Although Trimac has been using business intelligence applications primarily to analyze orders, managers are planning to extend their analyses to other key metrics including accounts receivable, margins, equipment utility, and maintenance. In addition, Trimac will soon implement a reporting tool that will enable its customers to log on to a secure extranet and analyze their individual accounts.
Deltek Gets a Stronger Grip on Receivables
Deltek, a provider of enterprise software, turned to Cognos "to help us fix what was burning us the most," says CFO Lori Becker — "the high number of receivables over 90 days old." Adds Becker, "It's hard to keep track of over 8,000 customers."
One way to do that, says Forrester Research analyst Noha Tohmay, is through a system that automatically notifies company managers when something goes awry. If an event falls outside the parameters determined by the company, the system dispatches an E-mail alert to the appropriate people.
Deltek turned to Cognos NoticeCast to send alerts about customer relationships. The system sends detailed reports to account managers about each of their customers, including information on the status of receivables, whether a customer has placed a support call, and the degree of urgency of the call. When a customer's account slides beyond a threshold that Deltek specifies, the system sends an E-mail alert to the appropriate manager — even to handheld devices such as Blackberries and digital cell phones, if need be.
The account manager can view the exact invoice sent to the client and E-mail it to other parties for further discussion, if necessary. The system also allows Deltek's accounts receivable department to publish reports displaying outstanding invoices for specific account managers.
E-mail alerts alone are only "helpful in a very limited manner," contends Tohmay, "because the user still needs to resolve a problem." Strong monitoring tools should not only have the capacity to synthesize available data, they should also have the analytical intelligence to come up with solutions and recommendations.
Business Intelligence, One Step Beyond
Although a number of companies have recognized the benefits of devising and implementing a coherent BI strategy, analysts maintain that most have not yet laid the organizational groundwork to reap the benefits of available technologies.
For one thing, numerous business intelligence applications exist on top of the individual vertebrae of the ERP backbone: supply chain management, customer relationship management, budgeting and planning applications, and financial analysis, for example. True, these BI tools are proving useful for extracting and analyzing data at a departmental level — but this piece-by-piece implementation relegates enterprisewide analysis to little more than a distant possibility.
"There tends to be a wall between the enterprise applications and the decision maker," says Patrick Connolly, a worldwide product marketing manager at software provider J.D. Edwards. Part of the problem: Most corporations still expect the IT department to decide how data and business processes should be integrated, says research director Bill Hostmann at Gartner. "All they are doing is creating application spaghetti as a result," he adds.
According to Tom Hoblitzell, an analyst at consultancy Answerthink, one-third of his company's clients don't have the integrated, cross-functional strategy necessary for a successful BI implementation. Frequently, adds Hoblitzell, the will, leadership, cross-departmental collaboration, and skill level required to implement such a strategy is weak or lacking altogether.
As a good next step, analysts recommend that companies create a cross-functional business intelligence team — with the endorsement of top management — charged with the responsibility of devising and implementing strategy. According to Hostmann, a "BI competency group" can go a long way toward setting data standards; defining key performance indicators; and deciding how the numbers will be computed, where key data should be extracted, and who should have access.
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