The Six Levers of a Comprehensive Reporting Strategy

A company’s reporting strategy provides the foundation for a robust and mature information management program designed to deliver timely, relevant and actionable information to the company’s management in order to make sound decisions when executing the corporate strategy. Regrettably, most companies have have an incomplete reporting strategy, not having considered all of the dimensions required to produce a mature reporting environment.  

A mature reporting strategy is based on six levers:

1. Corporate Strategy,
2. Information Management,
3. Process Management,
4. Organizational Alignment,
5. Reporting Governance, and
6. Technology Enablement

These six levers work together to effective drive a company’s information management program. Managed as a strategic asset, the information generated and reported to a company’s management group will yield valuable and actionable insights. All of these levers must be incorporated into the reporting strategy in order to yield the most effective reporting environment.  In future posts, I'll delve into each of these dimensions to show how a company can establish and maintain a robust and mature reporting environment.

Welch Foods leverages BI to manage logistics costs

Identifying cost savings around a BI implementation can be difficult, yet Welch Foods, the maker of juices and jellies, has done just that.  The company spends over $50 million per year transporting their products, yet had a difficult time understanding their cost drivers.  Working with a company called Oco, Welch's implemented a BI system using the Software as a Service model.  The article doesn't quantify the cost savings, but Welch's was able to better understand their customer order patterns to identify opportunities to improve truck-capacity utilization.  The company claims their new BI system paid for itself in 30 days.

Something to note is that the company recently implemented Oracle as their ERP system, but still had other systems that were not integrated into Oracle.  As a result, they still had a fragmented IT strucctured and this BI model enabled Welch's to tie it all together.

 An excerpt from the article:

 The BI tool allows Welch's to analyze its logistics costs, volume and order flow "by many different dimensions," including by geography, manufacturing plant, distribution center, carrier, customer and shipping form, according to Coyne. Welch's now can aggregate any time periods, compare year-over-year time periods and analyze volume and cost by any sales division.

"But the real beauty of this is that we have… every data element on every order, every bill of lading and every freight bill in a single data warehouse, and with the ability to look at it in any way that we want, and then, beyond that, the ability to drill all the way down to an individual freight bill order or bill of lading," Coyne says. "If we see something that looks the least bit funny, we have the ability to drill down to an individual shipment or shipments."

Here's the link to the full article:

http://industryweek.com/articles/bi_tool_bears_fruit_for_welchs_19784.aspx?Page=2&SectionID=32?ShowAll=1

Capturing Reporting Dimensions

More often than not, the companies that become my clients have a common problem.  That problem is they're drowning in data but are crying out for meaningful and actionable information.  I'm currently working with a client in just such a position.  A technology manufacturer with a global footprint, this client has an Enterprise application to generate and capture transactional data.  In fact, they have three of them.  What they don't have is a common data repository and common data definitions to accurately capture and tag the data for reuse. 

Best Practice companies are adept at capturing data once and using it repeatedly.  They have also made significant progress on that most cherished ideal - the One Version of the Truth.  The companies that do this invest in the technology - the data warehouse and concommitant tools - to provide the common data repository.  But this alone is not sufficient.  They also excel at governing data with the proper oversight and definitions.  By doing so, they strategically align their defined reporting dimensions with their business.   This way, the various Lines of Business and Geographies  can report and analyze their business in a way that is consistent with the overarching strategic goals of the organization.