IBM Cognos to Deliver Hardware Cost Savings
overview
With help from IBM Cognos Express and PREDICTif Solutions, our customer was able to upgrade, consolidate, and standardize their diverse reporting systems, saving at least $50,000-75,000 a year in hardware costs, and increasing productivity by 100-125%.
The company is a privately held diversified manufacturer with operating subsidiaries engaged in the production of commercial van bodies, step-vans, funeral coaches, limousines, mid-sized buses, pick-up truck bed enclosures and tonneau covers, precision machined components and expandable foam plastics. The company operates with a decentralized management and operating structure. Subsidiaries have complete operational, financial and administrative responsibility, with professional and executive management support provided by the corporate staff.
challenges
The customer has grown significantly in the last few years, acquiring six separate business units. As each unit maintained its own staff, product lines, customers, as well as its own ERP system, reporting processes were difficult to manage. The business and corporate units had limited visibility into crucial arenas, such as performance at plant levels, costs, margins, overhead, material savings, etc. Due to the nature of their sustainable growth, they lacked consistency in information and standardization processes. In addition, the information reporting and planning processes that were in place were antiquated. With manual and laborious systems in place that included spreadsheet formatting, crucial business information was often inconsistent and difficult to come by in a timely manner. They needed a way to upgrade their system into an automated, consolidated, and standardized. That way, corporate and business units would be able to quickly and easily view crucial information at both a detailed and broad level, allowing them to manage effectively and respond to any potential problems or risks immediately.
approach
- Leverage PREDICTif’s recognized experience and expertise to implement a business intelligence solution tailored to the customer’s needs.
- Purchase multiple IBM Cognos Express modules.
- Consolidate, standardize, and automate reporting and forecasting processes across all distinct business and corporate units.
results
- Implementing IBM Cognos and PREDICTif services, provided end users with an intuitive budgeting, forecasting, and reporting solution with BI capabilities.
- Created a system of easy-to-understand dashboards that automatically provide critical information across all business units, allowing management and corporate to assess performance and risk in a timely manner.
- Implemented a cost-effective solution, saving $50-75,000 a year in hardware costs alone.
- Eliminated the need for report builders by empowering end users with an easy-to-use system.
- Allowed IT staff to focus on IT needs instead of spending several hours a day loading data and fixing reporting issues.
- Increased productivity by 100-125%.
- Reduced time to deliver manual reports by well over 200%.
benefits
- Upgrade and consolidate budgeting, forecasting, and reporting systems into one easy-to-use solution, IBM Cognos Express.
- Using IBM Cognos Express, significantly reduce manual reporting from the separate business units by over 200%.
- Generate consolidated, standardized reports that include product line costs and margins, fast and efficiently to make better business decisions.
- Create easy-to-use reporting dashboards across all business units and corporate units, so that all levels of management can assess performance and risk in real time.
- Increased productivity by 100-125%.
- Employ PREDICTif Solutions consultants to install a cost-effective solution, and even complete phase one of the project early and on-budget.
- Leverage PREDICTif’s proven expertise to build a solution specifically tailored to the customer’s needs.