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A merger occurred between two North American manufacturing companies. They were able to unite forces to bring unique value to the construction, transportation, materials handling, and agricultural industries in Canada and the United States.

As a multinational firm which has undergone mergers and acquisitions, the new company had multiple and disparate IT systems. They were seeking a more simple and timely way to access business data and improve its decision-making process to successfully serve customers in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Numerous mergers and acquisitions stimulated an urgent need to reconcile disparate sales and distribution models and to gain a clearer picture of business activity. Its existing systems caused redundant work for staff and there was a critical need to deliver more consistent and accurate business information to support management decisions and business users.

A ‘Bridge and Gasket’ Approach to Consolidated Business Intelligence

To connect multiple international systems, datacubes were crafted to house data from different ERP systems and data sources, including Excel, to allow business users to overlay data across different systems and create an international view of sales and profits. This is the Bridge.

Not only did this approach accelerate their ability to analyze important information, it also reduced the current IT report backlog. Users were empowered to mine the information to meet their own reporting requirements (the ‘gasket’).

Leaking Profits Saved by a Web Store

A manager in the call center overheard an agent taking an order and discounting the price of a popular item. On a hunch, he ran a query against one of the datacubes and found that this happened quite frequently. Customers ordering online always paid the full price, so a decision was made to minimize the discounts on certain items. This simple change reduced the volume of incoming calls as more customers ordered online while improving margins in the call center.

China Sourcing and Business Model Reversal

In the good old days the company would ask the sales managers to forecast sales by key customers, customer groups, geographies, key products and product classes. This model began to break down as Chinese suppliers entered the market with comparable products of similar quality.

Today the company sources roughly one third of its supply from North America and up to two thirds internationally. Of about a dozen suppliers, as many as half might be Chinese. And going forward, four of those suppliers might be replaced by three, four or five different Chinese suppliers which provide similar but not identical products to be sold.

While this supplier substitution delivered a new competitive price and quality combination, it created havoc with customer forecasts effectively reversing the business model from customer driven to product driven. Forecasts became useless over time.

The BI Bridge and Gasket approach provides the means to identify and understand problems caused by a transition from customer-driven to product-driven forecasts. This is another example of how rapidly deployed solutions based on current and focused business drivers help companies in competitive industries.

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