Mueller, Inc. achieves 113 percent ROI through analytics

Strategy

Mueller, Inc. operates a sophisticated business model in a highly competitive marketplace. The company both manufactures and resells prefabricated steel building components, offering customers a spectrum of products from individual parts up to entire building projects. In 2000, the company decided to streamline the retail sales, manufacturing, and distribution processes as part of its overall strategy to manage growth and support the continued evolution of its end user-focused strategy. This decision triggered the migration to a new ERP environment to reflect the business changes in processes and operations.

The new ERP platform collected a wealth of detailed, operational data that Mueller had not previously tracked. It provided an opportunity to build on it to adopt a Smarter Commerce strategy to analyze its business, monitor performance, and make optimized decisions to reinforce its strategy and customer-centric culture.

Focus on Business Impact
The Mueller team began looking for an analytics solution that could identify and monitor a range of key performance metrics to support their balanced scorecard strategy. This would enable the company to gain a better understanding of how different aspects of the business were performing – especially the complex supply chain and distributions network – as well as measuring outcomes such as customer satisfaction. By highlighting areas where performance was lower than expected, this would help Mueller focus its efforts on improving operational efficiencies and business results.

It was critical to Mueller to select an integrated platform that would not only support its balanced scorecard requirements, but also include the range of capabilities necessary to provide employees with relevant information in the appropriate format to allow them to make optimized decisions every day. The platform needed to be able to extend the ERP environment and data assets to enable delivery of metrics, dashboards, scorecards, reporting, analysis, and planning capabilities. The initial solution would target the critical Smarter Commerce focus areas in sales, customer satisfaction and the supply chain.

Business Value Outcomes
A Nucleus Research ROI study reveals that enhanced customer and supply chain focus at Mueller has resulted in tangible ROI results of 113 percent within 12 months, with an annual net benefit of $782,000 from the investment in IBM Business Analytics.

Deeper Insight
By providing relevant information to employees across the organization to monitor their performance and identify areas where improvements can be made, Mueller has been able to maintain lean staffing levels and drive improvements in product manufacturing and delivery.

Direct Benefits

• Reduced materials costs by identifying parts of business processes where steel and other materials could be reused and waste minimized.
• Deliver better services to customers without adding IT staff for report development or customer service representatives by automating the processes for survey analysis and dashboard updates.

Indirect Benefits

• Boosted productivity for administrative staff by automating the manual aspects of the information gathering and reporting processes. The time they save can now be utilized for additional tasks.
• Managers can access information in minutes instead of days, and can share performance data with operational staff instantly. This helps the company to make better decisions on product manufacturing and delivery, ultimately increasing customer satisfaction.

Solution Review
With executive support, a combined project team was formed within Mueller spanning the finance and IT departments. Working together with an external consulting firm, the team began with the critical business focus areas in customer performance sales analytics and the analysis of the company’s general ledger. These were each implemented within 30 days, and delivered immediate value for business users.

In parallel with the deployment of these applications, the team began working on the automation of the balanced scorecard with the enterprise metrics. The scorecard provided visibility into the key performance indicators, both financial and operational, and displayed the appropriate status depending on performance targets. The team incorporated a wide range of business areas, such as daily, weekly, monthly sales, production volumes and materials utilization, as well as the results of monthly customer satisfaction surveys.
To enable employees to gain deeper insight into areas of the business that were underperforming, the team extended the solution with the relevant web-based dashboards, reports, queries, and analysis. This gave the business a new capability to drill down from the raw metrics and look at the underlying root causes of problems and enable managers to make fact-based decisions. It also helped to disseminate the analytics from the executive team to the front line, giving individual employees a clear view of what the business goals were and how well they were executing against them. Today, employees receive daily information and relevant trends, which has helped to optimize operations and drive business growth while maintaining relatively lean staffing levels.

About Nucleus Research
Nucleus Research provides investigative, case-based technology research and advisory services. Nucleus analysts investigate hundreds of deployments every year to deliver unique insight into the measurable value of technology. Founded in 2000, Nucleus Research is headquartered in Boston MA and provides services worldwide. For more information go to: www.nucleusresearch.com

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.