Bunzl
Bunzl
The Business Innovation
Bunzl Distribution USA, Inc., based in St. Louis, Mo., is the largest division of Bunzl plc, an international distribution and outsourcing group headquartered in London. Bunzl supplies a range of products to food processors, supermarkets, retailers, convenience stores and other users. Operating over 90 warehouses that serve all 50 states and Puerto Rico, and with 3,500 employees and more than 500,000 different supply items, Bunzl inherently has to deal with mountains of varied data. An accurate view of this data is especially important since Bunzl works with razor thin margins. Bunzl struggled to find a way to develop data in such a way that its management could gain a viewpoint into the business and where the margins were going. Bunzl sought a cost-effective solution that was intuitive, easy to use, security driven and would allow them to access and drill-down to item and customer level data from four levels of management.
Bunzl requires both high and low level information across the company in order to conduct day to day operations, as well as take corrective actions to ensure the success of the business. The OLAP applications Bunzl was using to retrieve business intelligence data were functional, but were not truly available “on demand.” IT often had to intervene to produce reports. Such static reports are not very feasible for a 3,000+ employee corporation, as they are difficult for end-users to utilize effectively. Bunzl also required a large amount of functionality that, if delivered strictly with local consultants, would have made it difficult to get a project approved from a cost perspective.
Bunzl’s IT staff is responsible for collecting, mining, presenting and distributing data to the company’s executives and management. Their former application was capable of retrieving information but was limited in its abilities to quickly derive the information needed at various levels of management, as well as the ability to drill into data to understand its origins. Though nearly all company data was similar in nature, many tedious reports were needed to create the many different views that are necessary at any given time. Ascendant Technology helped Bunzl to better understand the industry-leading capabilities of IBM software, as well as a solution that not only solved the technical data issues but also created business value.
Aligning Technology with the Businesss Needs
Atech’s team provided the expertise and consulting that resulted in Bunzl selecting IBM’s Dashboard Framework to deliver the “Executive Dashboard” application functionality. The Dashboard was deployed on IBM WebSphere Portal 6.0, which provided additional business value. This solution handled all of Bunzl’s reporting needs in a clean, On Demand format.
Bunzl runs the iSeries platform as its back-end system, and Ascendant utilized WebSphere Portlet Factory to access the iSeries data. By using profiling throughout the application Atech was able to display various views according to the user’s portal group. The views are segmented into Corporate, Division, Region and Company, and each portlet is customizable. The portlets’ functionality include drilldown, charting, exporting to Microsoft Excel, filtering, summary rows and status indicators, giving Bunzl employees a dynamic view of the company’s data on demand for the first time.
Bunzl leveraged Atech’s Global Delivery approach to implement the solution within the budget, blending onsite technical leadership with global development. This combined team of developers accelerated the design and delivery of the resulting application, leading to the delivery of eight modules in the time initially estimated for three modules. Additionally, Bunzl required a solution that could be maintained internally after the Atech engagement ended. Atech’s architects and consultants provided hands-on mentoring through each step of the implementation, leveraging their expertise to enable Bunzl to “own” the application.
In just six weeks Ascendant Technology created six complex Executive Report dashboards that captured vital business metrics, as listed below:
- Sales Variances
- General Ledger Expenses
- Accounts Receivable Credit Memos
- Accounts Receivable Past Due
- Accounts Receivable Unearned Discounts
- Below Minimum Shipment
The Resulting Benefits
Ascendant Technology’s engagement with Bunzl yielded vast benefits from both a line-of-business and IT perspective. From the business side, data metrics were finally improved and up to date, giving managers from several different levels insight into where the company’s margins were headed. Global Delivery was used very effectively, as Bunzl did not need to be concerned about the physical location of the development team. By leveraging VPN connectivity and remote development, the application was designed locally and delivered within the budget by a true global team. Data is now available to Bunzl management on a more consistent and frequent basis.
The IT staff has benefited as well, as the new application greatly reduces individualized requests for reporting information. Now that information is available in an On Demand, self-service format across different levels of management, IT is no longer burdened with the manual reporting and data retrieval tasks. Bunzl IT has become proactive, rather than reactive when it comes to data, thanks to the Atech solution. In the past, they were dealing with old data, too much data or not enough data in many different instances. Now, they can identify issues before they become major problems and are empowered to use company data strategically, rather than reactively.
The emphasis placed on mentoring and enabling Bunzl’s IT team was a fundamental key to the success of the solution. After the engagement, Bunzl developers were able to develop two additional modules on their own, without Atech involvement. This enablement strategy reflects Atech’s belief that it’s always more mutually beneficial to partner with customers, rather than just sell to them.
Technologies Implemented
There were six portlets developed by Ascendant. Two more were self-implemented later by Bunzl IT after mentoring from Ascendant consultants.
- WebSphere Portal 6.0
- WebSpere Portlet Factory
- WebSphere Dashboard Framework
