Sharing Information Across the Organization

As companies continue to strive toward reaching an optimized level of "Lean Manufacturing", their need for better report flow and more timely representation of variances, overages, and comparative standards is critical. "Just-In-Time" information awareness impacting the Production Process slowdowns, or delays in Work-In-Process schedules could represent areas that have a large impact not only on profit margins, but also on customer service levels. The ability to quickly bring on board a new report reflecting new views, based on change, can result in a huge opportunity to reduce costs and improve service level.

DART's application connectivity platform can be used to facilitate work flow process alerts that impact certain reports in the library and automatically trigger the generation of new reports reflecting those changes. In effect, DART becomes a valuable tool to help manage change and to manage its respective impact for scaling services and processes to react to that change in many diverse user business units.

Let's say that the firm has evolved or is evolving to a new Shared Services model, where Purchasing is a centralized business unit servicing a variety of manufacturing units. Purchasing has a service level agreement with each business unit in the organization that utilizes Purchasing's services and functions. Those manufacturing units have dynamic needs and they change based on forecasts for sales or increased and/or decreased manufacturing process requirements. Being able to incorporate the picture of these changes very quickly into DART reporting and distribution to Purchasing could result in Purchasing's more efficient scaling and utilization of company resources, and to balance the organizational activity more economically. In the case of a need for a production process slowdown, that business unit would not be unnecessarily charged back by Purchasing for services that it did not need or use in a particular period. DART reporting can provide everyone with better visibility into this type of scenario resulting in cost efficiencies.

Answer Think ERP

ERP Budgeting

Business Intelligence, analytics, including report writing, are a high priority item for the majority of manufacturing companies engaged in supporting ERP platforms in their organization for 2007-2008. Often, complex BI and analytical systems are very costly to install, maintain and rarely reflect the critical day-to-day data and business operational views that help middle management run the operation more efficiently. DART represents a "friendly bridge" between complex, costly high-end solutions with many features and functions that are rarely used, and very low cost "off-the-shelf" packages that have no flexibility and often become "shelfware". See graphical comparison of DART positioning. DART positioning

AMR Research ERP Spending 2006-2007

DART, a Prescription for Reporting Performance - Control and Management

DART Architecture for Performance

Many ERP architectures represent complex interoperating applications that have "interdependencies" that facilitate transaction processing very well. However, getting at the data needed for daily, weekly, monthly operational reports is more challenging for a few reasons:

1. Performance could get substantially degraded if the report writing platform is not set up on an Operational Data Store (ODS) environment - see DMReview Article, by Michael Schroeck, PWC Global Consulting
   
   
2. Often the data in ERP systems is not designed for easy to access reporting , but rather efficient straight through processing for application to application. Where each application enriches a message along its STP chain, focused more on completing a business process rather than isolating data components for reporting
   
   
3. Efficiencies for reporting platforms are difficult to create that easily "transform" the ERP data into a data dictionary for the report writer
   
   

DART addresses these concerns, and facilitates a friendly Operational Data Store (ODS) as a report repository. It's very simple for users to access, and transparent to the business critical processes of the ERP system and architecture so as not to impact performance. DART's data connectivity transformation component solves the extraction problem and helps users to manage a "discreet" repository of data at any level of granularity required for reporting.