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Analytics for the iSeries

The ShowCase Suite from SPSS Inc.helps organizations that use the IBM® eServer™ iSeries™ (AS/400®) computing platform leverage historical data to make better, faster decisions—the classic definition of business intelligence. For more than 10 years, the ShowCase Suite has been the leading analytical solution for iSeries users, delivering real, measurable benefits.

All components of the ShowCase Suite are fully integrated for faster, more efficient implementation.

ShowCase Query and ShowCase Report Writer provide your organization’s decision makers with efficient tools to access data and create reports

ShowCase Enterprise Reporting helps decision makers in every area benefit from advanced business intelligence capabilities through browser-based reporting

ShowCase Essbase brings the power of the leading online analytical reporting (OLAP) solution to the iSeries. Essbase enables your organization to organize operational data in customized applications and perform both simple and complex calculations on this data. You can analyze data from multiple perspectives, develop scenarios to support strategic planning, and monitor results.

ShowCase Analyzer enables your business users to explore and interact with data using a graphical interface that helps focus attention on key metrics

ShowCase Warehouse Builder supports the building of both relational and multidimensional databases, while ShowCase Warehouse Manager makes it easier for you to protect data integrity, manager user access and privileges, and optimize system resources

You can also add advanced analytics to the ShowCase Suite through SPSS' popular Clementine® data mining workbench, which runs natively on the iSeries.

Future-oriented

SPSS continues to enhance the capabilities of the ShowCase Suite. New capabilities in the ShowCase Suite 7.0 provide users with increased power and flexibility.

The ShowCase Suite's reporting and OLAP capabilities complement the predictive analytics capabilities found in other offerings from SPSS. Our text mining, Web analytics, and predictive analytics solutions integrate with numerous technology platforms and software solutions, so they're easy and cost-effective to deploy.

You can use the ShowCase Suite in combination with other SPSS applications to transform your organization into a Predictive Enterprise—one that has the tools to shape its own future. Predictive Enterprises anticipate trends and develop strategies that maximize their ability to both avoid risk and benefit from emerging opportunities.

Supported by an expert team

SPSS Inc. supports you with unmatched service and technical support. We use proven methodologies to design, install, and upgrade your information systems. We offer customized consultations, including the use of ShowCase Deployment Accelerator™ techniques, so that you obtain the fastest possible return on your investment in the ShowCase Suite.

To transfer our expert knowledge to your staff, we offer expert training online, at customer facilities, and at convenient locations worldwide.

Read more about system requirements for the ShowCase Suite.

To learn more about how you can benefit from the ShowCase Suite, contact an SPSS sales representative.

Gain the Insight You Need

With ShowCase Query, people in all areas of your organization can access the information they need on their own, so your IT staff can focus on more strategic projects.

ShowCase Query is part of the ShowCase Suite from SPSS, the leading business intelligence solution for companies using the IBM® eServer™ iSeries™ (AS/400®) computing platform.

ShowCase Query helps users build SQL statements easily and manage queries efficiently. It enables your managers and staff to:

Run both scheduled and ad hoc queries Streamline the building and execution of SQL statements

View data in ways that help them understand conditions more clearly Support responsive, informed decision making

To create a complete reporting solution, use ShowCase Query in combination with ShowCase ReportWriter™ to create reports with customized formatting for greater visual impact. Then, to provide secure, central management of queries and reports and browser-based access to reports, enterprise-wide add ShowCase Enterprise Reporting.

The fully integrated ShowCase Warehouse Manager™ helps you protect database security and optimize system resources, as you use the ShowCase Suite.

Automatically Populate Spreadsheet ProgramsSpreadsheet programs are a basic management tool, but having your staff re-key data into individual workbooks not only takes time, it’s also likely to lead to errors. ShowCase Query enables users to export data directly to Microsoft® Excel™ or Lotus® 1-2-3®. For greater time savings, you can refresh results each time a workbook is opened while preserving embedded formulas, macros, and formatting by using the ShowCase Query “add-in” features.

Stay in Control with ShowCase Warehouse Manager Manage queries and other important tasks easily through ShowCase Warehouse Manager. Database administrators can:

Define and manage database security, aliases, and user profiles and privileges

Secure data by user or group of users Set job priorities to optimize system resources Monitor system usage for improved performance and optimal data access

Read more about Warehouse Manager.

Streamline Information Distribution with Enterprise Reporting With this component of the ShowCase Suite, your organization can create a central, secure, searchable repository for queries and reports. You can store new and existing queries and reports in this repository and share query and report definitions among many users.

Business users can schedule reports or run them as needed. You can automate the scheduling and distribution of routine reports, optimizing both system and staff resources. You can also schedule alerts and notifications, so report “consumers” know when information they need has been updated. Learn more about Enterprise Reporting.

Create Reports to Support Decision Making

By enabling decision makers to quickly locate and focus on key metrics, ShowCase Report Writer helps your organization accomplish its goals more efficiently.

ShowCase Report Writer is part of the ShowCase Suite from SPSS, the leading business intelligence solution for companies using the IBM® eServer™ iSeries™ (AS/400®) computing platform.

Used in combination with ShowCase Query, ShowCase Report Writer supports self-service reporting and helps your organization optimize both staff time and computing resources. To provide secure, central management of queries and reports and browser-based access to reports, enterprise-wide, add ShowCase Enterprise Reporting.

Easier Report Generation for All

Business users can create their own reports and even automate the formatting of reports that they routinely update. Easy-to-use features enable business users to:

Create a variety of report types, including crosstabs

Save time by using one of several report templates

Use summary fields to create subtotals, averages, counts, etc.

Format fonts, colors, styles, as well as column and row sizes and alignment

Introduce graphics and images into reports Choose from a variety of printing options,

including the ability to create PDF files without the need to purchase additional software.

Advanced Features for Report Developers

Those responsible for generating reports for others can take advantage of additional features. They can use Report Writer to:

Customize reports by using a Visual Basic-like macro language

Create style sheets that can be applied department- or enterprise-wide

Access multiple reports simultaneously, for even greater efficiency in creating and formatting reports

Access additional databases, using ODBC and JDBC capabilities

Streamline Information Distribution with Enterprise Reporting

With this component of the ShowCase Suite, your organization can create a central, secure, searchable repository for queries and reports. You can store new and existing queries and reports in this repository and share query and report definitions among many users.

