iWay DataMigrator Renews Reporting Activities at Visteon

Leading Automotive Components Manufacturer Unifies Its Information Systems

Few business sectors have been shaken as hard in recent years as the worldwide automotive industry. As a leading global automotive supplier that designs, engineers, and manufactures climate, interior, electronic, and lighting products, Visteon Corporation needed to maintain its position as an industry leader within a challenging economic environment.

For the company, staying ahead has involved a forward-thinking business strategy driven by business intelligence (BI) and integration technology from Information Builders. Visteon uses iWay Software’s DataMigrator and several iWay data adapters to manage a diverse set of information systems. For example, Visteon is using four different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in North America. Two SAP R/3 systems store data in a proprietary SAP database, a QAD system uses a Progress database, and a CMMS legacy mainframe system uses an IMS database.

It was partially this information diversity that led Visteon to Information Builders’ data management solutions. Because these ERP systems create three very distinct types of data, users previously had to log in to each system, gather the data they required, and then manually combine it to generate reports. Now, with Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform and iWay technology, Visteon can be sure that everyone sees the same data with the same level of accuracy.Visteon uses iWay DataMigrator to pull data from multiple databases into a single reporting database, and it uses iWay adapters to connect to various production systems in real time.

Leveraging this consistent data store, Visteon has used WebFOCUS to create reports and dashboards for people in finance, purchasing, engineering, and other sectors. These users no longer need to access multiple systems or manually combine data to get the information they need.

The Road to Data Quality and Consistency

Visteon’s BI team handles data retrieval; extract, transform, and load (ETL); and migration services with an emphasis on creating cross-functional reports and dashboards for Visteon’s 30,000-member workforce. Several IT pros at Visteon attended Information Builders seminars and workshops, and they hired an administrator who had previous experience with iWay.

Using these resources, the team used iWay DataMigrator to move data from these three disparate ERP systems into one reporting database. It also used DataMigrator to extract bills of material (BOM) information from a worldwide engineering release system and to extract supplier data from the ERP systems and load it into a global BOM and change solution.

With its intuitive interface, iWay DataMigrator makes it easy to aggregate, join, merge, and apply selection criteria to information from any combination of systems. It synchronizes data movement, transforms dissimilar data types to one master type, and loads data into a target database using either bulk loaders or row-at-a-time inserts. The IT team can easily execute, schedule, manage, and audit these ETL processes through the DataMigrator interface.

BI Dashboards Guide Business Users

In addition to these batch ETL processes, Visteon uses iWay adapters to access the legacy ERP environments in real time. The IT department has used iWay adapters to create interfaces to six global information systems. WebFOCUS presents this information via parameterized reports and dashboards – an instinctive approach for a company that develops instrument clusters for automobiles.

The most marked changes have been in the Purchasing and Accounts Payable (AP) departments. Previously, employees in each area would run unique reports in an attempt to gather information. In many cases, people from purchasing would phone the finance department to try to determine the status of an invoice or payment to a supplier. Has the product been received at the plant? Has an invoice been entered in the ERP system? Has a payment been scheduled? What date will the payment be made? Finance personnel had to manually track down answers to these types of questions.

Now, Visteon uses the iWay Universal Adapter Suite to retrieve data from its execution systems and display it through a WebFOCUS dashboard. Personnel in Purchasing and Accounts Payable can choose the fields they want to display on their reports, drilling down by region, company, plant, division, and vendor, and then outputting data in PDF, Excel, HTML, and other formats.

Visteon’s materials planning and logistics organization in Europe saw the capabilities of this Accounts Payable dashboard and requested a similar system, which is currently in production. They also developed sales and inventory planning reports that enable the MP&L organization to develop forecasts. Visteon now has 700 users accessing the WebFOCUS production environment. Fifteen developers use WebFOCUS Developer Studio while numerous power users create reports for their departments using WebFOCUS Report Painter.

Extending Visibility to Suppliers

Visteon deals with an intricate supply chain, so anything it can do to streamline interaction among its trading partners has a direct impact on the bottom line. To improve supply chain communication, the IT team created a secure interface to the AP dashboard so suppliers can log in, run reports, and see the status of their receivables in Visteon’s global ERP systems, synchronizing their production and logistics operations.

Having global reporting dashboards improves collaboration between North American and European purchasing teams, which could potentially enhance Visteon’s supplier sourcing strategies. For example, if a supplier ships materials to four different plants, Visteon can leverage this information to create more favorable global purchasing contracts.

The company is also using WebFOCUS to transform a critical payroll application as well as replace a Teradata database with an Oracle database.