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Banta
Global Turnkey
3 . Problem Definition and Objectives
BGT
dealt with a huge number of clients and suppliers on
a daily basis. To facilitate these relationships, a
massive amount of information was required to ensure
that production and all its associated processes ran
smoothly. Until the introduction of iView, the web-based
system launched by BGT as part of its eBusiness Acceleration
Fund project, all data was handled by the company’s
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system with reports
being generated manually and distributed by email.
“It was a manual process and manual processes are
prone to error”, commented Simon McGrath, Project
Manager for iView, “one of the main objectives
was to remove the effort and delay caused by the manual
processes”.
In order for clients to see how progressed their jobs
were, or for suppliers, for example, to see what BGT’s
stocking levels were, they had to wait until a report
was distributed to them by a BGT business analyst. This
caused two main problems:
1. Reports were generated once a week (say on a Wednesday)
but it would take a business analyst around 48 hours
to pull the report together. Therefore, a report received
by a client or supplier on Wednesday would be using
Monday’s data and therefore be out of date the
minute it was received.
2. Additionally, the reporting was done on a PUSH basis,
i.e. clients and suppliers received reports that were
agreed in advance between themselves and BGT. It wasn’t
possible for suppliers or customers to get data on an
‘as-needed’ basis (PULL) – they simply
had to wait until the reports were sent to them.
The process of developing reports from the data was
straightforward but time consuming, taking output from
five BGT systems including two ERP systems (JD Edwards
and Acuman) and Shop Floor Control systems, importing
it into Microsoft Excel and ‘slicing and dicing’
the information to suit the reports. By spending time
on this time consuming exercise, the staff weren’t
adding as much value to the organisation as they could
have been.
Other objectives for the system included:
- The
ability to collect information from the ERP system
and make it available to customers, suppliers and
partners via the web.
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Building a central repository for shared documentation
(to reduce instances of version error).
-
Development and deployment of new reports quickly
and easily.
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