Business users can schedule reports or run them as needed. You can automate the scheduling and distribution of routine reports, optimizing both system and staff resources. You can also schedule alerts and notifications, so report “consumers” know when information they need has been updated

ShowCase Enterprise Reporting

Efficiently Deliver Critical Information

Today, it's essential that your organization be able to provide information to decision makers throughout your organization quickly and cost effectively. ShowCase Enterprise Reporting enables you to do this.

ShowCase Enterprise Reporting is part of the ShowCase Suite from SPSS, the leading business intelligence solution for companies using the IBM® eServer™ iSeries™ (AS/400®) computing platform. SPSS Inc. also offers Enterprise Reporting for Windows® for organizations that choose to run this component on that platform.

With either version of ShowCase Enterprise Reporting, you can take existing reports, publish them to a secure repository, and make them accessible enterprise wide through a Web browser. In this way, your organization can share information with a virtually unlimited number of employees, business partners, suppliers, and even customers. You gain the ability to:

Provide decision makers with rapid access to information while protecting proprietary or sensitive data

Enable report developers to do their jobs more efficiently

Meet reporting deadlines more easily Avoid the high costs associated with printing

and mailing paper reports

Features to meet your organization's needs

ShowCase Enterprise Reporting completes the ShowCase reporting solution, which also includes ShowCase Query and ShowCase Report Writer. With ShowCase Enterprise Reporting, you develop a central, secure, easily searchable repository for reports and other critical information. With ShowCase Enterprise Reporting, you can:

Automate the scheduling and distribution of routine reports

Notify individuals or groups automatically by e-mail when certain types of reports or other content are updated

Link several reports on a single page, without requiring that report developers do any programming

Provide for the creation of personal home pages containing links to frequently needed reports, documents, and applications

New features available in ShowCase Suite 7.0 provide:

Expanded report-delivery options, including the ability to publish Microsoft® Excel™ spreadsheets and refresh them online

Role-based security More efficient processing of reports with charts

and images

ShowCase Essbase helps your organization gain insight into conditions that are critical to your success. It is an advanced online analytical processing (OLAP) solution that enables you to leverage information you already have in new and more powerful ways. You can improve your understanding of customer profitability, product profitability, product quality, and many other aspects of your operations.

ShowCase Essbase is part of the ShowCase Suite from SPSS, the leading business intelligence solution for companies using the IBM® eServer™ iSeries™ (AS/400®) computing platform. With ShowCase Essbase, you can:

Organize information from different sources to eliminate information "silos" and the resulting inconsistencies and added costs

Support the analytical needs of multiple functional areas from a single platform

Carry out complex analyses, such as multi-currency financial translations and inter-departmental budget allocations

Analyze even the largest datasets efficiently Provide sub-second response time to queries,

even if hundreds or thousands of individuals are using the application at the same time

Update data efficiently while protecting information integrity

ShowCase Essbase offers greater functionality than any other online analytical processing (OLAP) solution. When creating applications, your organization's project leaders can:

Include thousands of dimensions and attributes, with up to a million members per dimension

Build applications that automatically deliver important information such as “top sales territories” or “sales below plan” by using metric filtering or rank analysis

Modify applications to reflect changes in business structures and conditions

Define multiple variance and exception levels

Set alerts and send notifications automatically when certain levels are exceeded

This release makes available to iSeries users the new and enhanced capabilities of Essbase 7.1. These capabilities include:

The Aggregate Storage Option, which provides new ways to store and calculate data

Essbase Administration Services, a new graphical interface that makes it easier for your staff to develop and administer analytic applications

Visual Explorer, a new, separately priced feature that displays multiple dimensions of data graphically

Support for basic data mining Enhancements to Essbase Integration Services,

a separately licensed component that enables your staff to integrate data or metadata from multiple data sources

Support for MDX, a powerful data manipulation language similar to SQL

ShowCase® Analyzer™

Interact with Graphic Views of Data

With ShowCase Analyzer, your organization’s business users can view and interact with customized reports through a Web browser to help them make the right decisions quickly.

ShowCase Analyzer is part of the ShowCase Suite from SPSS, the leading business intelligence solution for companies using the IBM® eServer™ iSeries™ (AS/400®) computing platform.

A Product That Paints a Picture

ShowCase Analyzer enables your organization to leverage all the information contained in Essbase, the online analytical processing (OLAP) component of the ShowCase Suite. You can also access information from relational databases.

By using Analyzer, you can:

Rank, filter, and sort data according to a number of variables or "dimensions"

Present information in a variety of graphic formats

Explore both summarized and detailed data in a variety of ways

Highlight exceptions or variances that point either to problems or opportunities

Print Analyzer reports or include them in documents, presentations, or Web pages

Easy to Deploy and Manage

Because ShowCase Analyzer is browser-based, it can be deployed easily and cost effectively throughout your organization. There’s no need to install, maintain, or upgrade client software. System administrators can manage access, protect database security, and even monitor the server, through a Web browser. And, thanks to its Java™-based architecture, ShowCase Analyzer installs smoothly and integrates easily with other applications.

ShowCase Warehouse Builder

Organize Data—and Keep it Current

With ShowCase Warehouse Builder, you can create a data mart that houses a specific type of information or meets the needs of a particular functional or geographic area. Or create a data warehouse bringing together information for your entire organization.

ShowCase Warehouse Builder is part of the ShowCase Suite from SPSS, the leading business intelligence solution for companies using the IBM® eServer™ iSeries™ (AS/400®) computing platform.

ShowCase Warehouse Builder helps simplify data transformation, loading, and replication, as well as the building of your data mart or data warehouse.

Access Data from Multiple SourcesUsing Warehouse Builder, you can access and consolidate data from a variety of popular platforms and data sources, including:

IBM® DB2® for iSeries, and DB2 on other platforms Microsoft® SQL Server™ Oracle® on AIX™ or on Windows NT® and other Windows® operating

systems Lotus Domino® on the iSeries Microsoft Excel™ and Access™

Streamline ProcessesYou can accomplish essential tasks more easily, with ShowCase Warehouse Builder. For example, you can:

Select specific rows or columns from one or more tables in a transactional database and move this information to new or existing tables for development

Assign meaningful names to any column or table Create calculated results columns Build complex expressions with less likelihood of error and with minimal

support from IT

In addition, ShowCase Warehouse Builder integrates with other components of the ShowCase Suite, enabling you to:

Populate multidimensional databases automatically, using direct links to Essbase on either an iSeries server, a Windows NT server, or servers using the Windows 2003 or Windows 2000 operating systems

Run Essbase routines such as SQL loads, dimension builds, database calculations, and more

Import Query/400 objects and definitions from ShowCase Query and manipulate them to define source data

Gain Greater Value from Your ERP SolutionThrough ShowCase Warehouse Builder, the ShowCase Suite integrates with a number of leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, including JD Edwards World™ and EnterpriseOne™. This integration enables your organization to develop more meaningful reports from your ERP data quickly and easily.

