Description
Business Intelligence for Manufacturing Panorama Necto
Business Intelligence for Manufacturing
Panorama Necto
TECHNICAL WHITEPAPER
© Panorama Software 2011
Maximize operational performance, adapt to customer demand, and
accelerate the supply chain.
In this competitive world, making a great product isn't enough anymore. That means manufacturers
can no longer rely on low prices, high quality and on-time delivery alone to keep them on top. These
attributes ? competitive advantages a decade ago ? are now just requirements to stay in the game.
And the rules of the game are constantly changing. Manufacturers face increasing globalization, more
competition than ever, and customers whose demands reflect their own knowledge and expectations
of a global market.
Manufacturing companies today have extensive inventories to track and move, a greater number of
products to generate, numerous suppliers to negotiate with and quality standards to maintain. They
also have an ever-increasing need to acquire, satisfy and retain additional customers to remain
profitable.
Every day, manufacturers receive volumes of data that could help them move into a more competitive
position. This data flows from all directions – the boardroom, the assembly line, customer contacts
and all points in between.
Capturing key customer information can help identify business opportunities and anticipate customer
demand. Yet, many companies can't even tell how much was sold, what was shipped or what
production levels are. This information is critical to planning and forecasting efforts, which can
determine the success or failure of a business. But unless you know what to do with the information
you capture, all that valuable data is useless.
Business intelligence (BI) solutions help to improve your current ability to capture, analyze,
warehouse and mine customer information. This delivers a critical advantage by helping companies
turn data into knowledge, enabling them to develop unique demand, supply, operational and
customer insights. As a result, companies improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their supply
chain, manufacturing process and after-sales service network, thus maximizing profits at optimal
levels of customer satisfaction.
Panorama® Necto™ enables decision-makers to work more effectively, efficiently and proactively by
dissolving information silos, and increasing collaboration between the back office, front office,
warehouse, customer service and more. By transforming the ever-increasing flow of data generated
by disparate systems into actionable information, manufacturers can improve tactical and strategic
decision making.
© Panorama Software 2011
Business intelligence from Panorama can address such issues as: maximizing operational
performance, anticipating and adapting to customer demand, and accelerating the supply chain.
Maximize operational performance
Managers of today’s manufacturing companies receive tons of data: data about equipment, products,
orders, deliveries, conditions, quality and customers. But for most plant managers, it is a challenge to
make well-informed decisions based on the fragmented view of plant operations they garner from
these traditional, stand-alone manufacturing systems. To act effectively, managers and other key
decision makers need visibility into the entire plant floor operations. They need data that is online,
available in real time, and in a format that can be readily understood and applied to real business
problems.
That’s why a growing number of companies are moving to powerful BI solutions like Panorama Necto
that help to integrate isolated silos of information residing in existing systems. This allows
manufacturers to consolidate data from multiple sources to improve production planning, scheduling,
and schedule adherence, and then monitor key operational metrics using dashboards and
scorecards.
Even after products and services have been delivered, quality must still be monitored and problems
anticipated. Managing the multitude of factors that affect quality can prove difficult considering the
complex nature of most production processes, which involve multiple departments within and across
lines of business and globally dispersed suppliers, production facilities and customers. Panorama’s BI
solutions give you the intelligence you need to maintain quality throughout the complete lifecycle of
your products and services. They do it by offering world-class predictive analytics and reporting to
help companies identify emerging issues, determine their root cause, and resolve issues before they
become customer problems.
Anticipate and adapt to customer demand
Customers in the global marketplace have high expectations, but the truth is that many companies
have difficulty understanding and connecting with their customers. And manufacturers must quickly
respond to customer needs to remain competitive. Although the value of providing a more customer-
centric experience is evident, manufacturers struggle with implementing this concept in their
organizations. Using BI, customer retention solutions can enable companies to quickly gain an
understanding of the variables that influence customer churn, allowing them to determine not only
which customers are likely to leave, but why.
© Panorama Software 2011
Unacceptable return on marketing investment is potentially the biggest challenge organizations face
as they strive to interact profitably with customers. With real-time, accurate intelligence from
Panorama BI solutions, campaigns and programs implemented across channels will be effective,
consistent and timely. And with the power of predictive analytics, actual results will match predicted
ones, even before spending a dollar on a new campaign.
