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REXEL Austria GmbH has been setting new standards in the wholesale retailing of electrical installation material and electrical appliances in Austria since 1996. With comprehensive service offers and a broad portfolio of high-quality products, REXEL has established itself as a market leader. With around 530 employees at 14 locations and one central distribution centre located in Wels, the company generated annual sales of more than €250 million in Austria in 2009.

Deliver the service promise
REXEL Austria GmbH has continuously extended its business in recent years – today the company sells its products across the whole of Austria through two sales networks. At the same time, the service expectations of customers regarding fast and smooth delivery are increasing: more than 30,000 different electrical solutions need to be ready for delivery within 24 hours to meet the service promise that REXEL gives its customers.

As a result, logistics has become a mission-critical factor: people in charge need to coordinate orders, product inventories, supplier relationships and delivery methods accurately to comply with delivery times and delivery quality standards, and to satisfy the customer. Systematic warehouse management is key to this: products need to be commissioned correctly within the shortest possible time, while stock levels (and capital lockup) should be as low as possible.

Much effort, low profit
In the past, to achieve this the required information needed to be painstakingly exported from source systems and then consolidated manually with Microsoft Excel. About 180 hours of work were needed each month for these tasks.

“The efficient planning and management of the logistics processes was equally delayed,” explains Ing. Reinhard Füllerer, Business Application Manager (SCM) at REXEL Austria GmbH. “REXEL urgently needed a new reporting system that could provide up-to-date data centrally via self-service functions, based on a standardised data model. In addition, the company’s management team required sophisticated analytics features as well as easy-to-use dashboard functionality.”

After comparing several business intelligence solutions in summer 2010, the right solution was found. Following a successful proof of concept, the consulting company Pitagora Informationsmanagement GmbH convinced REXEL of the advantages of the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence application suite.

“The solution was exactly what we were looking for: an information portal that consolidates corporate data and displays it at the push of a button in any format you want,” says Füllerer. “Performance, flexibility and user-friendliness are in the foreground.”

Teamwork for information advantage
Working with Pitagora, REXEL began to implement the new solution in July 2010. Starting from an existing standard report that consolidates all logistics performance figures, the project team redesigned the whole process of data processing and report generation from scratch. The data structures needed for this were exported from the source systems and transferred into a request-oriented data warehouse which is used as a central data repository for reporting. Subsequently, meta models were configured to allow users to create the required reports and analyses independently. Finally, the project team designed management dashboards for the management team that would reuse existing analytics components to provide a rapid overview of performance data.

Central database available via the web
Since November 2010, managers in the logistics and warehouse management teams have been using the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence solution for reporting and analyses. The data warehouse automatically updates the reporting solution with quality-assured data on a daily basis. Users access the web-based interface via a browser and create reports as and when they require them. While previously users needed to request help from the IT team to extract the needed information from the source systems, now the whole reporting process is automated by the data processing and communication layer.

Using the information advantage
With help of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence, REXEL Austria GmbH has improved both reporting quality and data quality considerably. The company now has a universally valid data model for all reporting requirements. The data warehouse ensures that users have the reliable and consistent data they need to support their everyday work. The solution’s self-service features allow users to request up-to-date information about orders, products or inventory capacities daily in the shape of standard reports with a minimal amount of effort. The time taken for the generation of standard reports has been reduced from 180 hours a month to about one minute.

The solution’s analytics functions also provide further decision-making insights for the optimisation of the logistics processes. When unexpected situations occur, users can dive into the multi-dimensional data with drill-down analyses and examine the root causes. The new query engine in the latest version of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence pays dividends here, as the technology enables huge amounts of data to be analysed at the press of a button and outputs the required information in real time.

“The analytical capabilities of the solution are very versatile,” says Reinhard Füllerer. “They help us to respond to diverse issues and make the overall logistics processes run more efficiently. This not only benefits the company itself, but also our customers.”

Getting on top of business performance
The flexible dashboard features of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence add further value to the information that the solution provides. Besides mission-critical questions regarding logistics and warehouse management, the solution also provides answers to questions about the business performance of the whole company. Even without IT knowledge, managers are able to select the information or performance figures that interest them and filter them by different parameters, (time, product category and so on). Executive managers always have an eye on sales, costs, customers and market opportunities, which gives them an up-to-date and reliable basis for strategic decisions.

“The management team is enthusiastic about the speed with which information can be retrieved and the intuitive usability of the new solution – it’s a real leap forward in terms of information access for the management team,” says Füllerer.

Into the future
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence has proved successful as REXEL Austria GmbH’s reporting solution – the users have adopted the solution extremely positively. As a result, the company plans to extend the usage of the Business Intelligence suite to other parts of the company such as finance and human resources. Moreover, new functions like Active Reports for offline report generation should in future increase the flexibility of the information retrieval process.

”The implementation of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence was a strategic decision for REXEL,” concludes Reinhard Füllerer. “By providing easy access to valuable business information, the solution will continue to deliver competitive advantages in the future.”

IBM DB2 Connect Unlimited edition for iSeries
The company was able to reach a further milestone by directly integrating the data into the business intelligence architecture (ETL plus IBM Cognos Business Intelligence). This meant that the stage of exporting and intermediately storing the data in CSV format was no longer necessary, and that both processing and loading times could be further reduced and in some cases halved.

• The process now has one stage, rather than two, making it significantly faster and less complex. This is possible because the integration now occurs in a single toolset.
• There will be no more problems with text that contains “tab” characters or other separators. This makes it easier to assess the quality of the integration processes.
• Further loads can be completed with BULK-Load rather than BULK-Insert. This provides a further increase in speed.
• There is no longer a need to store exports and intermediate CSV data.
• It is no longer necessary to use a separate programme to export/import the data.
• Data types from the original query can be used. This reduces the burden of data modelling and quality assessment.

About Pitagora
Pitagora Informationsmanagement GmbH was founded in 1993 by Robert Wittnauer in Innsbruck. The company has become a partnership with its customers, who are the focus of its business. Only through a stable and fair relationship is it possible to properly recognise customers’ needs. Through Pitagora’s corporate structure, it can identify these needs holistically and develop solutions, no matter what process customers want to follow to support their business electronically.

About IBM Business Analytics

IBM Business Analytics software delivers actionable insights decision-makers need to achieve better business performance. IBM offers a comprehensive, unified portfolio of business intelligence, predictive and advanced analytics, financial performance and strategy management, governance, risk and compliance and analytic applications.

With IBM software, companies can spot trends, patterns and anomalies, compare “what if” scenarios, predict potential threats and opportunities, identify and manage key business risks and plan, budget and forecast resources. With these deep analytic capabilities our customers around the world can better understand, anticipate and shape business outcomes.

Why IBM Information Management Software?
IBM Information Management solutions deliver trustworthy information that enables companies to make better decisions to optimise their businesses. Data management, enterprise master data management, information integration and data warehousing are all part of the IBM solution offering.

For more information
For further information or to reach a representative please visit ibm.com/analytics.

Request a call
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