ShowCase Warehouse Manager

Manage Data and System Resources

ShowCase Warehouse Manager helps protect both information integrity and system resources.

ShowCase Warehouse Manager is part of the ShowCase Suite from SPSS, the leading business intelligence solution for companies using the IBM® eServer™ iSeries™ (AS/400®) computing platform.

Stay in Control

With ShowCase Warehouse Manager, you can tightly control and monitor user access to data and simplify routine data management tasks. This helps you realize a greater return on your IT investments.

Through the software's Security Manager, you can:

Secure data at the collection, library, table/view, column, and row levels without affecting other applications

Secure data by user or group of users Create and manage user and group profiles

By using its Resource Manager and License Manager features, you can:

Monitor use across multiple ShowCase products

Define the actions that specific users or groups can take with respect to your data

Set job priorities to optimize resources Monitor system usage and tune system

performance for optimal data access

Streamline Your ERP Solution Security

ShowCase Warehouse Manager's security features integrate with the security of major ERP solutions. For example, the limits you've set to specific applications, rows, and columns in your JD Edwards World™ or EnterpriseOne™ solutions are automatically recognized by ShowCase Warehouse Manager.

http://www.spss.com/success/search.cfm?option=3&Product_ID=81Customer Stories: ShowCase® Suite from SPSS

ALPS Electric Europa GmbH - Electromechanical components manufacturer improves billing accuracy using the ShowCase® Suite from SPSS for sales and financial analysis.

B/E Aerospace, Inc. - Leading supplier to commercial aviation market uses the ShowCase® Suite from SPSS to improve operational efficiencies, increase staff utilization, and improve customer relations.

Branion GmbH - Office supplier wholesaler based in Germany makes critical business information available to managers using the ShowCase® Suite from SPSS.

Canon UK - UK-based electronics manufacturing and services firm dramatically reduces management reporting time and provides ad hoc analysts and reporting capabilities using the ShowCase® Suite from SPSS

Chase-Pitkin Home and Garden - Home improvement vendor deploys the ShowCase Suite® from SPSS to monitor and track 45,000 'for sale' items, significantly improving view of its retail business.

Contrans - Transportation company manages diverse business units with SPSS Inc. solutions

Distribution and Auto Service, Inc. (DAS) - Vehicle distribution company implements financial performance management solution, increasing profitability and costs, using the ShowCase® Suite from SPSS.

Fortis Luxembourg Assurances - Insurer meets complex information needs with SPSS Inc. solutions

Johnsonville Sausage - Food manufacturer uses its data to tasty (and profitable) advantage

Mississippi Chemical Corporation - Chemical company achieves better business insight using the ShowCase® Suite from SPSS Inc.

National Textiles, LLC - Company cuts quality problem down to size

PUMA North America - Athletic footwear and apparel company leverages ShowCase Suite® from SPSS to dramatically reduce management reporting time

Shenandoah Life Insurance Company - Insurance provider implements the ShowCase Suite® from SPSS to improve customer service, reducing policy issuing time by twenty percent.

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*Distribution and Auto Service, Inc. (DAS)

Situation

Headquartered near Los Angeles, California, DAS has operations in 10 cities in the United States and Canada. It provides a wide range of services, including receiving, distribution, vehicle storage, accessory installation, damage survey and repair, pre-delivery services and systems support. Customers include Nissan, General Motors, Subaru, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, Daewoo and Infiniti.

In 1999, DAS began offering marine survey services at its six seaport processing

centers. It also formed a subsidiary to provide terminal and stevedoring operations for auto carrier vessels.

Challenge

Speed. Handling. Comfort. Safety. All the qualities that drivers value in their vehicles, Distribution and Auto Service, Inc. (DAS) values in its business intelligence solution from SPSS Inc.

DAS processes an average of 4,800 vehicles per day for multiple customers for delivery throughout the U.S. and Canada. Every day, the company has opportunities to

acquire new business or improve profitability. To take advantage of these opportunities, managers and decision-makers need fast, easy access to critical information.

But at DAS, this valuable information was getting stuck in the slow lane. Reports against the company's financial accounting solution took three to four days to prepare, and even then provided only a single, high-level table of statistics.

Solution

By implementing an SPSS Inc. business intelligence solution, DAS gained the ability to create, in just a few hours, the detailed reports its managers and decision-makers need. The Essbase® online analytical processing (OLAP) solution from SPSS leverages the company's existing investment in its IBM® eServer iSeries™(AS/400®) technology and in its J.D. Edwards WorldSoftware™ERP solution.

Deploying the SPSS Inc. solution was a straightforward process for the DAS information services (IS)

team. The solution protects the integrity of the company's data. It is also easy for the IS team to support, and for company functional managers to use. During the initial installation, SPSS provided two weeks of on-site training for DAS managers and staff, ensuring that all users were comfortable with the solution's features and operation.

The DAS business intelligence initiative began in finance. This department created a relational database containing financial data from its J.D.

Edwards system. The repository was used to develop the multidimensional databases, or "cubes," that now support the company's budgeting and financial reporting processes, including multi-currency consolidation. The company's finance staff can now pull data from Essbase directly into familiar Microsoft® Excel spreadsheets for analysis, and can create reports and budgets.

DAS uses a second Essbase cube to measure operational efficiencies, as

well as the costs associated with the services DAS provides.

Using a third Essbase cube, DAS tracks logistics costs and service performance data received from external sources. This enables DAS to analyze and better manage its logistics cost structure, which was previously tracked only at summary level in a spreadsheet, and monitor carrier service performance. Previously, DAS had to rely on the logistics service providers, such as railroads and trucking

companies, to report on their own service performance. With the ability to easily analyze detailed cost and performance data, DAS can be more effective in its negotiations with logistics service providers.

Today, more than 40 individuals at DAS use SPSS' Query and Report Writer to create reports customized to their needs. In addition, the graphical display capabilities of SPSS' Analyzer enable DAS to easily identify and quickly respond to any changes in key business metrics.

