Engine manufacturer Briggs & Stratton has reported
immediate production-line benefits from its deployment of business
intelligence software.
The company installed Enterprise BI Server reporting software
from SAS to manage access to and distribution of almost 2,400
reports from operational systems to 1,500 global users in 100
countries.
An SAS datawarehouse is used as a central repository for
information contained in operational systems running on Novell and
Unix. These include reports extracted from SAP R/3 enterprise
resource planning systems, PeopleSoft HR, in-house Unix
applications and Excel spreadsheets stored on Novell file
servers.
The BI Server software has allowed accounts and engineering
departments to view customised web pages reporting potential
problems in production. BI Server is also used to produce reports
that combine manufacturing information with headcount from the
PeopleSoft HR system.
Grant Felsing, manager of decision support at Briggs &
Stratton, said, "We can compare bill of materials against inventory
and shift the day that a particular engine is built, should the
figures show that components are not available."
The ability to extract business value from this level of
reporting has resulted in Felsing dedicating half of his team to
developing further operational reports.
"Operational managers can empower their staff, and higher
management can see if a problem is going to happen," Felsing said.
"We can produce data cheaper and customise the way it is
presented."
The SAS software provides a portal and a set of authentication
services to give groups of users at the company access to specific
reports via a web browser.
Processing is run on a high-end IBM AIX Unix server. Tomcat,
running on Windows servers, is used as the application server to
provide web services to support the SAS system.