Business intelligence (BI) applications within manufacturing organizations have been as fragmented as the BI market itself. Part of the market's fragmentation is due to the relative immaturity of the products and technology, while the fragmentation within organizations is the result of BI historically being purchased on a departmental or divisional level. Fragmentation is also increased because many users need reports and access to the data for many different reasons, while most BI products have focused on meeting the needs of end users or analysts.

But manufacturers' corporate needs are maturing quickly, driving BI vendors Business Objects (San Jose, CA) and Hyperion (Sunnyvale, CA) to acquire Crystal Decisions (Palo Alto, CA) and Brio Technologies (Santa Clara, CA), respectively, to broaden product capabilities and meet the needs of customers who require more complete suites of applications. Today's manufacturers are starting to standardize on a single business intelligence tool to reduce the number of vendors they have to deal with, reduce their total cost of ownership with regard to their enterprise applications, and develop standard business practices and rules across their organizations.

"Average Global 2000 companies have many BI tools, and companies that want to reduce their cost of ownership and get broader visibility into their overall operations want to standardize on one BI technology for all users," says Chris Caren, vice president of product marketing for Business Objects. "Customers are driving us to have the best comprehensive suite of products so they can choose us as the clear, safe choice for standardization."

Both Business Objects and Hyperion traditionally have focused on providing analytic tools and data warehousing technology, but their products have not included the ability for customers to easily distribute reports over the Web, nor have they provided easy-to-use enterprise reporting tools for a variety of users. Crystal Decisions and Brio Technologies provide those reporting and distribution capabilities while also adding increased access directly into operational systems. Another BI vendor, Cognos Inc. (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), recently developed and released ReportNet, an end-user reporting tool that runs on top of its more traditional BI functionality (see sidebar, below).

"We see enterprise planning and scorecarding, traditional business intelligence, and end-user reporting all coming together, and customers are looking to vendors to provide these disciplines tied together," says Paul Hoy, Cognos' director of manufacturing industry solutions.

In response to customer demands, Hyperion has also shifted its focus to business performance management (BPM), which it defines as financial applications sitting on top of a business intelligence foundation. One of the core attributes of a BPM system is its ability to report on operational data from the source transactional systems that capture that data.

When speaking about the drivers for acquiring Brio, Rob Berry, Hyperion's director of product marketing, says, "Our customers want to work with a single, strategic vendor for both BI and business performance management. Since BI is the foundation technology for BPM initiatives, it was important for us to be able to offer a more complete BI suite with end-user reporting and online analytical processing."

Standardizing on a single tool across the manufacturing organization brings a number of associated benefits. For some customers, like power semiconductor provider International Rectifier (El Segundo, CA), having a single vendor and data warehouse means having aggregated data and a lot less time spent collecting data from various user systems for reports.

"We wanted a centralized database," says Doug Burke, International Rectifier's senior manager of financial analytics. "We needed to do that to grow the company without adding a lot of people, and we needed to get some control over our databases." The company had a lot of Microsoft Access databases on users' machines and analysts spent more time collecting data from these separate databases than they spent analyzing the data for reports. Analysts also spent a good amount of time cleaning the data before they could create reports.

Having a single tool also means all users share the same data on which to base business discussions and ultimately make better business decisions. That eliminates any confusion or conflict around the correct data to apply to the issue or what that data represents.

Now International Rectifier's Hyperion data warehouse is updated regularly and everyone shares the single data source using Microsoft Excel as the interface. Analysts are also spending the bulk of their time analyzing the data for users. Moving to a single data warehouse was also one of the keys to the company's growth strategy by allowing it to integrate other system data into the data warehouse.

Though growth can't be attributed solely to Hyperion's Essbase data warehouse, the company has "doubled its revenue over the last five years, without doubling our workforce," says Burke. Over the past three years, International Rectifier has acquired companies and integrated data from those systems into the data warehouse without having to change those operational systems. Once the data is in the data warehouse, executives can get a good view of the overall health of the combined organization.