"This solution has helped us better understand our entire business," says Brendel. "One result is that we can now expand into new ventures with the confidence that we can do so profitably."

Our data preparation time saw a ten-fold improvement, our reporting was much richer and contained much more information, and the business intelligence benefits are almost impossible to quantify. How do you quantify the benefit of having access to information you've never

been able to access before?

Rai BrendelDirector of FinanceDAS

Results: With support from their SPSS Inc. solution, DAS now:

Provides critical information to decision-makers more rapidly

Identifies and responds to

opportunities as they occur

Controls costs effectively

Has increased its profitability

Johnsonville Sausage

Situation

In an industry where taste counts for everything, Johnsonville Sausage has created its own recipe for success. Founded in 1945, as a butcher shop in Johnsonville,

Wisconsin, JohnsonVille Sausage Inc. now operates multiple manufacturing facilities in the United States that produce fresh, smoked and cooked sausage products, breakfast sausage, and snack sausage. The company, now based in Kohler, Wisconsin, distributes its products nationally and internationally. Johnsonville was one of the first in its industry to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) backbone to consolidate business systems and share critical business information.

Challenge

Using its ERP system, Johnsonville's employees, or "members," had access to the company's data repository. This data provided them with valuable information about company operations. However, to shape that information so that managers could easily understand and analyze it required somewhat different tools than the ERP solution provided. That's where SPSS entered the picture.

Solution

With the help of SPSS business intelligence solutions, Johnsonville Sausage managers were able to analyze critical business information — such as sales and operational information — quickly and accurately.

Johnsonville chose SPSS because its fully integrated suite of products allowed them to construct a data warehouse and give users controlled access to it, so that they could quickly build their own printed reports right from their desktops. Johnsonville also liked the solution's flexibility and ease of use.

Today, nearly 80 members company-wide use SPSS solutions to access operational and financial data. They can compare sales by customer, region and brand. With this information, they can develop more accurate sales forecasts for production and manufacturing scheduling. These capabilities directly impact the company's cost of doing business their profitability.

Our users needed customized reports beyond the standardized set of formats available

on the iSeries computing platform. Before we implemented the SPSS solution, MIS

had to extract and compile this information. It was a very labor-intensive process.

Now we have the tools we need to pursue new and better ways to expand the

business.

Ron GilsonMIS DirectorJohnsonville Sausage

Results

By using their SPSS solution, Johsonville Sausage:

Increased productivity Optimzed production and manufacturing

processes

More effectively retained and leveraged customers

Freed up MIS resources that had been previously devoted to compiling information

Additional Applications

The human resources department at Johnsonville uses SPSS solutions to track turnover, separations, statistical payroll information and statistics for active members. Johnsonville also uses SPSS tools on the production side to help make planning more efficient.

"Before we implemented our SPSS solution, manufacturing could only access up to 60 days' worth of information on shop orders, which drive production. We wanted to be able to give them a longer period of history and deliver it to them faster so they could schedule future production runs," says Denise Daley, Johnsonville's data warehouse architect. "Now that we can offer them two years worth of information, they can plan much more accurately."

Johnsonville sees unlimited potential for business intelligence solutions within its organization. In the future, the company hopes to use ShowCase solutions to expand its customer-oriented applications. For example, Web-based technology might allow Johnsonville's customers across the country the benefit of timely, accurate information — on customer order status, for example, or regional sales totals — with just the click of a mouse.

*ALPS Electric Europa GmbH

Situation

A subsidiary of Tokyo-based ALPS Electric Co., Ltd., ALPS Electric Europa specializes in passive and electromechanical components and supplies, offering more than 170,000 different products that address a wide spectrum of customer needs.

Challenge

With thousands of products sold throughout Europe through multiple channels, closely monitoring sales to

ensure continued profitability was critical to ALPS Electric Europa GmbH. But the company found this very challenging to accomplish.

Hans Burg, Head of IT, explains that his department was always very busy generating customized reports on sales. "This was always a tedious process that involved many different approval steps. For this reason, many of our sales people simply stopped requesting reports. Clearly, this was unacceptable," says Burg.

ALPS started searching for a solution that would include a centralized database that staff could access on their own to print out the reports they needed. "In addition to freeing up IT resources, we were looking to establish one common pool of data as a way to ensure that everyone obtained reliable information," Burg adds.

His team began taking a closer look at the solutions that the market had to offer. Because ALPS was already using the IBM® eServer iSeries™ (AS/400®) as its platform of choice, it seemed

logical to stay with this platform.

"It was important to us that we be able to leverage the advantages offered by the iSeries, such as its scalability and reliability. We also wanted to take advantage of our employees' expertise in working with the platform," Burg explains.

ALPS evaluated several vendors, then selected the ShowCase® Suite from SPSS because of its integration with the iSeries. The project was implemented with help from the company's business partner, Cubus.

Solution

"To meet the needs of management, we wanted a solution that would support the decision-making process. In terms of both cost-effectiveness and flexibility, we were convinced that the ShowCase Suite would be the right choice. At the same time, we were interested in retaining Microsoft® Excel™ as our front end, simply because our staff was accustomed to using it.

"We wanted to provide our users with a flexible tool that would allow them to produce their own reports, using Excel,

without help from the IT department," says Burg. "We had already been using ShowCase Query as an interface to the iSeries to transfer reports to our file network. Therefore, we already knew the company and felt comfortable working with them," Burg summarizes.

Another critical requirement of the business intelligence solution was that it provides secure central information access to ALPS' many European distributors, which use conventional phone lines to connect to ALPS

headquarters in Düsseldorf, Germany.

"For this reason, we decided in favor of a multidimensional solution. The values contained in our database cubes were all pre-calculated. Calculation in Essbase initially took about three hours, but once this was done, the information was available to dial-up clients extremely quickly, because nothing more had to be calculated. Had we elected to use a two-dimensional database, these calculations would have had to be performed again

by the clients, significantly lengthening the amount of time required," Burg explains.

Burg says he was also convinced by the almost limitless scalability that the ShowCase Suite offered, as well as its ability to work with Essbase dimension attributes and to allow users to drill down to obtain further details. The ability to purchase concurrent licenses also made the ShowCase Suite cost-effective.

Regardless of the indicators used to reach a conclusion, our people always obtain the

same results. Also, because we are able to monitor payments more accurately, we benefit financially in a very substantial way. As all of this might suggest, we're very pleased with the solution now in place.

