Seeing the trees, and then the forest
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 7/1/2006 6:00:00 AM
For SAS, bringing business intelligence (BI) capability to market was a no-brainer, and so it's proved. "We've sold a lot of platforms, and are pleased with what our customers have done with them," says Mike Newkirk, SAS manufacturing industry strategist.
The plan, he explains, was to go to market with custom-made niche BI applications: packaged pieces of functionality pre-configured to address particular manufacturing missions.
SAS Demand Intelligence, for example, enables market-driven planning through accurate demand forecasting and optimal inventory replenishment. SAS Activity-Based Management, meanwhile, helps manufacturers maximize profit, reduce costs, and streamline processes by determining the cost of processes and the profitability of products, customers, and suppliers.
SAS Supplier Relationship Management—of which an enhanced version was launched in August 2005—allows procurement departments to gain a better understanding of their purchases, suppliers, and performance to support better strategic sourcing decisions. "It's about helping customers improve data quality, reduce enterprise spend, create complete spend transparency, consolidate and prioritize suppliers, and set, measure, and manage optimal procurement strategies," explains Newkirk.
Finally, SAS Warranty Analysis integrates warranty data with key customer, vehicle, product, manufacturing, and geographic information; while SAS Supply Chain Intelligence helps businesses drive revenue and reduce costs by anticipating customer demand, improving supplier strategies, and identifying actions to improve service levels.
But if attention to detail and focus was the strategy, the result was dangerously close to myopia. "What we'd missed was how companies were buying business intelligence applications to fulfill some very broad requirements," confesses Newkirk.
But that's changing now too. At LG Electronics, for example, the intention was to develop an integrated activity-based costing model across its 76 subsidiaries around the world. "Using business intelligence, it took less than a year to build, despite multiple sources of data and multiple ERP systems," he says. "Some customers find that speed of implementation shocking—but speed is the name of the game."
Another example is longtime SAS user Steelcase, a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based office furniture maker, adds Newkirk. SAS software is embedded within how the company does business, undertaking a truly impressive range of analytical functions, stretching from demand forecasting to providing large customers with reports detailing what they've bought, irrespective of which dealer it was bought through. There's even a cash ROI, with SAS now undertaking tasks formerly farmed out to third parties for a fee. "We're data-agnostic," says Newkirk. "If it exists in numeric form, we can work with it."
