HVAC, energy, and security arenas, TAC employs more than 8,000 people worldwide with partners in 80 countries.
Staying ahead in a fast-paced industry led TAC to select business intelligence (BI) and integration software from Information Builders and its subsidiary, iWay Software. TAC's rapid growth demanded that its ability to maximize operational efficiencies aided by a dynamic BI platform was critical. It was increasingly clear that TAC needed to replace its enterprise reporting solutions.
"We were unable to access accurate ERP information in a fast and efficient manner," sums up Brent D. Schultz, chief financial officer for TAC, LLC. "This meant that we were missing valuable product-management and sales information because of outdated software."
Identifying the Best BI Software
To kick off the selection process for a new BI platform, Sherry Mattson, programming manager for TAC's Baan ERP system, created a matrix listing 35 to 40 different requirements that TAC needed in a new reporting system.
"We had a reporting tool, but it wasn't very robust," says Mattson. "It wasn't user-friendly, it was difficult to pull information from, and it was even harder to try to distribute that information to the business community. We needed a BI platform with more capabilities."
As the evaluation cycle progressed, it became clear that WebFOCUS best aligned with TAC's detailed requirements. As a comprehensive BI platform accessible through robust self-service dashboards, WebFOCUS could deliver the scalability, usability, and performance Mattson's team required while offering across-the-board compatibility with the company's existing data sources.
TAC was particularly intrigued with WebFOCUS' ability to create Active Reports, in which data and analytics are combined into highly portable packages for remote users. With iWay Software, TAC could also take advantage of Data Migrator, a robust extract, transform, and load (ETL) environment that simplifies data integration tasks - such as accessing information from several different ERP systems and combining it into a cohesive reporting database.
Taken together, the BI and ETL software could provide a robust framework for accessing data, scheduling reports, and automatically delivering targeted information to key employees.
Building Momentum With Enterprise Reporting
After placing WebFOCUS at the top of the firm's short list, TAC management met with consultants from Information Builders to devise an optimum framework for self-service reporting. The first challenge was to rebuild the current reporting system. The long-term goal was to establish a business intelligence standard for the organization's global operations.
"WebFOCUS was compatible with all our data backgrounds, it performed better than other products, and it was easy to use," Mattson says. "Information Builders also offered solid customer service. They delivered the best functionality to fit our unique requirements."
With Information Builders' help, Mattson and her team developed dashboards that enable end users to quickly create custom reports with minimal training, simply by specifying parameters and following dashboard prompts. Personnel across the organization's global operations now had ready access to customized reports detailing sales units, sales amounts and gross margins, and the ability to perform instant queries based on metrics such as product line, region, country, business partner or specific part number.
Extending Rich BI Capabilities Throughout the Organization
By freeing up information formerly on various servers throughout the organization, TAC can optimize the analysis of product and sales data faster and with more clarity. As a result, Schultz expects to grow the WebFOCUS deployment and encourage the organization to use the BI software for all reporting projects going forward.
"Our strategy is to use WebFOCUS to eventually replace all of our ERP reporting," he said. "Everyone from the vice president [and] general manager to product managers and sales people see the value of having a consistent, enterprise-wide reporting platform."
Taking WebFOCUS to the next level will involve expanding the company's current 25 users. The developers also plan to use WebFOCUS Visual Discovery to enhance the reporting environment with cutting-edge data visualization capabilities, such as 3D bar charts, pie charts, and histograms. Finally, they plan to use WebFOCUS Active Reports to safely deliver analytic reports to business partners.
In addition, as the company's reporting strategy unfolds, Mattson and Schultz look forward to using WebFOCUS ReportCaster to send reports to key decision makers via e-mail so they always have current information to make solid business decisions. What began with sales could expand to include finance, manufacturing, order entry, and customer care in the future.
"We are moving towards exception-based management, which involves automating more and more of our business processes and limiting human input only if a problem or exception comes up," explains Schultz. "For example, if we have a particularly low profit margin, we can focus on the problem at hand without wading through unnecessary information. We can use WebFOCUS to alert people of past due orders, past due accounts, and so forth. It's a very efficient way to do business."
Looking back on TAC's quick progress with the BI software, Schultz says having quick access to timely, accurate data - with the ability to drill down to important details - has been a major step forward for the organization. Better still, WebFOCUS engages casual business users in the process of creating reports, freeing up the IT department to focus on other projects.
"We're making better decisions, boosting IT efficiency, and reducing time and money formerly spent on basic information retrieval," Schultz concludes. "When we first purchased the software I kept saying that it seemed too good to be true. I kept expecting the other shoe to drop. I'm happy to say that the other shoe hasn't dropped yet, and we don't expect it to anytime soon."
About Information Builders
Information Builders' award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world's most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders' iWay Software suite provides state-of-the-art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data, and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Together, these products give Information Builders'customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.
Information Builders' customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners.
About iWay Software
iWay Software, an Information Builders company and the world's leading adapter vendor, accelerates business integration by providing tools that make service-oriented architectures easy to implement. Clients achieve short-term ROI by using iWay to reduce custom programming and to solve problems quickly, while incrementally creating an architecture that supports long-term projects. The biggest names in software, including BEA, Microsoft, and SAP, use iWay adapters to simplify access to ERP and CRM systems, messaging, legacy systems, e-business protocols like AS2 and ebXML, and more. Additional message transformation and data integration make iWay a natural integration choice – standalone or with other middleware.