Hans Burg, Head of IT, ALPS Electric Europa GmbH

Results

The ShowCase Suite has been in use at ALPS since the spring of 2001, both in sales and in the finance department. Integrating the solution into the existing architecture was easy. There was no need to

purchase any new hardware or additional software. From the very outset, user acceptance was high, primarily due to the retention of Microsoft Excel. Immediately following initial training, staff members were able to work with the system without difficulty.

ALPS uses the ShowCase Suite to analyze monthly sales. The so-called billings (i.e., anything that has been invoiced) are compared to the bookings (incoming orders) from the current month. ALPS management is then able to take a closer look at this

information in a highly detailed manner. At the departmental level, the company is able to analyze this data as it relates to specific customers.

In another application, the finance department generates reports on customer payment habits. "Every invoice that we send includes payment deadlines that generally vary from country to country and customer to customer. With the help of these reports, we are able to determine whether a customer pays on time or not. This allows us to more accurately document

payments and associate them with specific customers and/or projects. This, in turn, helps us determine whether we are facing a quality issue," Burg explains.

Additional information

A new application will soon be put into place to more carefully analyze how the financial module has performed over time. This represents important information for the management team and serves as an early indicator of business performance.

"Today, both our management and sales staff are able to easily generate their own reports whenever they are needed, and we know that we can rely on our data. Our IT department is able to perform more important tasks than report generation. Regardless of the indicators used to reach a conclusion, our people always obtain the same results. Also, because we are able to monitor payments more accurately, we benefit financially in a very substantial way. As all of this might suggest, we're very

pleased with the solution now in place," Burg concludes.

*B/E Aerospace, Inc.

Situation

The world's leading manufacturer of aircraft cabin interior products, and a leading aftermarket distributor of aircraft component parts, B/E Aerospace, Inc. serves virtually all of the world's airlines and aircraft manufacturers. The company designs, develops, manufactures, sells and services a broad line of passenger cabin interior products for both commercial aircraft and business jets, and provides interior design, configuration and conversion services to its customers throughout the world.

Challenge

B/E Aerospace is a leading supplier to the commercial aviation market. Business challenges arise from the fact that this is a global market, with a diverse customer base, in a highly cyclical industry. Additional challenges come from the company's history of acquisitions. From 1987 through early 2001, B/E Aerospace acquired 22 businesses, many of which had decades of experience in the industry and their own established practices.

These acquisitions resulted in an organization that today employs more than 3,500 people and operates 11 principal manufacturing facilities in Europe and North America. This growth necessitated the integration of a variety of legacy systems. B/E Aerospace met this challenge by deploying a J.D. Edwards World Vision ERP solution on the IBM® eServer iSeries™ (AS/400®) computing platform. However, the company found itself with more complex reporting needs than this system could satisfy. The system did not allow managers to simply access key company data or easily create ad hoc queries and reports. B/E Aerospace needed a scalable solution that could integrate with its ERP system; provide reports to managers throughout its diverse, global operations; offer personalized user interaction; and perform in real time.

"Our products are on virtually every commercial aircraft in the world and, since airlines view cabin interiors as a way to differentiate their brands, each fleet is equipped differently. So the ability to have immediate access to different configuration information is mission-critical," explains Roman Ptakowski, group vice president and general manager, B/E Aerospace. "Also, because the aviation market is extremely cost-conscious, it's imperative that B/E's IT department create a ‘zero-friction' environment to facilitate efficient, cost-effective operations. To achieve this, we needed a solution that would provide users with instantaneous information,

improve the efficiency of B/E's business processes, increase the velocity of B/E's fulfillment cycle, as well as support more informed business decisions that would ultimately have a positive impact on our bottom line."

Solution

By implementing a business intelligence solution using the ShowCase® Suite from SPSS from SPSS, B/E Aerospace was able to run routine reports against its ERP system and also create ad hoc reports, providing managers with immediate access to company information in real time.

Almost immediately, our investment in the ShowCase Suite paid for itself. We feel that

we have only scratched the surface with this SPSS technology, and look forward to

continued results once the application is implemented in additional departments and

facilities.

Roman PtakowskiGroup VP and General ManagerB/E Aerospace, Inc.

Results

With support from the ShowCase Suite technology, B/E Aerospace has accomplished the following key business objectives:

1200% ROI in one year on the implementation in its aftermarket sales operation, due to improved product margins

Immediate access to critical information that has enabled the company to save money for its customers

Reduction in time spent by the IT department on report generation, resulting in better staff utilization

Ability to provide the CEO with up-to-theminute information on company operations

"Our criteria in selecting this solution were that it be able to gather information from a variety of sources and work with a variety of tools, that it be easy and intuitive for users with a wide range of computer literacy, and that it show a positive ROI by reducing costs and improving margins. The ShowCase Suite from SPSS fully met these criteria."

Initial applications

B/E Aerospace first deployed the ShowCase Suite to support the information needs of its aftermarket sales efforts. Almost two-thirds of the company's revenues come from upgrades, refurbishments and spare parts for existing aircraft. Since commercial aircraft stay in service for decades, B/E Aerospace must maintain a large inventory of FAA-approved replacement parts. Using the Essbase component of the ShowCase

Suite, B/E Aerospace created a multidimensional database, or "cube," that allowed it to analyze both the pricing of its replacement parts and its customers' ordering patterns. This analysis allowed the company to show its customers how changing their ordering patterns would save them money. As a result, B/E Aerospace was able to improve margins in this critical business area while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction.

A second application was in the company's marketing/sales department. Here, the ShowCase Suite enabled B/E Aerospace to monitor orders, revenue and backlog data, and track previously unavailable metrics, including:

On-time shipment performance against promised date

On-time shipment performance against customer request date

Average number of days to ship

By using the solution's Analyzer component, B/E Aerospace managers were able to create views of data simply by pointing and clicking on relevant details. Analyzer even allowed users to filter data according to their own needs, and sort, rank and graph results. Through these detailed analyses, B/E Aerospace was able to improve its business processes, and simultaneously save money for its customers and improve its own bottom line.

Currently, the company has five or six "power users" of the solution, while an additional 40 key managers in a variety of functional areas at nine plants use it to analyze specific reports. B/E Aerospace also uses the solution's Enterprise Reporting component to make reports available to more than a hundred staff members worldwide over a company intranet. In each of these applications, B/E Aerospace used Essbase to develop what-if scenarios that enabled managers to better anticipate the impact that changes in customer or market dynamics might have on their operations. These scenarios enabled the company to be more proactive in its planning and forecasting and, therefore, manage resources more effectively.

