business intelligence in decentralized organizations : a business case

Empowering a “think global, act local”

business strategy with BI core modelJean-Luc CHIRON, CIO Legrand Group

Olivier NINET, Manager Business&Decision

Empowering a “think global, act local” business strategy with BI core model

Content

• 1 - Introduction

• 2 – BI core-Model : Strategy

• 3 – BI core-model : Implementation and Deployment

• 4 – Conclusion


Legrand Profile


Turnover: 3 578 M€

Workforce 29 600(in over 70 countries)

Legrand operates in a vast and solid market with strong long-term

growth potential. This market amounts to some 60 billion euros in

the electrical installation and data network sectors.

Sales by activity

Commercial: 50%

Residential: 40%

Industrial: 10%

Electrical Intelligence

solutions and

services

Integrated

functions

Enhanced

functions

Standard

products

No electrical

power supply

Legrand : focus on Information System


• IT lanscape

– Decentralized ERP : Mapics, Oracle, mfg/pro, SAP.

– Datawarehouse : IBM Cognos C8, Datastage, SAP BPC, WPC

– Supply Chain Management : Manugistics (DRP), Catalyst (WMS)

– HR : Sigal, local pay-roll systems

– CRM : Salesforce.com

– XAO : Catia

– PLM: e-Matrix

• IT headcounts : 322 (incl 98 in France)

• Data-center : Limoges(fr) and Varese(it)

Business&Decision ProfileEmpowering a “think global, act local” business strategy with BI core model

A global player in solutions and

Systems Integration

Founded in 1992

Presence in 19 countries

More than 1700 worldwide clients

2500 employees

Listed on Eurolist C

Delivered in excess of 3,000 projects

An expert in:

* Business Intelligence (BI)

* Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

* e-Business

* Enterprise Information Management (EIM)

* Enterprise Solutions

* Management Consulting

Our key success factors:

* Ability to align business best

practices with innovative and

specialised technology, to develop

IT systems designed to meet our

customers’ business needs.

* Partnering with our customers

through the life-cycle of the

project: from consulting to

continuous improvement, through

hosting & ongoing change

management

* Expertise to create delivery

models which can be adapted to

our customers needs, industry

requirements and cultures.

Introduction (1/4)

• “Through 2012, more than 35 per cent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets”

Gartner Business Intelligence Summit, 2009

• Through reporting and analytical processing, Business Intelligence (BI) solution provide :

– historical,

– current and predictive views of business operations

• Benefits of BI applications are numerous :– Elimination of cost due to legacy reports production

– Group division may control and ensure that local unit are on target for corporate strategy

– Local unit can report, control and analyze their business with a solution adapted to their local needs


Introduction (2/4)

• Through an accelerated series of targeted acquisitions, the Legrand Group has been able to gain a unique global position and raise its profile across the world.

– Over 120 acquisitions

• Consequently, the Group is now a large organization with multiple local units. Each of them dedicated to manufacturing activities or to sales activities or both


Introduction (3/4)

• ERP systems among subsidiaries are not unified– QAD/MFG Pro in Hungary, Mexico, Costa Rica …

– Infor Mapics in Austria, Spain, UK, India, China, Russia, Poland, Potugal…

– Oracle e-Business and SAP in France…

• Organization is mainly globalized– Finance, Marketing, Supply Chain Management, Purchase, IT …

• Before joining the Group, most of the subsidiary didn’t know anything about Business Intelligence


Introduction (4/4)

• Alignment of BI with Legrand’s context has been achieved with BI core-models through an enterprise data warehouse architecture :

– 4 functional domain addressed : Sales, Marketing, Supply chain and Finance

– 1 500 named users

– More than1 500 reports

– 200 analytical area

• IBM Cognos 8 has been chosen for his ability to deliver a complete range of BI capabilities

– Reporting

– Analysis

– Dashboarding and Scorecards

– On a single, service-oriented architecture (SOA)


Content






BI Core-Model Strategy• Legrand is a global company operating with decentralized processes. What value

does Business Intelligence bring to this context ?

