January 2002
Report Management: ERP Helper
by Debra Haverson
Many Companies are still working to rid their operations of the daily drudgery and cost of
printing, bursting and shipping reports enterprisewide. They want to gather data from different
applications on different platforms and they want to deliver customized reports electronically.
The need is especially acute for companies using ERP systems, which gather a wealth of
information but don't always produce accessible reports. State-of-the-art report management systems
fill the gap, providing centralized repositories, security features, and distribution options
including customized Web, fax, email and print delivery. Professional Service Industries, Newport
News Shipbuilding, Alliant Energy and Pilot Travel Centers represent four diverse industries, yet
they've all cut costs and quickened decision making through report management software
implementations.
A Distributed Enterprise Keeps Everyone in the Loop
With more than 140 offices nationwide and in Canada, Professional Service Industries, Oakbrook
Terrace, IL, found it expensive and time consuming to make ERP information available enterprisewide.
To keep its many offices up to date on test results or payable and receivables information, the
environmental consulting, geo-engineering and construction testing firm would print and manually
burst weekly reports for distribution via overnight courier.
PSI knew it could save time and money by electronically bursting these reports, but a look at
state-of-the-art output management software helped executives realize they could do much more. By
implementing Monarch/ES Report Portal software from Datawatch, Lowell, MA, the company has gained
wider, more timely and far less expensive access to reports via the Internet.
Web access has paid off in a number of ways. First of all, hundreds of people can access the
system from field offices, construction trailers and home computers using standard Web browsers. The
more than 60 district managers and vice presidents who travel constantly now access the system from
hotel rooms, branch offices and customer sites using laptop computers.
Compared to one obvious alternative, the cost per user for the Report Portal "was almost
negligible," says Jim Gries, PSI's vice president of information technology. "This was a method of
giving recent data to our field offices without the cost of additional ERP seats."
The Monarch/ES Report Portal provided access to years of older customer files and sales analysis
and accounting information stored in a Texas Instruments legacy application. The Datawatch software
eliminated the need to maintain this Unix box and now makes it possible to create reports, for
example, that show five years of trend data by compiling information from the legacy system and the
newer ERP system.
The Report Portal offers access to information about labor time tracking so managers can see
which engineers and subcontractors at which level of expertise put in how many hours on which
project. They can also track the progress of the work itself. Users can easily access and download
data into Excel or Seagate's Crystal Reports, and they can do so without increasing the load on the
ERP system.
Field offices have responded well to yet another by-product of the implementation: The company
can now generate preliminary invoices that can be reviewed and changed before a final bill is
printed and mailed to customers from the main office. In October, PSI refined the way these invoices
print from browsers because it discovered that many satellite offices distribute printouts to
various staff members for approval.
The biggest advantage, according to Gries, is that data is moved from the ERP system to
Monarch/ES Report Portal nightly, giving users very current information. The company's ROI studies
have identified in excess of $800,000 in cost savings just from managing project costs, collecting
receivables more proactively and eliminating shipping costs of paper reports. This number, he says,
doesn't include the labor saved by eliminating manual report distribution.
Defense Giant Gets a Grip on Output
Newport News Shipbuilding is the largest privately owned shipbuilder and a bulwark of the United
States' naval defense. When the Newport News, VA-based company undertook a major transition to a new
ERP system beginning in 1998, it also uncovered the need to improve report creation and
distribution. "We had to create an output environment that would ease the burden of the transition
on the end users," says Newport News project leader Mike Hager.
The switch to an SAP ERP system presented several challenges. For one thing, some information
still resided on legacy systems. Long-term employees could access this data easily, but new hires
tended to be familiar only with SAP. Hager says the shipbuilder needed to give everyone access to
the reports, but the ERP system didn't provide all the answers. "We found that the reporting tools
in SAP were not as robust as we needed," Hager says.
Indeed, output and report management software is most frequently called upon to support ERP
implementations. With knowledge delivery architecture from Cypress, Rochester Hills, MI, Newport
News was able to eliminate manual printing and distribution of reports. The initial implementation
in November 1999 included 2,000 people. As of October 2001, 3,700 employees from many different
divisions and departments across the enterprise use the software.
"With one interface, users are able to access all the reports regardless of the source," says
Hager. "There are literally thousands of reports generated. Quite a bit of information is going to
the department heads and directors who need statistical information on various aspects of their
operations. All of those reports are generated pretty much on autopilot and delivered by Cypress on
schedule."
