Digital's PC Division Uses SNAPpack to Maintain Its Competitive Edge
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  SNAPSHOT
ORGANIZATION: Digital Equipment Corporation
PROFILE: Leading-edge developer of computer and communications systems
HEADQUARTERS: Maynard, Massachusetts
THE CHALLENGE: Effectively monitor business controls and leverage SAP R/3 integration
RESULTS: Flexible, scalable reporting solutions that empowered users and expanded capabilities
INFORMATION BUILDERS' TOOLS: SNAPpack

Organizations operating in the global marketplace must be able to analyze information as rapidly as competitive requirements dictate. Nowhere is this more true than in the PC industry, where product life cycles are short and market fluctuations are sharp.

In a PC company, for example, business analysts might need to compare defect rates of motherboards from different suppliers one day, while plant floor staff might need to drill down on the delays incurred at specific points in production the next day. The bottom line for companies that operate in volatile marketplaces is that information needs constantly change. Therefore, these organizations require systems that can readily adapt to these needs.

For these reasons, SAP's R/3 Enterprise Resource Planning system has taken the Global 2000 by storm. Its comprehensive functionality enables multinational organizations to harmonize all their business processes across business units, languages, and currencies. When R/3 is implemented, every part of an organization can work with uniform data and standardized

processes.

R/3 integration promises to be extremely beneficial for Digital Equipment Corp. (recently acquired by Compaq), the leading-edge developer of computer and communication systems, with divisions worldwide.

Clear Mandate for Enhanced Reporting

Digital's European PC Manufacturing and Logistics Division was one of the first business units to go live with R/3 � providing the division with access to standard reports that supply information on inventory levels, material requirements, master plans, and more. These reports gave division personnel a taste of the benefits of R/3 integration and made them aware of R/3's potential for dramatically improving their operations. But to effectively leverage R/3, they needed an enhanced reporting solution that would produce complex reports.

"When the CIO of our PC division visited the Irvine, Scotland, facility, he returned with a list of lessons learned," said Judy Patton, Digital's SAP program manager for Manufacturing and Logistics Reporting. "While R/3 integration was definitely beneficial, the staff asked for enhanced reporting capabilities, such as ordering patterns, order-load analysis, lead-time analysis, and operational metrics. They needed these reports to effectively monitor their business controls."

To satisfy the division's reporting needs, Digital specified four key business requirements for the solution:

Flexible Data Searching: The user should not be limited as to the types of searches conducted: the user should be able to conduct wild-card searches, for example. Also, format flexibility and data groupings, for example, must be predefined, while columns should only list a single type of data.

Ease of Report Sorting: The user should be able to sort data, rather than have to run new reports each time a sort is changed.

Drill-Down: The user should be limited only by intuition when drilling down into data details; preset drill-downs are not sufficient.

Multiple Data Views: The user should be able to pull down data from different R/3 modules, for example, to create a report showing the contents of a customer order and the invoice. Digital turned to Information Builders, an established, trusted partner, to provide the solution.

SNAPpack Power Reporter � The Logical Choice

Judy Patton, Digital's SAP Program Manager for Manufacturing and Logistics Reporting
Digital determined that Information Builders' SNAPpack Power Reporter met all its prerequisites for delivering a flexible reporting solution. SNAPpack Power Reporter provides tools that greatly simplify complex report generation from R/3 by integrating directly with R/3 data, offering metadata that shields users from the complexity of R/3 tables. It delivers strong reporting capabilities and produces reports in popular formats, ranging from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to Word documents.

For these reasons, SNAPpack Power Reporter proved to be the logical choice for Digital. In addition, Digital has a long record of success using Information Builders' tools and has developed strong ties with the company

.

Information Builders Delivers a Flexible, Low-Cost Solution

To test SNAPpack Power Reporter's features, Digital's PC division conducted a pilot program using SNAPpack Power Reporter to create a flexible, scalable reporting R/3 application. The application will track and manage all of the manufacturing orders (released to build, shipped and backlogged, and invoiced, for example) for NT and Alpha-based components.

The pilot involved personnel from several European PC divisions, including the manufacturing site in Scotland, and sales and marketing offices in Geneva and Vienna. It also included representatives from each site and several IT personnel.

There were several objectives for the pilot:

Reducing report development time
Expanding reporting capability with data retrieval from R/3's proprietary clustered table formats
Empowering users with the ability to generate their own reports from R/3
Reducing overall costs by avoiding the need for additional developers

"The results of the pilot were extremely positive," Patton said. "SNAPpack Power Reporter's ability to retrieve data from R/3's proprietary clustered tables was very useful. And because SNAPpack Power Reporter automatically generates metadata from R/3, developing the necessary logical views of R/3 for the managed reporting environment was extremely simple.

"Making a table takes only about a minute," Patton added. "For the pilot, we generated 150 logical data views in only a day. That's roughly a third of the overall number of data views that are necessary for the production application."

Looking Forward: Digital Expects Big Productivity Gains With Power Reporter


After the pilot was successfully completed, Digital started its first SNAPpack production implementation of Power Reporter with R/3 Version 3.1h. The PC Manufacturing and Logistics Division currently has 200 SNAPpack Reports in production.

SNAPpack Power Reporter will provide multiple benefits for Digital, including:

A scalable, easy-to-use, three-tier managed query reporting solution
Productivity savings
Simplified R/3 integration

In addition, the results of a ROI cost analysis conducted for Digital demonstrate that, if used at 100 percent capacity, SNAPpack Power Reporter will provide an average productivity gain of 10:1 over other tools, saving Digital millions of dollars.

Patton expects that the combined solution will be easy to maintain and highly usable. "Having a real three-tier reporting environment is a real advantage," she said. "It won't hurt that, thanks to SNAPpack Power Reporter, the hard part of the job � integrating with R/3 � will be a snap."