Accelerate the supply chain
Predicting every market change is impossible. Now more than ever, managers need tools that
generate the insight that leads to smarter decision making and results in a more efficient supply
chain. When Panorama’s BI solutions are applied to the supply chain, they deliver a critical
advantage to manufacturers by generating actionable insights; anticipating customer demand;
deriving financial insights across the extended supply chain; improving product quality, yield and time
to market; and optimizing supply strategies.
BI enables these insights through market-driven planning, accurate demand forecasting and optimal
inventory replenishment planning by understanding demand, inventory costs and product delivery
lead times. Additionally, by collecting, analyzing and leveraging all aspects of supplier data and
purchasing history, manufacturers can optimize strategic sourcing. This leads to significant cost
savings through strategy alignment and scorecarding, opportunity exploration and detailed spend
analysis with decision support.
Improve Operational Performance and Maintain Competitive
Advantage
It isn't easy to maintain efficient operations in today's manufacturing environment. The typical
manufacturing plant includes multiple vendors, multiple interfaces, complex information flows, and
asynchronous processing, all of which can make it difficult to get visibility into orders, materials, and
production.
To achieve operational performance and maintain their competitive edge ? that is, to buy and
manufacture at the lowest cost, and ship as expeditiously as possible ? manufacturers must
systematically identify and eliminate inefficiencies.
Quality control is also critical to the success of any manufacturing operation. High-quality products
lead to improved reputation of the organization within its industry and help to drive sales. In addition,
profitability improves through the reduction of returns and field service calls.
© Panorama Software 2011
Managing manufacturing data assets is key to maintaining and improving operating efficiency.
However, data sources are typically dispersed across a vast enterprise, while supply and demand
management requires timely access to relevant information. As a result, it is a challenge to make
well-informed decisions based on the fragmented view of plant operations garnered from traditional,
stand-alone manufacturing systems. To act effectively, managers and other key decision makers
need visibility into the entire plant floor operations. They need data that is online, available in real
time, and in a format that can be readily understood and applied to real business problems.
Leading manufacturers such as Philips Consumer Electronics and Texas Instruments are use
Panorama BI Solutions to streamline information flow across the organization and provide decision-
making support that helps them reduce costs, maximize resources and increase productivity.
Powerful BI software allows manufacturers to consolidate data from multiple sources to improve
production planning, scheduling, and schedule adherence, and then monitor key operational metrics
using dashboards and scorecards. Panorama can also conduct defect analysis to identify sources of
quality issues and support initiatives such as Six-Sigma, and report on performance by department,
employee, machine, customer, product, and operation.
Texas Instruments, the Dallas-based producer of technology products ranging from calculators to
semiconductors to sensors and controls, is using Panorama BI Solutions for production yield analysis
and improvement. Prior to implementing its BI solution, production personnel ? engineers, managers
and technicians ? were spending a great deal of time preparing Excel-based static reports.
Additionally, when users needed to change reporting parameters to investigate anomalies in the data
from the production floor, they had to go back to the IT department and commission a new SQL
report ? a time-consuming and labor-intensive process.
But with the Panorama solution, users across the organization are free to view, download, and send
reports whenever they need to. The web implementation reduces the need for hardcopy, and the
automation of the reporting process cuts down the workload for the IT department. Standardization
also lowers costs and enables a rapid, corporate-wide deployment of the reporting tools. Users
appreciate the new freedom and the greater flexibility and availability of information.
Achieve Sales and Marketing Superiority
Manufacturers have in the past focused primarily on operational excellence as a critical dimension of
competitive success. Today the race is on to achieve sales and marketing superiority through selling
models that are cost-effective and that create real value. For manufacturers, achieving channel
control requires unique business insight that can only be gained from real-time transaction analysis
coupled with deep analysis of developing business trends.
© Panorama Software 2011
In recent years, manufacturers have increasingly struggled to gain control over the distribution
channel. Without insight into demand fluctuations, manufacturers cannot determine appropriate
inventory levels in the channel. This issue of channel control has really emerged as a core challenge
for the industry today.
At the most basic level, the best way to achieve channel control is to have visibility into all channel
activity, and the key to gaining visibility across the channel is having timely, consistent, and complete
data.
But beneath this wave of available channel data, manufacturers are struggling to do even the most
basic analyses. To truly take control of the channel, manufacturers must evaluate channel data and
transactions upon arrival, analyze them in real-time, and optimize decisions on those transactions
against key business policies. Manufacturers also need the ability to identify trends to derive deep
insight to anticipate changes in their business environment. The optimal solution for channel control
must capture, validate, and analyze channel data and orders at the line item level ? in front of the
point of decision, and continuously in real-time. The manufacturer that can do these types of analyses
will gain a competitive advantage.
