Driving Agile Wins in Heavy Manufacturing

Case Studies
Hamish Imrie - Principal Consultant

"The introduction of the PFEP (Plan for Every Part) had an immediate impact on the business. In addition, with saving down the daily data, trending was built, which enabled stakeholders to identify emerging problems at a buyer or material group level."

CLIENT SUCCESS STORY

Company Highlights

Region: USA

Sector: Engineering

Industry: Manufacturing

Division: Operations

Solution Technologies: Qlik, SAP

Solution Products: QlikView SAP Connector

Solution Service Type: Project

 

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Pomerol Partners implemented a BI platform for a large North American-based engineering and manufacturing client. Data came from multiple plants in the US and 8 other countries. To add to the complexity, the data was from multiple ERP systems including SAP. The client is a mid-tier SAP user (revenue above $6 billion but below the bulk threshold of $10 billion). Pomerol often find that clients in this range are big enough to warrant an SAP ERP solution but have often not adopted the traditional SAP peripherals like SAP Business Warehouse and Business Objects due to cost. Pomerol was called in to help the business transform with data literacy – enabling the business to work better with data. This client also requested specific analysis and reporting via a daily PFEP (Plan for Every Part) report and a system for cleaning up vendor reporting.

 

C H A L L E N G E S

Data Inefficiency & Inconsistency: 

  • Heavy reliance on extracting reports from SAP to Excel and then doing further manipulations in complex workbooks that were prone to error.
  • Key users were spending an overly large portion of their day with data extractions.
  • Key users were often performing the same data manipulations as their colleagues which caused a lack of productivity and therefore different versions of the truth.

Incomplete Parts Data:

  • A new plant was being stabilized in a new geographic location. Due to receiving issues and poorly configured lead-time master data, there were severe shortages of critical materials on the shop floor. The impact of this amounted to major rescheduling and last-minute retooling of the production line and importantly hefty penalties from expectant customers.

Lack of Companywide Data Integration:

  • Duplicate vendors existed in the system and the nationwide purchasing from branches and chains was not easy to report on due to badly captured vendor master data.
  • Purchasing department was under enormous pressure to achieve meaningful cost savings.

 

S O L U T I O N

At the time, the client did not have a data warehouse in any shape or form, so the first iteration of a BI environment was
based off direct table extracts from SAP. Every day more than 135 tables were extracted from SAP using RFC read table. Extraction filters were used where possible and delta loads were placed on tables that had timestamps or sequenced entries. During the pilot phase the selected extraction tool was Data3Sixty Analyser (Lavastorm), however the QlikView SAP Connector was used for actual production purposes.

The PFEP report was designed, built and productionised in a short amount of time using QlikView. In order for the report to be flexible, colour thresholds were coded into variables so that changing a variable lead to a rapid recalculation of the report.

To clean up vendor reporting, Pomerol modelled an application in such a way that the selection of a vendor resulted in seeing all purchase orders and invoices for a vendor. Invoices that were matched to an vendor were reported accordingly however the trick was to model open purchases orders alongside non-PO invoices. Additional logic was coded into the report to roll-up branch vendors and to group duplicate vendors under a single name so that analysis of vendor spend at a group level
could be done.

R E S U L T

An end to end BI reporting solution using SAP data in an agile method. A comprehensive Procurement and Spend application with 5 years of procurement data consisting of 14 million records of data (invoices, payments, purchase orders, goods receipts and vendor records). The introduction of the PFEP which had an immediate impact on the business. In addition, with saving down the daily data, trending was built, which enabled stakeholders to identify emerging problems at a buyer or material group level.

 

A B O U T  P O M E R O L

Pomerol Partners creates and delivers meaningful data-driven business solutions and services. We’ve been operating in Data Analytics and Intelligence Reporting for over 9 years and our Partners have a cumulative 100 years in global experience. In 2013, Pomerol spun out of Deutsche Bank after a range of successful BI projects were delivered saving the bank over $3m. Ever since then we’ve been partnering with our clients (executives, managers, analysts, etc.) across all business verticals to optimize the intersect between changing business demands, technological progress and sustainable business growth.

Our consultants have helped hundreds of organizations, of all sizes and in all industries worldwide, make money. How do we do this? Leveraging your data to increase revenue, automate processes, decrease costs and understand your insights. Pomerol delivers value that helps you grow and change with better data-driven decisions and solutions that empower you as an Elite Qlik Partner as well as a Gold Data Platform, Silver Data Analytics and Silver Cloud Platform Microsoft Partner.  Our professional consultants, that reside in three countries (United States, United Kingdom and Portugal), are experts that will partner with you for the technical as well as business-oriented solutions. Working with the same team in all capacities ensures you always know where we stand with our work and commitment to you.

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