Coretec
New Business Intelligence Platform Improves Decision Making
The company chose to standardize processes across its three plants to improve manufacturing operations and enhance management decision making. By implementing SAP® BusinessObjects™ business intelligence (BI) solutions, Coretec has the centralized information and improved decision-making support to achieve these goals.
Business Needs
Centralizing Manufacturing Processes and Decision Making
In the highly competitive printed circuit board (PCB) industry – where profit margins are razor thin – every decision that can enhance productivity, pricing, and customer satisfaction becomes especially important. With three plants in Canada and the United States, Toronto-based Coretec Inc. knew it had to standardize its processes for manufacturing rapidresponse interconnect solutions and centralize decision making to remain an industry leader and fulfill its responsibilities to company shareholders. The company also wished to control spending through greater financial visibility and cut the time and staff required for business reporting.
Faced with an outdated business intelligence system that could not consolidate data across the three plants and different company departments, Coretec decided to invest in new technology rather than spend money on a costly upgrade. Coretec needed to provide a meaningful and quantifiable return on investment to the business user. In addition, the company’s IT strategy called for replacing custom-built applications with commercially produced software.
Solution
The company chose SAP BusinessObjects™ XI R2 solutions (predecessor of SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.0) as its core business intelligence platform and Crystal Reports software as its core reporting tool.
“We were impressed with the robust functionality that these solutions offered for managing our manufacturing and sales processes,” says Coretec CIO Michael Schumacher. “We were also attracted to the complete self-service platform and lower total cost of ownership for the solution versus others in this space.”
The organization-wide implementation was “painless, with no hiccups,” Schumacher says. Of particular help was use of the same internal implementation team for the full deployment life cycle. Coretec used software development tools to build a security framework and interface and consolidated data from all enterprise resource planning instances into a single data warehouse.
The first phase of the implementation took just a few weeks, which further reduced total cost of ownership. The company also benefited from a significant decrease in system downtime and related business disruptions, along with optimized data and report security.
Benefits
Room to Grow
There have been many strategic and operational benefits as well. “The SAP BusinessObjects software has given us a scalable platform for achieving our goals for growth,” Schumacher says. “It has significantly enhanced the effectiveness of our manufacturing processes – which, in turn, has resulted in lower costs, faster time to market, and greater customer satisfaction.”
Now that key data has been centralized and made available across the enterprise, he adds, employees spend less time creating customer reports, and decision making has become more effective. Report development time has been cut from an average eight hours to two hours, and the IT staff that generates the reports has been cut in half.
In the future, Coretec hopes to improve its business intelligence platform further with management reporting tools that build on the software’s self-service functions. “We will continue our efforts to make information quick and easy to get across the organization,” Schumacher says.