This holistic view of the channel is necessary to determine wholesaler compensation, reveal
secondary market activity, and assess overall channel performance. And that is where a powerful
business intelligence (BI) solution can help. With timely, consistent, and accurate results gleaned
using Panorama’s BI tools, the manufacturer can extract previously unavailable business insights,
apply corrective action immediately back into the transaction stream, close the loop between policies
and transaction decisions, and anticipate changes in business conditions.
For instance, reports can be developed that show secondary sourcing, sideways movement of
products, excessive returns, and even the true cost of distributing product through the channel. It’s
also possible to continuously monitor sales performance by product, brand, customer, and channel.
The next step is to analyze sales trends and customer buying behavior, and report on product margin
performance, customer satisfaction and campaign effectiveness.
Because of the complexity involved in performing these analyses in the pre-BI era, it was usually
analysts who interfaced with the data. With Panorama dashboards, managers no longer have to rely
on analysts and can make proactive decisions based on information parameters that they define.
At San Jose, Calif.-based Altera Corporation, a pioneer of system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC)
solutions, the company wanted greater visibility across functional areas to manage pipeline, inventory
© Panorama Software 2011
and design wins more effectively. In fact, since analysts had to pull sales data from one model, billing
information from another model, and inventory information from yet another model, determining
inventory trends became such a complicated process that analysts could only source the numbers
once per month.
The answer was a Panorama BI solution where all users, not just analysts, could have information at
their fingertips. Customer service, point of sale and inventory sales are a few of the areas that have
been impacted significantly by Panorama’s introduction, including customer service managers who
now have dashboards that enable them to monitor resolution times and exception cases.
Maintain a Comprehensive View of the Customer
In today’s global economy, the manufacturing industry is much more competitive and manufacturers
are often focused on optimizing processes, coping with compliance, or dealing with globalized supply
chains. Consumers, however, have more options, so they can afford to be picky about where they
spend their money. And price and quality are no longer sufficient differentiators, making the way
customers are treated before, during, and after the sale more important than ever.
To build customer loyalty, people who work in the manufacturing industry need a customer-care
framework that gives them immediate access to the resources and information they need to best help
their customers. Manufacturers must develop a focused marketing and sales strategy that includes
enhanced customer care, improved order management, and product and service customization.
That requires what Yankee Group analysts call “strategic customer resources management,” an
integrated approach for identifying, acquiring, and retaining customers — and for presenting a unified
face to them whenever they encounter the organization. But this is precisely where many
manufacturers fail. They may optimize pushing out product, but they don't connect informational silos
very well. Customer information often is captured, stored, managed, and maintained in several legacy
systems — each accessed by different functions and used for different purposes ? impeding the flow
of information and the ability to make good decisions.
Furthermore, effective application of analytics to the gathered customer data is just as important as
integration. Despite this, most respondents to a Aberdeen Group survey said they lacked effective
customer data analysis processes and were unable to establish meaningful performance metrics, yet
this is where much of the value in CRM resides.
© Panorama Software 2011
With Panorama Necto, manufacturers can dramatically improve data collection and data mining
capabilities and offer customized customer interactions at a lower cost. With a “single view” of a
customer across the organization, decision makers are able to identify the true value of a customer,
and can greatly improve customer service.
Additionally, by determining what sold well at different times, or to different customer profiles, sales
and marketing teams can make predictions about what might sell well in the future. This enables
them to tailor marketing campaigns for products that might sell well with a certain group of customers,
or at a certain time of year. Sales and marketing teams can also easily target the right customers with
the right value proposition, based on specific product and feature requests. They can also use this
data to coordinate follow-up activities, such as customized special promotions.
Supply Chain Intelligence
The development and manufacturing of products has become increasingly complex in today’s global
economy. Typically, multiple communities of suppliers are involved, and these communities are
geographically dispersed. To work together effectively, manufacturing partners must have tools for
managing inventory across the supply chain. With a closely-managed inventory, the delivery of
products can be automated based on predicted rates of end-customer sales and achieve greater
efficiency and profitability.
Ideally, executives, managers and even front-line staff should be able to monitor and report on the
actual productivity and business value of vendor and partner engagements, and implement
appropriate course corrections. In turn, an organization can practice consistent, efficient quality
control over the fulfillment of vendor commitments, and record findings in such a way that it is easy
for business managers to evaluate vendor performance, negotiate terms, or initiate new business
alliances. Reliable demand-planning capabilities also help to control costs and align vendors firmly
behind a manufacturer’s business goals.