Newport News automated much of its reporting by integrating a scheduling tool called Control M
with SAP and feeding the resulting reports to Cypress. A key advantage, says Hager, is that reports
are run just once. Cypress captures the report print stream and allows the company to define each
recipient and the method of distribution, whether to a remote printer or fax machine, to a hold
queue or as an email in a Cypress inbox. Users click on links to access Cypress Web using Internet
Explorer. There's no clogging the email system or the network with long documents such as the
company's 9,000-page phone bill, which Cypress captures directly from the company's phone system.
Many department managers review these and other reports and documents regularly.
"By keeping the clutter off the large systems where the data resides, you can speed these systems
up," Hager explains.
Hager says Newport News is saving $500,000 per year by eliminating all costs associated with
report printing and distribution. This figure doesn't count labor efficiencies that engineers and
others have gained. The shipbuilding giant is now migrating to NT 2000 and Cypress Web, a Web
document delivery module that provides a personalized portal page to users. Hager says the company
hopes to complete this project by July.
Midwest Utility Tackles Three Projects in One
Two years ago, Alliant Energy, Madison, WI, formed a few project teams to tackle what seemed like
unrelated objectives. The company was formed a year earlier through the merger of three Midwestern
utility companies: Wisconsin Power & Light, IES Utilities and Interstate Power. The unified company
was looking for efficiencies, and the respective teams were studying how to eliminate the use of
microfiche, replace the printing of mainframe reports, and consolidate print and copy facilities in
four states.
It didn't take long before the project teams realized that an electronic document repository
could meet all of these objectives, so the projects naturally converged. Alliant Energy considered
several possible solutions before selecting Vista Plus Software from Quest, Irvine, CA.
"We did a full cost-benefit analysis, and the project grew in scope and visibility," says Tom
Chubaty, IT project manager. "We ended up rolling out an enterprisewide solution across all of our
territories."
The project also grew in functional terms as the company learned more about the capabilities
inherent in capturing, managing and distributing high-volume mainframe reports with an enterprise
report management system. Vista Plus software now serves as a secure archive and report management
solution for all core mainframe legacy systems, including multiple financial applications, human
resources, marketing, customer service, purchasing and meter and transformer reader systems.
Chubaty says Alliant Energy installed Quest's software out of the box within a few days, but he
adds that the company was methodical in implementing new reporting procedures. The company spent the
first half of 2001 eliminating paper, and the second half switching the capture of content from
microfiche to electronic format. He pegs the total investment for the 500-seat, 100-concurrent user
system at somewhere between $200,000 and $400,000 for software and hardware, including a Sun Unix
server and a 180-gigabyte EMC disk array.
As important as the investment was, the time and energy spent reviewing and reengineering
processes and then retraining end users was even more critical. "Reengineering the processes,
working with the people — that's what took time," says Chubaty, but he adds that it was time well
spent. "That's why we've had a high, 99 percent acceptance rate among users."
The utility is now processing 1,811 different reports. This translates to 36,869 reports recorded
from January through August 2001. The repository is growing with 400 new reports generated each day,
which translates to about one gigabyte (or 200,000 pages worth) of uncompressed data. Chubaty says
the software's high compression ratio of 8:1 for ASCII mainframe data is crucially important.
Alliant Energy's studies show that the implementation has generated a 47 percent rate of return
on the company's capital investment. As a result, the system will pay for itself — including
training and reengineering costs — within three years. Chubaty emphasizes that these calculations
include only hard-dollar cost savings, such as the reduction of printing, paper purchase and leasing
of microfiche equipment.
"We did not include 'soft' costs like productivity savings, so [the savings] will be even
higher," he explains. "People can do things more quickly, and they aren't rekeying numbers into
spreadsheets or looking for a payment misapplied to the wrong account. People used to look at
microfiche files to determine where the payment went. Now you just do one find command that takes 20
to 30 seconds, and you can see exactly where the payment went instead of spending a half day looking
at microfiche."
In other examples of savings, the payroll department eliminated its mock cycle, in which it used
to print and manually check for errors before printing a final run. Using search criteria, the staff
electronically checks for common errors, making the job faster and less tedious and saving a huge
printing expense.