Internally, B/E Aerospace bestowed a special name, MIDAS, on this SPSS solution. The purpose of the new name, according to Ptakowski, was to emphasize to the user community that the solution was "My Data Source" — designed to meet their analytical needs — and to remind them that with it they could turn data into gold for their company!

Additional applications

Under development is an application for the purchasing department that will enable B/E Aerospace to analyze its use of raw materials and pre-assembled parts, and finetune its processes for acquiring, distributing and storing these critical product components. The goal of this application is to achieve a 15% reduction in expenditures. The company also plans to implement the ShowCase Suite at additional plant locations.

Over the next two years, the company intends to fully deploy the ShowCase Suite at its remaining facilities. Also, B/E Aerospace is looking to expand the solution's use to other areas of the business, including finance and inventory.

"Almost immediately, our investment in the ShowCase Suite paid for itself," said Ptakowski. "We feel that we have only scratched the surface with this SPSS technology, and look forward to continued results once the application is implemented in additional departments and facilities."

Canon UK

Situation

Canon is a world leader in imaging products and solutions for digital home and office environments, including digital imaging devices, digital and analog copiers, image filing systems, printers, fax machines, bubble jet printers, scanners, cameras, video cameras, binoculars and calculators. Canon also provides complete network solutions, from IT consulting to installation of voice/data networks, including computers and telephone systems.

Challenge

Managing the operations of Canon UK calls for careful attention to detail. The challenge for managers was to master the details and be able to respond to changing conditions appropriately and quickly.

Analysts formerly had to gather information from different sources and then merge and manipulate the data in Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheets. This took up a large amount of their time. Now, they are using business intelligence solutions from SPSS for a range of applications, the first of which was called MIDAS, to address the question, Must I Do Another Spreadsheet?

Solution

Canon wanted to drastically reduce the time required to produce management reports, and to provide ad-hoc reporting and analysis capabilities for a range of business applications.

A management reporting tool was needed that would be fed from their Intentia® Movex® ERP system running on the IBM® eServer iSeries™(AS/400®), and would address a number of areas:

Production of the monthly financial report pack was a full-time job, with four days being spent re-keying data, and two people taking five days to produce the profitability report

The monthly consumer sales and marketing report took two days to produce

Business and financial analysts required the ability to analyze up-to-date company information and produce ad-hoc reports without the support of the IT department

Management of service level contracts was difficult — more detail was required, as well as a greater level of analysis

A single data warehouse was required to ensure that all users were making decisions based upon the same set of figures

The solution was a SPSS data warehouse, which Canon used to improve several key elements of its business operations.

Being more than satisfied with the reliability and performance of the iSeries platform, it was important to Canon that the solution should run on the same platform, to minimize any problems feeding data from Movex. In addition, Canon wanted to take advantage of their in-house iSeries skills.

SPSS Inc. seemed the natural choice because of its specialization in the iSeries platform, and its ability to easily extract data from Movex. Canon was also impressed that the entire toolset could be provided by SPSS — the relational data warehouse, the world-class Essbase OLAP database, the ETL tools, the Query and Report Writer facility, as well as the ability to deploy over the Web. Another huge appeal was that once the initial investment was made with SPSS, there was no restriction on the number or nature of applications that could be created using the technology.

Financial analysis application

Provides faster reporting and enables greater depth of analysis

The financial analysis application provides information about the daily and monthly sales of all Canon's products sold by the various channels in different geographic regions. Each month, a financial reporting pack is prepared and delivered to approximately 40 of Canon's managers. Preparing this report used to take three weeks but now only takes two days.

Canon's business and financial analysts use the ShowCase® Suite from SPSS financial solution on a daily basis, creating ad-hoc reports which provide details of products sold across the various regions. For instance, the Average Selling Price report shows which products have been the most heavily discounted and in which geographic regions. Prior to the ShowCase Suite application, this report simply could not be produced. Now, the very latest product discount information can be produced by clicking on one button, at any point in the month.

Terence Allmark, consulting planning and analysis manager, says of the financial analysis capabilities, "Not only has this drastically improved the efficiency with which we can view and analyze the data but, by adopting SPSS's single version of the truth approach, we also have the confidence that the entire organization is viewing and acting on the same set of data."

Budgeting application

Allows a greater degree of analytical involvement by all budget holders

About 150 users at Canon UK are involved in the budgeting process, which formerly required the time-consuming and error-prone task of re-keying data. Because of the huge volumes of data involved — the marketing department, for example, had more than 20 spreadsheets to be linked — it was only at the end of the process that the whole picture was presented, leaving very little time to carry out any budgetary analysis. Searching through these spreadsheets for the source of any problems was incredibly laborious and there was no scope to incorporate any historic element into the budgeting process.

It took three internal staff only three weeks to customize the ShowCase Suite solution to meet Canon's budgeting needs. The company was able to use this solution for the budgeting cycle that began in November 2000. By incorporating historic trends from previous years, the budgeting software allows budget holders to analyze their own cost center data before submitting it, which in turn involves an automatic checking and validation process. Because this process is so streamlined, it's far easier now for Canon to perform a budget review six months into the year.

By having more time to work with the budget, staff are able to provide greater input into the budgeting process, which not only ensures that the final budget is realistic, but also brings staff closer to the running of the business.

Service application

Helps managers monitor customer service information and the performance of Canon technicians

Canon has a large number of active customer service contracts at any one time, with technicians making 50,000 visits per month. Information about each service visit is entered into the ERP system and then the information is analyzed to ensure that the required levels of service are maintained.

Previously, this information was held in a Microsoft Access® database, which took five days to update each month. The underlying code was so complex that maintenance and ad-hoc amendments to the system were extremely difficult. The resulting report lacked detail, and service level information could not easily be provided for an individual customer or technician.

To replace the Access system, an SPSS application was built which holds information about each service visit. The application allows Canon's service managers to manage the logistics of their teams of engineers more effectively, in order to cater to areas where demand is greater, and to establish training requirements. Any aspect of a customer visit can be analyzed with respect to the technician, the customer, the location or purpose of the call, right down to a detailed level, e.g., the number of copies made since the last visit.

The service application also makes certain trends visible. For example, it came to light that a significant amount of time was wasted due to technicians arriving for scheduled maintenance visits when no one was there to meet them. A solution was soon implemented: Mobile phones were given to each technician in order to call ahead prior to each visit. As a result, there has been significant time savings due to far fewer wasted visits.