However, when planning systems are decentralized, it can be difficult for staff, from executives to
floor supervisors, to identify problems in the production line or respond quickly to a change in
customer demand. Without global visibility, it is extremely challenging to track stock volume
accurately and deliver shipments on time. The results are high costs to house and manage overflow
stocks and poor customer satisfaction in delivery execution.
In fact, according to the Aberdeen Group, more than 50 % of all supply chain problems originate with
poor decision-making when orders are received. At the point of decision, the manufacturer must bring
to bear all related contextual enterprise intelligence and business policies ? all order history, near-
© Panorama Software 2011
term forecasts, regulatory conditions, and channel agreements, among other information. And when a
single batch of orders can dramatically alter inventory levels in the channel, the optimal solution for
must capture, validate, and analyze channel data ? in front of the point of decision and continuously
in real-time.
A powerful business intelligence solution, however, can give people across your supply chain visibility
into customer demand and the delivery of goods — helping them make faster, better business
decisions and take the best course of action when adjustments are necessary. With features such as
automatic notification, they easily can keep tabs on inventory, helping sustain optimal item levels
without tying up funds in the warehouse. Your team can plan purchasing at favorable terms and in a
timely manner, controlling costs and ensuring that your organization meets its customer
commitments. And they can connect closely with operations to make sure manufacturing has the
materials it needs to deliver products on time.
With decentralized planning systems, it was difficult for Philips Consumer Electronics division, a
global leader in connected displays, home entertainment networks and mobile infotainment, to attain
a global view of its supply chain. Without that visibility, Philips was unable to gauge product overflow
correctly and had difficulties tracking customer shipments and meeting delivery deadlines.
As part its supply chain transformation, Phillips chose Panorama’s BI Solutions business intelligence
solution to measure targeted performance improvements within the supply chain and facilitate greater
visibility into each step of the process.
Philips can now measure how well it executes operations against forecasts and planning. The overall
supply chain transformation program, in which BI played a crucial role, has resulted in significant
financial and performance gains for Philips: an increase in Income from Operations from 2.1 MIO
Euro to 3.6 MIO Euro; a decrease in Net Operating Capital from 46 MIO Euro to 161 MIO Euro; and a
change in Comparable Sales from a 4% decrease to 11% growth two years later.
“We’re using Panorama to facilitate successive improvements in the supply chain,” said Aart Joppe,
Program Director, Data Warehouse at Philips. “With visibility into issues, we can determine whether
we need to change business processes or [use] IT to correct them. Being able to take action
proactively ensures supply chain issues never progress to the point of becoming a missed customer
delivery deadline.”
© Panorama Software 2011
Panorama Software
Panorama Software helps companies grow revenues, reduce costs and improve corporate
performance by enabling social decision making and unlocking actionable insights contained within
their data.
Leading the Business Intelligence 3.0 revolution, Panorama Software offers a new generation of BI
solutions that introduces a unique way to connect data, insights, and people in the organization.
Panorama Necto™ is the first BI solution that leverages Social Decision Making and Automated
Insights to enable users gain insights more quickly, more efficiently, and with greater relevancy.
Necto end-to-end BI suite includes Analytics, Social BI, Automated Relevant Insights, Smart
Reporting, Dashboards/Workboards and integration with Microsoft Office/SharePoint. Necto is
designed to work on top of any data source - OLAP, Relational, Spreadsheets or In-Memory.
Founded in 1993, Panorama Software is the original developer of the OLAP technology that was
acquired my Microsoft in 1996, which was rebranded as SQL Server Analysis Services and integrated
into the SQL Server platform. Since that sale, Panorama has been a close and strategic Microsoft
partner, delivering the only Business Intelligence application that is specifically designed for the
Microsoft platform.
Panorama streamlines business operations through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premise
BI solution for over 1,600 customers worldwide, including some of the world’s largest financial
services, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, telecommunications and media companies. Panorama
has a wide eco-system of partners in 30 countries, and maintains offices throughout North America,
EMEA and Asia. To learn more about Panorama Software, please visit www.panorama.com.
