Lauritz Knudsen
NORRIQ's Shock Treatment for Schneider Electric Reporting.
When Schneider Electric ISC-Industry, who manufacture products for Lauritz Knudsen amongst others, were faced with organisational change they quickly realised that they needed to automate some of their business processes. After assessing a number of Business Intelligence solutions they chose a Targit-based product from NORRIQ: a choice quickly proved its worth. Since imple-menting their solution ISC-Industry have been able to save a full-time position.
Profile
ISC-Industry is an independent company in the Schneider Electric group, and their factory in Ringsted, Denmark manufactures the majority of Lauritz Knudsen's prod-ucts including components destined for markets in Europe and Asia. Schneider Electric has 114,000 employees in more than 100 countries with a turnover of 18.3 billion Euros in 2008. Schneider Electric Denmark employs 500 members of staff.
As a global energy optimisation specialist, Schneider Electric provide integrated solutions across the full range of business sectors from energy and infrastructure to industry, data centres, networks, building automation and houses.
One full-time position saved
A company like Schneider Electric ISC-Industry produces enormous quantities of data on a daily basis from across its manufacturing and delivery divisions. It is, of course, of crucial importance that staff and managers can access this business critical information as quickly and easily as possible. Previously, the company extracted data manually from their existing ERP system and used Excel sheets for reporting purposes. Their new Targit solution from NORRIQ soon put paid to that: ”Before we got our new system our controller used to have to process our back order, delivery quality and key quality performance indicators manually.
This was both an expensive and unproductive way of working, and it left us very dependent on that one member of staff. If the individual in question was off sick or on holiday we had difficulty accessing the information we needed. Furthermore, reports were stored on our network and staff for who the data was intended had to actively retrieve it – it wasn't sent to them. This meant that the reports weren't used as actively as they could have been.
Our new Targit solution provides us with live reporting functions that are very visual. All the relevant employees can access the figures via Targit Web and report mails are sent to staff automatically. Our controller no longer has to spend time preparing the reports, freeing him up for other important tasks. If you look at all the Targit tools we use we've saved the equivalent of a full time position” says ISC Industry IT Manager Flemming Jensen.
An intuitive tool at a very fair price
One of the other advantages which has really impressed Flemming Jensen about the NORRIQ BI solution is that it is extremely intuitive and easy to use. ”I was actually quite surprised by how easy the system was to use. In fact, it was so easy that we haven't had to arrange any sort of tuition for our users. That alone has saved us a lot of money. We've also found that maintenance costs are pretty much non-existent.
If we want to generate a new type of report or some other form of data we can make the necessary changes ourselves in one place, and then re-run it. It is definitely a very intuitive tool which is designed to be simple to use. When I compare it to the other solutions we looked at it's also very good value for money. We've got a solution that fully meets all our requirements and at a price that's way below what competing systems cost.
Even the implementation process was painless, and NORRIQ have acted with complete professionalism throughout. They delivered on time and on budget and the product has met all the agreed requirements.”
Better overview and shorter management meetings
Schneider ISC Industry's new Targit-based BI solution provides a much better over-view of the company's KPIs and has meant that management meetings now take much less time. This is, amongst other things, a direct result of the intelligent agents built into the solution package which ensure that the company can react quickly if KPIs change.
”We hold management meetings on a weekly basis in which we review our main KPIs. Our new system has made it much easier for us to gain an overview of our targets as our KPIs now come colour-coded. We only need to look for the red KPIs and can quickly get to the substance of the data we need and find out where problems are greatest.
This has meant that we can reduce meeting times from one and half hours to half an hour. It's also made it much easier for our production managers to manage back orders and deliveries generally. Plus, it's an enormous advantage that reports are now available to all who need them and can be distributed by e-mail or accessed over the Internet. We've got ourselves a really excellent solution that's easy to use and easy to implement – all at a very competitive price” summaries Flemming Jensen.