The service application is also used to help calculate the bonus paid to the service engineers. This is dependent on various factors, including the number of jobs per day, the cost per million copies, the number of copies between visits and whether one visit resulted in another visit. The SPSS Inc. software solution has resulted in a more objective approach to awarding bonuses.

Web-based reporting and analysis

Utilizes ShowCase Enterprise Reporting

Since August 2001, 80 users have been taking advantage of Enterprise Reporting, which is used to view a series of 70 pre-formatted daily, weekly and monthly reports, delivered over the Web and presented in Excel or PDF format. Some reports have selection criteria to allow the users to choose on which product, region, date, etc. the report will be based and where appropriate, to specify limits and ranges.

Some examples of where Enterprise Reporting has proven to be extremely beneficial:

Credit controllers can view reports to show the very latest debt situation, and specify criteria — e.g., debts over £1000 and more than 60 days old — for a more focused and efficient approach to chasing creditors

Customer-facing staff, who often work remotely, can quickly and easily get a current report on any customer prior to visiting them

Customer training officers can access a report with forthcoming machine installations in their region, which acts as a trigger for setting up training sessions with their customers

We can easily focus on specifics, allowing identification of risk areas at early stages in

the planning process, which is invaluable to any business. Being an Excel-based

system, the time taken to train new users is minimal - it is definitely one of the

easiest systems I have used in my career to date.

Bobi HowardFinance Planning & Analysis ManagerCanon UK Results

Super-fast production of reports:

The profitability report used to take 10 man-days — now it takes two minutes

The monthly senior management financial reporting pack used to take weeks to prepare — it now takes just two days

Four days of data entry are no longer required

Minimal preparation required by executives for board meetings

Wider range of available analysis for sales of products through the various channels across the geographic regions, e.g., sales trends, product profitability

The ability to produce ad-hoc reports without having to depend upon the IT department

A more streamlined budgeting process, which allows full analysis by the budget holder using historical trends, prior to submitting

A budget that can be easily revised during the year to take into account actual results

Full visibility for Service Managers to all service visit information — trends can be easily spotted, which helps to manage resources more effectively and deal with problems quickly, helping maximize customer satisfaction

The ability to calculate Technicians' bonus payments objectively using real facts and figures

Additional applications

As a result of the success of the initial ShowCase Suite applications, there are a number of additional applications in the pipeline, including:

Sales reporting for 30-40 users to provide live daily sales information more quickly

Enhancements to the service application to provide predictive capabilities for forecasting service requirements

Sales forecasting Balance sheet reporting Converting many of the Movex reports to the

ShowCase Suite reports to facilitate more complex analysis

*Branion GmbH

Situation

In 1999, Büro Actuell eG and Soennecken eG, which were both founded in 1926, joined forces to form one of the world's leading purchasing and marketing cooperatives in the area of office supplies. Today, Branion acts as a full-service hub for more than 800 office supply stores, offering them combined resources in areas such as service, purchasing, sales, logistics, marketing, consulting and IT.

Challenge

Office supplier Branion, based in Overath near Cologne, provides support to business partners, which include more than 800 office supply stores. The company processes three million invoices from member firms, totalling several billion Euros, each year. Revenue is then linked to the respective member and supplier based on various criteria. Branion's existing decentralized statistical methods for product tracking were not suited to the task of providing centralized billing with the type of detailed information the company required.

"The challenge was to establish a common standard for methodology and structures," says Harald Wallukat, the company's head of IT.

The company developed a detailed list of requirements that would have to be met by Branion's future solution. According to Andrea Köhler, the individual responsible for the data warehousing project, these requirements included that the solution be Web-based and offer integration capabilities with Microsoft® Office® products, such as Excel,® which Branion already used. But it also needed to include graphic display capabilities.

Because Branion's primary sources of data and storage media, such as centralized regulation and enterprise resource planning systems, are based on the IBM® eServer iSeries™(AS/400®) computing platform, access to this platform was extremely

important. At the same time, Branion was looking for a solution that could accommodate possible migration to a different platform in the future.

Solution

The data warehousing project started in early 2000 with the replacement of an older information system used for centralized regulation. Today, the new solution is being used in all of Branion's departments, with the primary focus on resource planning and centralized payment processing.

Branion extracts data overnight from its ERP system and loads it into the data warehouse. Approximately 30 employees work with the system at Branion's headquarters. However, many other employees, as well as Branion's member firms and customers, benefit from the results of the analysis.

"In sales, we conduct analysis based on specific products so that our salespeople can recognize not only how many invoices and credits a member has been issued across the various revenue categories, but also what products have been sold. In purchasing, we look at the same information, but from a profit perspective. Our management is primarily interested in the total amounts," says Andrea Köhler.

While examining the marketplace, Branion learned about the solutions offered by SPSS Inc. Factors influencing the final selection of SPSS' software included the fact that, although the software was developed specifically for use on the iSeries, it was also suited for use on other platforms. In addition, Harald Wallukat was already experienced in working with IBM and, therefore, had indirect contact with SPSS Inc. Finally, Branion management took time to speak with another company that worked with SPSS, and were pleased with what they learned.

We view SPSS Inc.'s solution as the right choice for us. We're extremely satisfied, and

view this software as very useful to our entire company. Had we tackled this project

earlier, we would have saved ourselves a lot of hard work developing custom

applications to manage IT tasks.

Harald Wallukat, Head of IT, Branion GmbH

Results

With the help of SPSS solutions, Branion has succeeded in creating unified structures and methods that eliminated "islands" of non-related data and met the needs of managers at all levels of the company. Much of the information that was previously available, but on a decentralized basis, is now available centrally and can be viewed by all authorized users.

Branion employees are able to work more independently and more efficiently, requiring less support from the IT department.

"More importantly, SPSS Inc. puts us in a position to review all of our company's resources whenever we want to. We were able to do away with time-consuming

statistical methods. In fact, because we can now provide analytical results wherever needed via standard Web browsers, we no longer need to print out reports. We have achieved real improvements in our cost structures," says Wallukat.

Additional applications

The system is continually being expanded to cover additional areas, such as finance, marketing and electronic commerce. Branion now plans to use the information contained in its data warehouse to answer individual questions from members, customers and suppliers over the company's Web site.