Worldwide
164 Eglinton Avenue East
Suite #100
Toronto, ON M4P 1G4
Canada
Phone: +1.416.545.0990
Fax: +1.416.545.0877
United States
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Suite #7109
New York, NY 10020
USA
Phone: +1.877.709.5848
Fax: +1.877.709.5888
Europe
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66 Church Street,
Leatherhead, UK
KT22 8DP
Phone: + 44-137-222-4027
Fax: + 44-137-222-4028
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5th Floor
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Tel Aviv, 69719
Israel
Phone: +972.3.645.9777
Fax: +972.3.648.0085
doc_521908242.pdf
Business Intelligence for Manufacturing Panorama Necto
Business Intelligence for Manufacturing
Panorama Necto
TECHNICAL WHITEPAPER
© Panorama Software 2011
Maximize operational performance, adapt to customer demand, and
accelerate the supply chain.
In this competitive world, making a great product isn't enough anymore. That means manufacturers
can no longer rely on low prices, high quality and on-time delivery alone to keep them on top. These
attributes ? competitive advantages a decade ago ? are now just requirements to stay in the game.
And the rules of the game are constantly changing. Manufacturers face increasing globalization, more
competition than ever, and customers whose demands reflect their own knowledge and expectations
of a global market.
Manufacturing companies today have extensive inventories to track and move, a greater number of
products to generate, numerous suppliers to negotiate with and quality standards to maintain. They
also have an ever-increasing need to acquire, satisfy and retain additional customers to remain
profitable.
Every day, manufacturers receive volumes of data that could help them move into a more competitive
position. This data flows from all directions – the boardroom, the assembly line, customer contacts
and all points in between.
Capturing key customer information can help identify business opportunities and anticipate customer
demand. Yet, many companies can't even tell how much was sold, what was shipped or what
production levels are. This information is critical to planning and forecasting efforts, which can
determine the success or failure of a business. But unless you know what to do with the information
you capture, all that valuable data is useless.
Business intelligence (BI) solutions help to improve your current ability to capture, analyze,
warehouse and mine customer information. This delivers a critical advantage by helping companies
turn data into knowledge, enabling them to develop unique demand, supply, operational and
customer insights. As a result, companies improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their supply
chain, manufacturing process and after-sales service network, thus maximizing profits at optimal
levels of customer satisfaction.
Panorama® Necto™ enables decision-makers to work more effectively, efficiently and proactively by
dissolving information silos, and increasing collaboration between the back office, front office,
warehouse, customer service and more. By transforming the ever-increasing flow of data generated
by disparate systems into actionable information, manufacturers can improve tactical and strategic
decision making.
© Panorama Software 2011
Business intelligence from Panorama can address such issues as: maximizing operational
performance, anticipating and adapting to customer demand, and accelerating the supply chain.
Maximize operational performance
Managers of today’s manufacturing companies receive tons of data: data about equipment, products,
orders, deliveries, conditions, quality and customers. But for most plant managers, it is a challenge to
make well-informed decisions based on the fragmented view of plant operations they garner from
these traditional, stand-alone manufacturing systems. To act effectively, managers and other key
decision makers need visibility into the entire plant floor operations. They need data that is online,
available in real time, and in a format that can be readily understood and applied to real business
problems.
That’s why a growing number of companies are moving to powerful BI solutions like Panorama Necto
that help to integrate isolated silos of information residing in existing systems. This allows
manufacturers to consolidate data from multiple sources to improve production planning, scheduling,
and schedule adherence, and then monitor key operational metrics using dashboards and
scorecards.
Even after products and services have been delivered, quality must still be monitored and problems
anticipated. Managing the multitude of factors that affect quality can prove difficult considering the
complex nature of most production processes, which involve multiple departments within and across
lines of business and globally dispersed suppliers, production facilities and customers. Panorama’s BI
solutions give you the intelligence you need to maintain quality throughout the complete lifecycle of
your products and services. They do it by offering world-class predictive analytics and reporting to
help companies identify emerging issues, determine their root cause, and resolve issues before they
become customer problems.
Anticipate and adapt to customer demand
Customers in the global marketplace have high expectations, but the truth is that many companies
have difficulty understanding and connecting with their customers. And manufacturers must quickly
respond to customer needs to remain competitive. Although the value of providing a more customer-
centric experience is evident, manufacturers struggle with implementing this concept in their
organizations. Using BI, customer retention solutions can enable companies to quickly gain an
understanding of the variables that influence customer churn, allowing them to determine not only
which customers are likely to leave, but why.
© Panorama Software 2011
Unacceptable return on marketing investment is potentially the biggest challenge organizations face
as they strive to interact profitably with customers. With real-time, accurate intelligence from
Panorama BI solutions, campaigns and programs implemented across channels will be effective,
consistent and timely. And with the power of predictive analytics, actual results will match predicted
ones, even before spending a dollar on a new campaign.