• 1 – Performance management can be managed globally– Core model provides the link between the local and the global view : eg, at corporate level,

results by customer is too detailed,.

• 2 – Autonomy at the local level– No need of IT support in local unit

– Ability to monitor and challenge sales representative and team results

– Core model provides both a local (eg. Local classifications of product data) and global (eg : group

level product classifications) view of the same data

• 3 – Empowerment at the field level– Legrand BI best practices are delivered to local unit

– Statistics are delivered to customers regularly and help sales representative find opportunities to

increase their sales


BI Core-Model Strategy

• 4 – Local execution but global control– Core model provides a quality proof process and short delays to reconcile data at corporate level

without mandating common ERP or even common operational business processes

– Financial consolidation in less than 8 days despite heterogeneous applicative architecture

– Follow-up of sales by marketing product line is done at a Group level each month

– Logistic and Purchase are consolidated as well but at lower frequency

• 5 – Agility– Considering new acquisitions, BI core-model helps to accelerate post-merger process

• 6 – Quality and governance– Ability to better manage the quality of local operational system and make business accountable

for data quality

• 7 – Economies of scales, resulting in lower TCO– IT is centralized and maintenance effort and infrastructure costs reduced


BI Core-Model Strategy


Local Vision

Corporate vision

Local Vision

Corporate visionLocal Vision

Corporate vision

Local Vision

Corporate vision

Local Vision

Corporate vision

Local Vision

Corporate vision

• Core-model BI is a different approach than the Enterprise data warehouse approach:

– Data model is unique but physically rolled out in every local unit

– Each local unit populates its core-model with its own data (e.g. customer referential is different

from one subsidiary to another)

– The core model mandates reconciliated data on some domains (financial, marketing product

line). Reconciliation must be done at local level, based on well defined group master data

– Benefits from reconciliated data are not only “bottom-up” : data Institutional reports and

aggregated data views also help local teams to gain from Legrand’s BI best practices

BI Core-Model : General organization

• Organization dedicated to BI core-model solution is a mix of centralized and decentralised

stakeholders


BI Technical Platform

• Definition of common needs with a

restricted number of local subsidiary

• Autonomy when building simple

reports or analysis area for local

purpose

• Accountability on the quality of data

populating the BI solution

• Administration of local access to the

application

• Without local IT support

Local Unit

• Technical administration

• Operation

• Maintenance with offshore

subcontractor

• Servers and licensing costs shared

Centralised

activities

BI Core-Model : Challenges

• Defining and building a BI core-model addresses several challenges

• 1 – Fulfilment of multiple business needs with a generic BI Model

• 2 – Robustness

– BI solution are gathering data coming from several systems :

• Finance and accounting, sales, warehouse management system...

– Furthermore, local units may operate different systems (Mapics, SAP, Mfg/pro,...)

• 3 – Technical architecture

– Impact when choosing to deploy core-model

– How a company like IBM is able to offer Performance Management solution

in adherence with those constraints and challenges ?






Content


BI Core-Model Implementation1 - Fulfilment of business needs with an unique BI Model

• Operational activities are the same within the Group :

– All unit face the same issues issues in manufacturing product; supply chain

management has the same complexities..

• Recommendations

– Elementary data required for BI solutions are similar from one location to another

and reports as well

– BI core-model should not address the specificities of each local unit

– But BI core model must guarantee its end-users an area from which they will be able

to analyse data and address manually those specificities.


BI Core-Model Implementation2 – Robustness

• Simplicity when extracting data from ERP:

– Less transformation rules or filter criteria as possible

– All calculation are done by in BI system

– Scope of extraction defined during specification phase and is wider than expressed

business needs.

