Brunswick taps data integration hub for warranty analytics
By Scott Bury, contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 6/1/2004 12:00:00 AM
Brunswick Corp. is a brand name in recreation—for boats and outboard motors, exercise cycles, billiard tables, and bowling balls—that posted $4.1 billion in revenue last year. Each of its divisions was profitable in 2003.
But because each division has its own enterprise system, supply chain management, and procurement systems, data is stored in different formats. That made it impossible for Brunswick's Lake Forest, Ill. corporate headquarters to know exactly what the company was spending its money on without a time-consuming, manual analysis that still masked areas ripe for cost reduction.
"If the president of Sea Ray [the Brunswick boat division] asked, 'How much do I spend on [warranty claims]?' it took two weeks to get her an answer," says Chris Lemnah, Brunswick's director of strategic sourcing. "It used to take one person two weeks to produce a monthly report. We weren't able to detect a problem unless we stumbled over it."
What Brunswick needed was a hub to integrate data from its disparate systems and divisions. It turned to Informatica's PowerCenter data integration and PowerAnalyzer business intelligence software. PowerCenter finds data that resides in separate "silos," extracts what the user needs, standardizes formats, and allows analysis.
To start, Brunswick looked at one function—warranty analytics—to find common elements among warranty claims across the company and trace them back to root causes. It's said manufacturers spend between 2 percent to 5 percent of revenue on warranty claims [see MSI March 2004, p. 34], and in Brunswick's case, that could amount to $200 million a year.
Identifying root causes is the first step in correcting claims.
Now the president of Sea Ray gets her answer in a matter of minutes, Lemnah explains. "The software lets us track claims on a daily basis. Any anomaly can be seen by the plant manager and head of manufacturing within 24 hours."
Lemnah believes the solution will speed the process of finding how many possibly defective parts are in inventory—and how many are installed—to determine how widespread a problem might be.
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