Accelerate the supply chain
Predicting every market change is impossible. Now more than ever, managers need tools that
generate the insight that leads to smarter decision making and results in a more efficient supply
chain. When Panorama’s BI solutions are applied to the supply chain, they deliver a critical
advantage to manufacturers by generating actionable insights; anticipating customer demand;
deriving financial insights across the extended supply chain; improving product quality, yield and time
to market; and optimizing supply strategies.
BI enables these insights through market-driven planning, accurate demand forecasting and optimal
inventory replenishment planning by understanding demand, inventory costs and product delivery
lead times. Additionally, by collecting, analyzing and leveraging all aspects of supplier data and
purchasing history, manufacturers can optimize strategic sourcing. This leads to significant cost
savings through strategy alignment and scorecarding, opportunity exploration and detailed spend
analysis with decision support.
Improve Operational Performance and Maintain Competitive
Advantage
It isn't easy to maintain efficient operations in today's manufacturing environment. The typical
manufacturing plant includes multiple vendors, multiple interfaces, complex information flows, and
asynchronous processing, all of which can make it difficult to get visibility into orders, materials, and
production.
To achieve operational performance and maintain their competitive edge ? that is, to buy and
manufacture at the lowest cost, and ship as expeditiously as possible ? manufacturers must
systematically identify and eliminate inefficiencies.
Quality control is also critical to the success of any manufacturing operation. High-quality products
lead to improved reputation of the organization within its industry and help to drive sales. In addition,
profitability improves through the reduction of returns and field service calls.
© Panorama Software 2011
Managing manufacturing data assets is key to maintaining and improving operating efficiency.
However, data sources are typically dispersed across a vast enterprise, while supply and demand
management requires timely access to relevant information. As a result, it is a challenge to make
well-informed decisions based on the fragmented view of plant operations garnered from traditional,
stand-alone manufacturing systems. To act effectively, managers and other key decision makers
need visibility into the entire plant floor operations. They need data that is online, available in real
time, and in a format that can be readily understood and applied to real business problems.
Leading manufacturers such as Philips Consumer Electronics and Texas Instruments are use
Panorama BI Solutions to streamline information flow across the organization and provide decision-
making support that helps them reduce costs, maximize resources and increase productivity.
Powerful BI software allows manufacturers to consolidate data from multiple sources to improve
production planning, scheduling, and schedule adherence, and then monitor key operational metrics
using dashboards and scorecards. Panorama can also conduct defect analysis to identify sources of
quality issues and support initiatives such as Six-Sigma, and report on performance by department,
employee, machine, customer, product, and operation.
Texas Instruments, the Dallas-based producer of technology products ranging from calculators to
semiconductors to sensors and controls, is using Panorama BI Solutions for production yield analysis
and improvement. Prior to implementing its BI solution, production personnel ? engineers, managers
and technicians ? were spending a great deal of time preparing Excel-based static reports.
Additionally, when users needed to change reporting parameters to investigate anomalies in the data
from the production floor, they had to go back to the IT department and commission a new SQL
report ? a time-consuming and labor-intensive process.
But with the Panorama solution, users across the organization are free to view, download, and send
reports whenever they need to. The web implementation reduces the need for hardcopy, and the
automation of the reporting process cuts down the workload for the IT department. Standardization
also lowers costs and enables a rapid, corporate-wide deployment of the reporting tools. Users
appreciate the new freedom and the greater flexibility and availability of information.
Achieve Sales and Marketing Superiority
Manufacturers have in the past focused primarily on operational excellence as a critical dimension of
competitive success. Today the race is on to achieve sales and marketing superiority through selling
models that are cost-effective and that create real value. For manufacturers, achieving channel
control requires unique business insight that can only be gained from real-time transaction analysis
coupled with deep analysis of developing business trends.
© Panorama Software 2011
In recent years, manufacturers have increasingly struggled to gain control over the distribution
channel. Without insight into demand fluctuations, manufacturers cannot determine appropriate
inventory levels in the channel. This issue of channel control has really emerged as a core challenge
for the industry today.
At the most basic level, the best way to achieve channel control is to have visibility into all channel
activity, and the key to gaining visibility across the channel is having timely, consistent, and complete
data.