• Each local unit must strictly follow these rules and is accountable for its

own data quality

• BI core-model is consequently independent from underlying ERP

• Deploy pilot first:

– One operating SalesForce.com, One operating MFG PRO, One operating infor ERP


BI Core-Model Implementation

3 – Technical architecture

• BI platform may be centralised from a technical standpoint

• Four database cases are operated asynchronously, one by main time zone– America, Asia, Western and Eastern Europe

• The ETL IBM Datastage is used to build and operate complex data flows– Subsidiary running Oracle e-business for example


BI Core-Model

AsiaAmericaWest ernEurope

EasternEurop


• In BI solutions (core-model or not),

delivery to end-users has to fulfil

different needs :

– Activity reporting for local unit or for

Group Division at an aggregated level

– Business analysis for local unit or for

Group Division at an aggregated level

– Dashboards and Scorecards for

several level of management (local or

group)




• IBM Cognos 8 delivers the complete range of BI capabilities

– Reporting, Analysis, Dashboards, and Scorecards -- on top

of a single service-oriented architecture (SOA)



• Before IBM Cognos 8, Legrand was facing limitations when

deploying BI core-model

– Specific characters (Greece, China, Turkey, etc.) are now fully

visible in reports

– With its full-web solution, deployment of core-model is now possible

into countries with low internet bandwidth. Issue with client-server

solutions are now in the past.

BI Core-Model : Next steps


• Migration toward IBM Cognos 8.4

– Expected benefit is to increase autonomy of local units with less and

less IT support

• Analysis is provided with

multidimensional model

• With Analysis Studio (web solution)

• Or directly into Excel (Cognos

Analysis fro Excel)

BI Core-Model : Organization


• Business&Decision provides its BI expertise and is fully

integrated into Legrand’s landscape

Service desk (Portugal)

Operation

Business Application

Support (India)

BI Expertise

Delivery center (India)

BI Core-Model : Organization


• Next step is to include usage of HP quality center into BI

core-model projects

Service desk (Portugal)

Operation

Business Application

Support (India)

BI Expertise

Delivery center (India)

Quality Center

BI Core-Model ROI


• Legrand Group has already deployed several core-model BI

Domain Status

Sales 11 units deployed

Finance 25 units deployed

Purchase 13 units deployed

Marketing 5 units deployed

Logistic Started in Q4 2010

First local unit currently in UAT phase

3 units will be deployed before summer

Manufacturing Started in February this year. First roll-

out expected by the end of this year

• Average delay for the definition of a BI core-model and its first iteration is between

6 and 10 months

BI Core-Model ROI

• One of the objectives of the BI Core-Model is to reduce cost of implementation

• That means :– BI Data model is the same, regardless of the ERP underneath

– Development used to extract data from ERP should be re-used. One set of development templates for each ERP (SAP, Mino , Mapics, etc.)

– Development used to populate BI Solution is unique

– Calculation rules to provide BI indicators are unique

– Set of reports is unique and doesn’t need to be designed or adjusted again for each roll-out

– Each new deployment is carried out at lowest possible cost

– Simplified maintenance


BI Core-Model ROI

• Comparison between BI core-model and classical BI solution


Project Phase First iteration / Upgrade* Each new deployment

Design Phase +30% None

Build = None

UAT = -60%

Go-Live = -50%

Training (Key-users) = -80% (Training session is ready)

Training (Technical

administrators)

= None

Transfer to maintenance team = None

*Upgrade only takes into account core-model enhancement and never specific local unit

request





Content


Conclusion• Information Management and BI disciplines provide even more value in

decentralized organizations– Local processes but global control and governance

– Fast reconciliation (eg : post merger processes)

• With BI core-model, Legrand Group has achieved its objectives :– Manage information globally

– Preserve agility and autonomy at local level

– Reduce IT costs

• Main challenges are :– Organizational : mixed global and local teams from the business lines dealing

with data reconciliation, quality and certification

– Processes: well defined roll-out procedures

– Technology: enterprise ready, but deployed to resource constrained organisations


business intelligence in decentralized organizations : a business case

Documents