Case Study
A manufacturing site of THERMO FISHER SCIENTIFIC felt a need for a full featured data warehouse. Part of the problem was reporting–an after-thought within the current ERP system. That caused difficulty in customizing or building reports. The decision to move forward wasn’t meant only to solve that, but more importantly to fulfill a long-term vision of having access to useful metrics, which would lead to better business decisions.
Starting with a comprehensive list of those metrics by business area, they sought an answer to meet those high level requirements. The idea was to build the solution from the ground up, while providing on-demand reporting capabilities to users as the project progressed. They recognized that they lacked the right tools in their IT department to put this in play. At the same time, the consensus was that BI was the way to go. So, THERMO FISHER SCIENTIFIC sought consulting expertise to build something that met those high level requirements.
Finding a Reliable Partner
In the end, they selected BII Consulting because of their experience and skill set. Now BII had to step up to the plate, and that meant putting the best man on the job – Vladimir, the owner and co-founder of the company.
The initial focus was on designing an adaptive ETL framework that would be reliable and scalable for long term development. BII did exactly that. In fact, their original design has remained intact and has been routinely expanded over the last four years to include most business functional areas.
“BII did an excellent job in building a reliable and scalable foundation of job streams that adhered to strict standards of data integrity.””
Point-by-point, here is how BII served their customer:
- Translated business requirements into the data mart design, and developed solutions using best practices.
- Trained in-house staff making them more self-sufficient in data warehousing.
- Built reports to help them manage their Cognos environment more precisely (such as the user security matrix and the data manager catalog comparison report).
- Developed metrics using Metric Designer and Metric Studio focused on inventory management.
- Provided expert administration assistance in all areas of the BI environment, including software installation, security, environment configuration, and performance troubleshooting.
- Successfully led a Version 10 upgrade from beginning to end. BII did the installation in a distributed environment, used lifecycle manager processes for validating reports, and worked with IBM support to resolve outstanding issues. This led to smooth migration into the production environment without impact to the end users.
- Provided further training as needed.
The End Result: Success
By the conclusion of the project, the data warehouse BII Consulting implemented was widely adopted by users who were able to answer business questions on demand. Reports and events had been incorporated into business processes for timely information delivery and notifications of business conditions.
Also, the financial closing process had been greatly improved through reporting and intra-day update capabilities. The company now leveraged new capabilities within Cognos 10 to deliver interactive content to users through active reports.
“Our data warehouse solution has been very successful. BII Consulting was available for us every step of the way and skillfully handled every aspect of our BI implementation.”
“We knew what we wanted, going into this project, but we didn’t know how to get there. One of our core guiding principles was that we wanted it done the right the first time around. That’s where BII Consulting came in. They understood our vision and helped us build it from the ground up, using BI and data warehousing best-practices all through the whole process. Without their guidance and expertise we would not have been able to pull this off.”