In place of green-bar printouts that had to be manually split and shipped to multiple district
offices, these reports are now delivered electronically.
"We used a function called page-level security and Smart Alarms [a software tool bundled with
Vista Plus] that allowed us to split apart a report and resubmit it to Vista Plus," says Chubaty.
"Each individual report goes into a separate folder. Even if you don't do the report splitting, you
can just tag the pages you want and print only these to your local printer."
Users now receive ASCII reports or these subreports as email attachments or as hyperlinks
directing them to the stored document. Plans for the first half of 2002 call for Alliant Energy to
implement a PeopleSoft ERP system, and Chubaty says the company will use Vista Plus to capture all
content from this system.
Travel Centers Find A Road to Faster Response
Pilot Travel Centers needed to speed and improve decision-making in hundreds of retail locations.
A joint venture of Knoxville, TN-based Pilot Corp. and Finley, OH-based Marathon Ashland Petroleum,
the company manages 235 travel centers and, through a subsidiary, nearly 70 convenience stores. With
tight profit margins on gasoline, food and consumer goods, the company needed to be more responsive
to stocking needs and more competitive in its pricing.
The company was not without prior experience in report generation; however, David DePrimo,
manager of corporate systems, says that the company's Computer Associates Unicenter application
demanded "too many steps before and after the information went into the system."
Each month, Pilot Travel Centers compiled 250 to 350 reports from its Lawson ERP system, which
was integrated with specialized vertical applications for restaurant, convenience store and service
station management. The company wanted one solution that could simplify all reporting, using the Web
to deliver information in a more timely way. A review of potential solutions led to ViewDirect
software from Mobius Management Systems, Rye, NY.
With ViewDirect, the company now generates two big reports. The software automatically splits
these reports, based on predefined access and requirement definitions, and sends users email with
hyperlinks to the specific report they need. By eliminating multiple report jobs, data sorting and
printing and delivery of hard-copy reports, the company has cut half a day of processing time,
various distribution costs and much of the hassle out of report generation.
With minimal training, users all over the country use ordinary browsers to access the reports and
information they need. Store managers and corporate managers alike have gained a better
understanding of data, and they can consult with each other on decisions such as how to adjust
prices to meet competition or make stocking changes to prevent excess inventory. The software "gives
us the ability to react a little faster," DePrimo says.
At this writing, Pilot was converting from a Keyfile imaging system to an outsourced solution
from Xerox Imaging and Global Repository Service, Hot Springs, AR. As part of this initiative, the
company will link images of original documents to reports in the Mobius DocumentDirect repository.
DePrimo estimates this will save approximately $200,000 over three years by reducing staffing in
accounts payable as well as imaging hardware and maintenance costs.
"A soft benefit" says DePrimo, "is that end users can do their own research, thus providing
faster answers to their questions and eliminating phone tag." They will also save by storing
accounts receivable billing statements in ViewDirect instead of printing them and storing them in
boxes.
DePrimo says Pilot Travel Centers plans to use Mobius's DocuAnalyzer software, which lets users
extract data from reports, input calculations and distribute new reports. "This will save our
operations personnel 50-100 hours a week," DePrimo explains. "Currently, they're manually cutting
pieces of information and pasting them into more usable spreadsheets and subreports. Our hope is
that after the imaging project is finished, we will begin utilizing DocuAnalyzer."
Debra Haverson (hercster@bcpl.net) is a freelance writer based in Baltimore.
RealWare Winners
Delivering a compelling combination of performance gains and hard-dollar cost savings, the report
management implementations at Professional Services Inc. (PSI) and Newport News Shipbuilding (see
story) were both finalists in this year's RealWare Awards competition. Hosted by CMP's Business
Intelligence Group, which comprises Transform Magazine, Intelligent Enterprise and related online
communities, the RealWare awards recognize outstanding implementations of technology in the
enterprise.
The judges in the Report/Output Management category were Richard Fisher of Giga Information
Group, Cambridge, MA; Mason Grigsby of Imerge Consulting, San Francisco; and Doug Henschen,
editor-in-chief of Transform Magazine. While both implementations yielded impressive returns on
investment, the judges crowned the Public Service Inc. implementation as the winning entry and the
Newport News Shipbuilding as the runner-up.
For more information on the RealWare awards program, visit
www.realwareawards.com.
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