Impregilo builds a powerful group-wide reporting solution

Listed on the Italian Stock Exchange, Impregilo is a leading general contractor and one of the world’s top-ranking construction groups, with a presence in over 29 countries. The Impregilo Group is an international specialist in major infrastructure projects and civil buildings of architectural prestige, such as the extension of the Panama Canal, the Thessaloniki subway, the Las Vegas tunnel, and hydroelectric plants in South Africa and Chile. Impregilo boasts annual revenues of over €1 billion with net income at €52.6 million in the first half of 2010. A solid 75 percent of earnings are made up from the Group's foreign sales.

The Impregilo Group consists of around 120 different companies/project teams, each of which needs to manage large-scale, high-profile construction projects within set budgets and schedules. The challenge for Impregilo was to create an infrastructure that could collect a variety of information from this disparate set of companies, and enable users at corporate headquarters and within the subsidiaries to create detailed reports and perform budgeting and forecasting tasks. Furthermore, Impregilo wanted an easy-to-use system that could be quickly rolled out across the group.

Giovanni Manzini, IT Project Manager Accounting Consolidation and Reporting, comments: “With so many group companies and so many projects, we have to manage an enormous amount of data. We needed to find a way to collect all this information together in order to create, in as simple a manner as possible, a single repository for analysis and reporting.”

Rapid implementation
Impregilo wanted to find a solution that it could roll out fast. The company evaluated a number of planning and reporting solutions before choosing IBM Cognos TM1. Within a month the company had worked with Stratos, an IBM Business Partner, to complete the first phase of the implementation.

Giovanni Manzini notes, “We had already spent five months creating a single central data repository using SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, which collects and structures all the financial information from our ERP system and other systems. Then we integrated this data warehouse with the IBM Cognos TM1 solution in order to provide rapid access to powerful analytics. This took just one month to implement. The Cognos solution provides easy-to-use planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting and performance management.

“Our first goal was to make the planning and reporting department completely independent of the IT department – so that they could create their own reports and analyses without needing help from IT staff. We accomplished this in record time, and the department is now able to make its own budget plans. The need for technical skill used to be a barrier that prevented people from accessing the information they needed; but with IBM Cognos TM1, information can flow throughout the company much more freely.”

Eliminating manual workload
“For our second objective, the Director of the Budget Planning and Control department was very clear. He wanted to make changes in his department in order to avoid wasting time on the production of numbers. He wanted his team to concentrate on analysis, not data-collection.

“Now, the combination of IBM Cognos TM1 and SAP NetWeaver BW provides a single central source of accurate data, so users can spend less time collecting and validating data, and have more time to focus on analysing risks and opportunities for the Group. There was always a need to produce this information, but IBM Cognos TM1 makes it much easier and much faster, which is a clear benefit for both the business as a whole and the individual users.”

A comprehensive solution
IBM Cognos TM1 has provided Impregilo with a comprehensive business analytics solution, capable of delivering everything from financial and operational modelling to performance management. Most importantly, TM1 is able to bring together data from the Group's SAP system and other sources to provide a single version of the truth.

As well as viewing information, IBM Cognos TM1 also enables properly authorised users to add and edit data within the data warehouse. As an example, the budgeting and forecasting departments can use TM1 to create multiple versions of each budget to model different financial scenarios. When the analysis is complete, the final version of the budget can then be moved back manually into the SAP environment and used across the whole business.

Says Giovanni Manzini, “We chose IBM Cognos TM1 because it is very powerful and flexible, and the interface is simply excellent. The great thing is that you can use it to manipulate and analyse data in all sorts of different ways without having to develop any additional processes in the ERP system itself.

He concludes: “We currently have 20 users using the IBM Cognos TM1 solution at headquarters, and we have begun the roll-out worldwide. The new users are happy with the solution because it makes it much easier for them to access the business information they need to make fast, accurate business decisions, without having to wait for help from technical specialists in the IT department. Our financial analysts, business managers and executives are all able to use the solution to do their own real-time analytics, and we estimate that we will have 100 users by the end of the year.