Quality Control - September 2004

Standardizing on a single business intelligence (BI) vendor can reduce spending, simplify deployment of reporting applications and provide more timely, accurate and consistent information. According to AMR Research, companies should consider standardizing on a BI platform when the costs of renegade spending, reporting backlog and incongruous reports become prohibitive.

Does the demand exist today for this type of standardization? A comparison of AMR Research's 2003 and 2004 IT spending surveys confirms that the number of companies issuing corporate guidelines for application purchases increased to 43 percent in 2004, a 5 percent leap from 2003 numbers, moving the power away from lines of business. "Application software still significantly lags other markets, such as database, operating systems, and desktop software, in issuing mandates and guidelines on software standards,' says the report. "Standardization is a trend that is building slowly. Wait for the right time and standardize BI when your company has a compelling reason to do so."

A New Standard
Pierre Foods is one company that recently found a compelling reason to standardize the company's enterprise reporting on WebFOCUS software from Information Builders.

"We decided on Information Builders because of their product's ease of use and the responsiveness of the sales and support team," says Sally Miller, vice president of information technology at Pierre Foods. "WebFOCUS is very flexible. We moved it from a Windows to a AS/400 environment and installation and re-mapping of data and reports was very quick and easy."

Information Builders provides enterprise business intelligence and real-time operational reporting solutions. The company's WebFOCUS product is able to meet a multitude of the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundreds of thousands of users.

Pierre Foods produces a complete line of fully cooked beef, pork, chicken, turkey and bakery products for school, foodservice, vending and convenience store markets. Consistent product quality is achieved in its manufacturing facilities, which are located in Cincinnati, Ohio and Claremont, North Carolina. Both operations are operating under HACCP inspection and the Cincinnati plant is among the 10 percent of total USDA-inspected meat plants attaining Total Quality Control (TQC) certification.

The Challenge
Pierre Foods had two major challenges to building a successful BI application. First, the tool had to be accepted by the user community. Second, the solution needed to be implemented quickly and efficiently. Pierre Foods narrowed the search to Information Builders' WebFOCUS. The company chose Information Builders as its standard based on the software's ability to work with existing IT infrastructure and deliver customized reports electronically.

How It Works
Pierre Foods built a business intelligence (BI) reporting environment to improve performance and more quickly resolve issues. The company processes reports to users as e-mails and supply department metrics in a self-service dashboard environment via an intranet. More than 50 executives, managers and sales representatives now view daily sales reports, top line sales revenue and sales profit by division. Prior to implementing the WebFOCUS application, this information was viewed and analyzed monthly; now it is updated every 24 hours and delivered by e-mail every morning.

Pierre Foods is extracting more value from existing data and applications because WebFOCUS leverages data and reports from three existing disparate systems. Historically payroll, labor standards and time and attendance information was only available in three separate information systems. Using WebFOCUS on the AS/400 platform, Pierre Foods now has the capability to distribute insightful, timely information in formats that include PDF, e-mail, or HTML.

Clearly, Pierre Foods is a company that understands the strategic importance of business intelligence solutions. Sharing sales and operational metrics on a daily basis now gives Pierre the ability to address potential problems more quickly or even anticipate problems before they occur.