For Penske Logistics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Penske Truck Leasing (Reading, PA), having a single vendor was important in order "to have a consistent look and feel to reports and to shield users from the database complexities," says Tom Nather, senior systems analyst. Penske Logistics' Business Objects system is used corporate-wide and the acquisition of Crystal Decisions, when finalized, should make report distribution even easier for Penske companies. Penske Logistics provides custom supply chain execution systems to help customers improve their logistics processes, and provides transportation and distribution management, as well.

In addition to the consistent look and feel to reports, Nather says having all the data aggregated "helps us with our Six Sigma program. The standardization lets our black belts [team leaders] use one tool to access the data warehouse to manage the measure-and-control part of the Six Sigma program." The data in the company's data warehouse also helps the company measure improvements made within its Six Sigma process.

Another benefit of relying on a single BI tool and data warehouse is the ability to establish and manage the business rules for the organization, so everyone has a good understanding of things like what constitutes a sale or cost for financial reporting. Not only can users have confidence that they're all talking about the same numbers, but they can also agree on what those numbers represent. Manufacturers can spend a lot of time reconciling these kinds of numbers, so having agreement on the rules can alleviate that problem.

"When a business standardizes on a BI tool, they can start to standardize the business rules around their activities and can start to reconcile differences in reported numbers by various departments," says Mark Schwartz, business intelligence practice leader for the business consulting and technology integration firm Accelerated Consulting Group (Plantation, FL).

International Rectifier defines its business rules in the data warehouse, so if there's ever a need to adjust a business rule, the rule only has to be changed in the warehouse. From there, the rule change is propagated out to the other source systems. Though it is important for users to have access to and understand the rules around the data, Burke adds that one of the hardest things to do was to "get people to agree on the rules and definitions, especially when it came to costs."

Most data warehouses are updated on a regular schedule: daily, weekly, or monthly. When making strategic decisions, daily or weekly updates are usually enough, but today's manufacturers also need real-time access to some subsets of data. In most cases, that data is accessed directly in the source system (e.g., MES, SCM, CRM, or ERP). Users have to be careful when accessing data from operational systems because they weren't designed for data analysis and the added load could slow or even crash the system. In some cases, it's also critical to combine real-time data with historical data from the data warehouse so the user has some context in which to place the real-time event.

"There are some activities, like time-series analysis, that require a data warehouse," says Caren of Business Objects. "Otherwise, the analysis can slow down the source system considerably and even bring it down entirely." For most manufacturers, the trend is toward implementing some event-based information delivery coupled with regularly scheduled reports.

Real-time access is getting a lot of play in the general and business press and with company executives these days, but "the big benefit of BI is that it helps users determine strategy and direction, and identify opportunities," says Schwartz of Accelerated Consulting Group. Most strategic decisions don't require real-time access to data so manufacturers should be cautious and smart about the information they make available to users in real time.

Real-time analytic access to operational data is also being embedded in enterprise applications by vendors like Oracle Corp. (Redwood Shores, CA), PeopleSoft Inc. (Pleasanton, CA), SAP AG (Walldorf, Germany), and others. Most of these are in the form of alerts displayed in executive or management dashboards. Oracle has applied the concept of Daily Business Intelligence (DBI) to its E-Business Suite. DBI 5.1, scheduled for release in August 2003, comes with "10 management roles, 103 key performance indictors, 18 performance summary pages, and 133 drill-down reports pre-defined," says Kurt Robson, Oracle's chief applications architect. Most of the enterprise suite vendors have automated the high-volume transaction and repetitive activities in an organization. "Now, we're trying to raise the value of the applications and get to management roles-that's where business intelligence comes in," Robson adds. DBI reports directly out of Oracle transactional systems.

In most cases, analytics embedded in an application offer pre-built functionality but can only access data in that application and cannot cross application or vendor boundaries without more integration work being done. One of the benefits of the stand-alone BI tools is that they have more sophisticated functionality and are designed to work across a variety of systems, though integration can still be an issue.

The advantages of a standard business intelligence suite are many, and the benefits can be great. Properly implemented, these applications let users "manage by exception much more easily," says Schwartz. Aggregated data, standard business rules, some real-time access to operational systems, and a common interface all help companies make better decisions faster, which is critical for manufacturing success. MA