So, this is a great example of using information to improve business performance, both collecting it wherever it needs to come in from, including using mobile devices and so on to do that. Pushing that information back kind of to a corporate headquarters where they can do the analysis and break things out appropriately and then pushing it back out to the field again to make sure the field has exactly the information they need and the right stuff going on the trucks in the morning to go make those deliveries. So, a phenomenal job there by this food manufacturer.
The third example is an example of retail business intelligence. It has to do with supply chains specifically as it relates to marketing, and this was by a sporting goods customer. They sell sporting goods, and they have a number of retail shops. Their specific interest was in pulling the right goods at the right time to make sure that product moved off the shelves quickly enough and to make sure that the promotion is involved, with the right promotions.
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Learning From Other Stores
So, they took real time information from their stores and were able to show each other to collaborate among themselves. When this display went up in Boston with these boots and this kind of socks, because of the weather, because of the type of promotion that was going, on whatever it maybe, those things flew off the shelf. And everybody around Boston needs to know that.
If other people are doing different kinds of marketing, they need to know that they should adapt to the type that was being done in Boston, so that they are most effective at selling through those products. And as a result the real-time information was being shared among a wide variety of different stores. They were able to increase their sales significantly and were able to make sure that the supply chain was supporting them, providing that information to their suppliers to make sure that the supply chain was supporting them by getting the goods to them on time.
And then for the last business intelligence example, I’ll talk about is the US transportation command. Now this is not a manufacturing situation at all but its one that talks to the complexity that we sometimes I have to deal with. The cargo here is the most precious you can get, it’s the American soldier. And if someone is injured in, lets say Iraq, and needs to be moved from one place to another its frequently not as simple as putting them onto a helicopter, putting them onto a bus and sending them wherever they need to go.
They might to need to have back to Germany for example where there are some major military facilities. However, sometimes the situation is such that they need to go back maybe all the way to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The issue here is understanding precisely what needs to happen and when so that logistically you can make sure that when they land in Germany, they have the right stretcher, the right doctors, the right equipment, the right medications available to treat that person.
Potentially they may just need to stabilize that person until they get all the way Bethesda, and then when they arrive at Bethesda make sure again that all the right treatment capabilities are there, the right doctors on hand to save that person’s life or limbs. And clearly in a case like this you’re dealing with a wide variety of different kind of systems, and this is the important piece to me as far as the technology goes, it’s about communication.
Being able to take the information within an individual command can be pretty complicated, just because they have a lot of different kinds of systems, integrating that information, making sure its clean and correct so that you know that this soldier with this social security number is in this location, being able to take the logistical information about which vehicles are going to be at which location at what time so that you can arrange transport most effectively.
Being able to communicate outside of your command then to the other people that you have to collaborate with in order to make sure that they have the capabilities available by the time the soldier arrives there, that kind of thing is extremely complex. For the kind of thing that can be done if you bring the information together keep it properly cleaned a share it will all of the people who need to share it with inside and outside of the firewall.
So with those four different examples I think we’ve seen a variety of situations in which the need to integrate the data and share the information that comes from integrating the data can be very effective in things that manufacturers need. Even though they are not all manufacturing scenarios, but all things that manufacturers need whether it is in sales or in supply chain or logistics or delivery.
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When No Power Users Are Available
So what I’d like to talk to you now is integration on the quality side I think is very important, but I’d like to just give you a feel for what kinds of things you do with it, we talked about the specific examples of what these people did, but how do you understand the scope of what you’re dealing? The way that we understand the scope of what we are dealing with is through what we call the click paradigm. So for example, you may have a situation where you got a number of power users. They understand how to do analysis. They are looking for answers to specific questions.
Basically when the boss has a question, they call that person up, and say, hey, can you figure this out for me? Their job is to go into a database or spreadsheet or whatever it is and slice them, dice some information to get answers. Those power users generally have to have two or more BI tools. They like to have an open sandbox to deal with them. They are analytical tool users for the most part, so business intelligence for them means giving them an analysis tool which serves as a whitespace for them to go and attack a whole bunch of data and figure out what’s going on.
That’s great for those power users, but those power users are very small number of people within any manufacturing organization. A quarter of manufacturing organizations don’t even have any recordkeeping at all. So I assume that many manufacturing organizations certainly don’t have the power users available.
What you need to do is consider all of those other people who need to make decisions within your company, and those people frequently are not power users. They don’t understand data structure. They don’t understand queries. They don’t want to understand that stuff. What they really want to do is click on a dashboard and get some additional information. That’s really what they are looking for.
On the left-hand of the screen you can see at the top the power users tool that we saw call our data mashup tool. Underneath that there are some different kinds of paradigms that help these business users get what they need. So for example guided ad hoc reporting. Describing guided ad hoc reporting is difficult because people don’t understand the concept.