Business intelligence software doesn’t have to be just for nerds. BI vendors are putting friendlier faces on their ware, to help manufacturer crunch insights rather than numbers.
German sugar and packaged food producer Sudzucker AG learned all about intense market upheaval long before the recession hit. In late 2005, after nearly four decades of protective regulations, the EU opened Europe’s borders to outside suppliers.
Suddenly, Sudzucker had to think hard about how to operate efficiently in a markedly more competitive environment. One technology it examined: business intelligence, or the practice of extracting nuggets of valuable knowledge about operations that otherwise remain hidden away in the morass of disparate systems, databases, and processes.
Sudzucker’s “sugar conversion” group, which packages and transports bulk, boxed, and bagged finished product, tapped CDC Software’s Factory, which went live at the company’s Plattling, Germany, operations last fall and which Sudzucker plans to activate in June in Tienen, Belgium, and later in Roye, France. Everyone, from the corporate chief of sugar packaging and transport, Peter Koopmans, to country bosses, to plant managers will use it help them clearly see where there are trouble areas and bright spots, and what to do about them — whether to stop production, shift it, or make other sorts of changes.
“It gives us information to help us run our business properly,” says Johan Savonet, head of the €5.8 billion company’s Belgian sugar packaging and transporting operations. The company is targeting a 10% efficiency improvement with the CDC software.
Sudzucker is just one of thousands of manufacturers that, pressured by recessionary forces and challenged to manage information that is increasingly spread around the world in global operations and supply chains, are looking for sage insights from business intelligence software. Never has the phrase “if only we knew what we know” had more relevance to manufacturers than it does today.
“Even in the current tough economic times, BI initiatives continue to be front and center of most enterprise business and IT agendas,” says Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson. “In spite of a certain degree of retrenchment in other enterprise software market segments, BI-related activities keep on rising.”
The idea of extracting informed analysis from mountains of data is not new. The apocryphal “data mining” tale about the supermarket that rearranged its layout of beer and diapers to make sure men bought suds when their wives sent them out to buy nappies goes back a decade or two. The drive to do that has continually strengthened and has led large enterprise and database software companies to buy business intelligence specialists in recent years — for example, SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects, Oracle’s of Hyperion, and IBM’s of Cognos.
But what’s changing now is that software companies are increasingly masking the technological underpinnings and interfaces from business users. Instead, vendors are striving to make the products easy to use in a language and format that business executives find relevant. While vendors also continue to enlarge the capacity of data that users can quickly analyze, it is ultimately the usability that will determine whether, say, a managing director can clearly see the meaning of data or whether he or she simply receives another indecipherable IT-style report. Gone are the days of simply crunching data. BI now has to crunch the insights.
That was the theme at SAP’s SAPPHIRE end-user conference in Orlando, FL, last month, when SAP announced a new business intelligence software package called Business Objects Explorer, meant to improve the usability of SAP’s earlier BI software, Business Objects Polestar. SAP also said that Business Objects Explorer will work with the company’s NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator, essentially meaning, according to SAP, that Business Objects Explorer will not only be easy to use, but also work with ever large volumes of data, at blazing speeds.
But in a world forever befuddled by the language of technology, the usability stood out.