But beneath this wave of available channel data, manufacturers are struggling to do even the most
basic analyses. To truly take control of the channel, manufacturers must evaluate channel data and
transactions upon arrival, analyze them in real-time, and optimize decisions on those transactions
against key business policies. Manufacturers also need the ability to identify trends to derive deep
insight to anticipate changes in their business environment. The optimal solution for channel control
must capture, validate, and analyze channel data and orders at the line item level ? in front of the
point of decision, and continuously in real-time. The manufacturer that can do these types of analyses
will gain a competitive advantage.
This holistic view of the channel is necessary to determine wholesaler compensation, reveal
secondary market activity, and assess overall channel performance. And that is where a powerful
business intelligence (BI) solution can help. With timely, consistent, and accurate results gleaned
using Panorama’s BI tools, the manufacturer can extract previously unavailable business insights,
apply corrective action immediately back into the transaction stream, close the loop between policies
and transaction decisions, and anticipate changes in business conditions.
For instance, reports can be developed that show secondary sourcing, sideways movement of
products, excessive returns, and even the true cost of distributing product through the channel. It’s
also possible to continuously monitor sales performance by product, brand, customer, and channel.
The next step is to analyze sales trends and customer buying behavior, and report on product margin
performance, customer satisfaction and campaign effectiveness.
Because of the complexity involved in performing these analyses in the pre-BI era, it was usually
analysts who interfaced with the data. With Panorama dashboards, managers no longer have to rely
on analysts and can make proactive decisions based on information parameters that they define.
At San Jose, Calif.-based Altera Corporation, a pioneer of system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC)
solutions, the company wanted greater visibility across functional areas to manage pipeline, inventory
© Panorama Software 2011
and design wins more effectively. In fact, since analysts had to pull sales data from one model, billing
information from another model, and inventory information from yet another model, determining
inventory trends became such a complicated process that analysts could only source the numbers
once per month.
The answer was a Panorama BI solution where all users, not just analysts, could have information at
their fingertips. Customer service, point of sale and inventory sales are a few of the areas that have
been impacted significantly by Panorama’s introduction, including customer service managers who
now have dashboards that enable them to monitor resolution times and exception cases.
Maintain a Comprehensive View of the Customer
In today’s global economy, the manufacturing industry is much more competitive and manufacturers
are often focused on optimizing processes, coping with compliance, or dealing with globalized supply
chains. Consumers, however, have more options, so they can afford to be picky about where they
spend their money. And price and quality are no longer sufficient differentiators, making the way
customers are treated before, during, and after the sale more important than ever.
To build customer loyalty, people who work in the manufacturing industry need a customer-care
framework that gives them immediate access to the resources and information they need to best help
their customers. Manufacturers must develop a focused marketing and sales strategy that includes
enhanced customer care, improved order management, and product and service customization.
That requires what Yankee Group analysts call “strategic customer resources management,” an
integrated approach for identifying, acquiring, and retaining customers — and for presenting a unified
face to them whenever they encounter the organization. But this is precisely where many
manufacturers fail. They may optimize pushing out product, but they don't connect informational silos
very well. Customer information often is captured, stored, managed, and maintained in several legacy
systems — each accessed by different functions and used for different purposes ? impeding the flow
of information and the ability to make good decisions.
Furthermore, effective application of analytics to the gathered customer data is just as important as
integration. Despite this, most respondents to a Aberdeen Group survey said they lacked effective
customer data analysis processes and were unable to establish meaningful performance metrics, yet
this is where much of the value in CRM resides.
© Panorama Software 2011
With Panorama Necto, manufacturers can dramatically improve data collection and data mining
capabilities and offer customized customer interactions at a lower cost. With a “single view” of a
customer across the organization, decision makers are able to identify the true value of a customer,
and can greatly improve customer service.
Additionally, by determining what sold well at different times, or to different customer profiles, sales
and marketing teams can make predictions about what might sell well in the future. This enables
them to tailor marketing campaigns for products that might sell well with a certain group of customers,
or at a certain time of year. Sales and marketing teams can also easily target the right customers with
the right value proposition, based on specific product and feature requests. They can also use this
data to coordinate follow-up activities, such as customized special promotions.
Supply Chain Intelligence
The development and manufacturing of products has become increasingly complex in today’s global
economy. Typically, multiple communities of suppliers are involved, and these communities are
geographically dispersed. To work together effectively, manufacturing partners must have tools for
managing inventory across the supply chain. With a closely-managed inventory, the delivery of
products can be automated based on predicted rates of end-customer sales and achieve greater
efficiency and profitability.
Ideally, executives, managers and even front-line staff should be able to monitor and report on the
actual productivity and business value of vendor and partner engagements, and implement
appropriate course corrections. In turn, an organization can practice consistent, efficient quality
control over the fulfillment of vendor commitments, and record findings in such a way that it is easy
for business managers to evaluate vendor performance, negotiate terms, or initiate new business
alliances. Reliable demand-planning capabilities also help to control costs and align vendors firmly
behind a manufacturer’s business goals.
However, when planning systems are decentralized, it can be difficult for staff, from executives to
floor supervisors, to identify problems in the production line or respond quickly to a change in
customer demand. Without global visibility, it is extremely challenging to track stock volume
accurately and deliver shipments on time. The results are high costs to house and manage overflow
stocks and poor customer satisfaction in delivery execution.
In fact, according to the Aberdeen Group, more than 50 % of all supply chain problems originate with
poor decision-making when orders are received. At the point of decision, the manufacturer must bring
to bear all related contextual enterprise intelligence and business policies ? all order history, near-
© Panorama Software 2011
term forecasts, regulatory conditions, and channel agreements, among other information. And when a
single batch of orders can dramatically alter inventory levels in the channel, the optimal solution for
must capture, validate, and analyze channel data ? in front of the point of decision and continuously
in real-time.
A powerful business intelligence solution, however, can give people across your supply chain visibility
into customer demand and the delivery of goods — helping them make faster, better business
decisions and take the best course of action when adjustments are necessary. With features such as
automatic notification, they easily can keep tabs on inventory, helping sustain optimal item levels
without tying up funds in the warehouse. Your team can plan purchasing at favorable terms and in a
timely manner, controlling costs and ensuring that your organization meets its customer
commitments. And they can connect closely with operations to make sure manufacturing has the
materials it needs to deliver products on time.
With decentralized planning systems, it was difficult for Philips Consumer Electronics division, a
global leader in connected displays, home entertainment networks and mobile infotainment, to attain
a global view of its supply chain. Without that visibility, Philips was unable to gauge product overflow
correctly and had difficulties tracking customer shipments and meeting delivery deadlines.
As part its supply chain transformation, Phillips chose Panorama’s BI Solutions business intelligence
solution to measure targeted performance improvements within the supply chain and facilitate greater
visibility into each step of the process.
Philips can now measure how well it executes operations against forecasts and planning. The overall
supply chain transformation program, in which BI played a crucial role, has resulted in significant
financial and performance gains for Philips: an increase in Income from Operations from 2.1 MIO
Euro to 3.6 MIO Euro; a decrease in Net Operating Capital from 46 MIO Euro to 161 MIO Euro; and a
change in Comparable Sales from a 4% decrease to 11% growth two years later.
“We’re using Panorama to facilitate successive improvements in the supply chain,” said Aart Joppe,
Program Director, Data Warehouse at Philips. “With visibility into issues, we can determine whether
we need to change business processes or [use] IT to correct them. Being able to take action
proactively ensures supply chain issues never progress to the point of becoming a missed customer
delivery deadline.”
© Panorama Software 2011
Panorama Software
Panorama Software helps companies grow revenues, reduce costs and improve corporate
performance by enabling social decision making and unlocking actionable insights contained within
their data.
Leading the Business Intelligence 3.0 revolution, Panorama Software offers a new generation of BI
solutions that introduces a unique way to connect data, insights, and people in the organization.
Panorama Necto™ is the first BI solution that leverages Social Decision Making and Automated
Insights to enable users gain insights more quickly, more efficiently, and with greater relevancy.
Necto end-to-end BI suite includes Analytics, Social BI, Automated Relevant Insights, Smart
Reporting, Dashboards/Workboards and integration with Microsoft Office/SharePoint. Necto is
designed to work on top of any data source - OLAP, Relational, Spreadsheets or In-Memory.
Founded in 1993, Panorama Software is the original developer of the OLAP technology that was
acquired my Microsoft in 1996, which was rebranded as SQL Server Analysis Services and integrated
into the SQL Server platform. Since that sale, Panorama has been a close and strategic Microsoft
partner, delivering the only Business Intelligence application that is specifically designed for the
Microsoft platform.
Panorama streamlines business operations through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premise
BI solution for over 1,600 customers worldwide, including some of the world’s largest financial
services, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, telecommunications and media companies. Panorama
has a wide eco-system of partners in 30 countries, and maintains offices throughout North America,
EMEA and Asia. To learn more about Panorama Software, please visit www.panorama.com.
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