National Textiles, LLC

Situation

National Textiles provides yarn, fabric and "cut parts"—fabric cut into pieces for sewing into garments. Its largest customers are the apparel divisions of Sara Lee Corp. that make familiar Sara Lee brands such as Champion,® Hanes™, Hanes Beefy-T,® Hanes Her Way® and Just My Size.® National Textiles is the third-largest consumer of cotton in North America, operating nine manufacturing facilities and a cotton distribution center, all located in the southeast. The company is on the "Forbes 500" list of the largest privately held U.S. companies.

Challenge

Founded in 1998 as a spin-off from Sara Lee Branded Apparel, National Textiles is a young company with a long history in its industry. National Textiles' core competency is making high-quality, low-cost cotton yarn and knit fabrics in large quantities. Due to the low unit cost of these items and the highly competitive nature of the industry, the company's strategy is to maintain competitive advantage through operational efficiency. A critical component of operational efficiency is quality.

Traditionally, quality has not been a top priority in the textile/apparel industry, but it is fast becoming a primary driver of operational success. Poor quality is unacceptable to customers, since higher product costs as a result of waste and inefficiency in the production process must be passed along to the customer. But quality management is particularly challenging for National Textiles. Cotton, like other agricultural products, possesses many different attributes, all of which can vary a great deal from crop to crop, and can only be controlled within certain limits. As a result, quality management requires continuous attention from the National Textiles management team.

Solution

For two years after National Textiles' creation, the IT department evaluated and consolidated existing business software applications. These included a legacy supply chain planning and tracking application, shared between National Textiles and its two largest Sara Lee customers, and an advanced planning and scheduling system that constrains production according to textile and apparel manufacturing capacity. These systems, while they kept inventory records accurate, did not enable National Textiles or its customers to track quality efficiently.

Starting at the beginning

As a result, IT became involved in helping the company's Quality Department improve the effectiveness of the company's quality control. Beginning in 1998, National Textiles initiated a series of projects resulting in a custom-developed quality monitoring, analysis and reporting framework that delivers impressive business results. Several components have already been completed. Additional components are in the process of being implemented, while still others are planned for the future.

SPSS Inc. solutions were integral to this effort from the beginning. Using SPSS' Warehouse Builder, National Textiles first created a data warehouse containing detailed information about product performance, such as weight, shrinkage and flammability. Reports developed using SPSS' Query and Report Writer provided basic information on quality to company management.

Meeting quality challenges step by step

Soon a second need arose. Management found that the "process technicians" hired to monitor and record operational states on the plant floor were unable to manually record all the data they observed. This became a bottleneck that prevented effective action to correct out-of-standard conditions. SPSS Inc. solutions enabled National Textiles managers to create a data warehouse containing detailed quality audit data, and then access and analyze that data quickly and easily.

IT began by conducting design sessions to develop a framework for this "in process" system. The team decided that data entry would be done through a combination of wireless hand-held scanners and traditional terminal-based entry programs.

Using this system, both process technicians and machine operators can compare audit values to standard values for each test and receive a response from the system, ranging from "OK" to "Stop the process until this problem is resolved." Each night, the day's audit data is sent to an IBM® eServer iSeries™ (AS/400®) server for storage in a quality data warehouse. SPSS analytical tools are then used to provide the visible, actionable data that users require.

National Textiles managers use this data to monitor the "state of the quality" at each plant. The multidimensional analysis capability provided by Essbase from SPSS enables management to "drill down" and quickly determine the cause of quality issues. This means that problems can often be corrected before shipment to customers. The visual display capabilities of SPSS' Analyzer, such as "traffic lighting," highlight "out-of-bounds" performance levels, making quick assessment and comparative analysis of results easier than ever before.

A third-party software package designed for the same purpose was evaluated for comparison purposes, but was rejected due to its high cost and the effort required to customize it for the company's environment. The internally developed quality project using SPSS Inc. software was approved, built and implemented in four textile plants between April 2000 and February 2001.

It is rare for an IT project to deliver significant business impact, technical

sophistication, and true ease of use. This project has been extraordinary.

Barry MarkusCIONational Textiles Results

National Textiles reduced the overall defect levels reported by its customers to nearly 50% of the levels reported before the first components of this system were implemented. As a result, National Textiles can give its customers better products at a lower cost, and profitability improvements are measured in millions of dollars per year. This directly benefits National Textiles customers. Additionally, reducing defect levels creates cost reductions throughout the company's supply chain, extending to the ultimate consumer.

National Textiles employees also benefit. Those charged with monitoring quality report greater job satisfaction, knowing that their observations will lead to action. And employees who formerly produced reports using spreadsheets or PC-based databases appreciate the much greater availability of data and the more efficient reporting the new system provides.

Because of its close ties to its Sara Lee customers, National Textiles receives a large amount of detailed information on product quality. All parties realize that it is in their mutual best interest to correctly identify whether a defect in a garment occurred during the sewing process or during one of the textile manufacturing processes. So, from each of the three Sara Lee divisions it supplies, National Textiles receives extensive weekly reports on half-a-million dozens of finished products, detailing defects by type, by product and by plant.

Each weekend, customers upload this information onto an FTP site, and National Textiles downloads it into their data warehouse, adding another week's data to its Essbase quality cube. On Monday morning, managers at all plants can access the latest information simply by calling up a "dashboard" built by National Textiles' IT staff, using SPSS' Analyzer for the Web.

The company found Analyzer for the Web a particularly cost-effective tool for this, since no additional software needed to be loaded onto client PCs. Also, managers found it easy to learn. "In a single, two-hour training session, our plant managers became familiar enough with its features that they could use Analyzer for the Web with complete confidence," says Barry Markus, National Textiles CIO.

Two other applications associated with quality control recently went into production. One was an application that automates Actual Quality Level (AQL) audits. These audits capture all product defects in fabric lots waiting to be shipped to customers. AQL audits are designed to indicate the quality levels that customers will experience.

A second application extends lot-history data beyond the 45 days the company used to retain, in order to provide better support for quality level tracking.

Additional applications

Two more applications are currently planned or under development. One will capture the results of knit fabric inspections. A second will combine information related to the company's yarn manufacturing process, supporting improved quality control at that critical phase of production.

Although National Textiles has made great progress, customer expectations continue to raise the bar on quality measures. Company management continues to approve quality systems projects, and holds operations accountable for using the new tools as they are delivered. Information technology has been a powerful enabler for National Textiles, but only because the company's Operations people have embraced the tools and used them to improve quality practices throughout their supply chain.

*Shenandoah Life Insurance Company

Situation

Mutual insurer Shenandoah Life Insurance Company provides a variety of insurance and financial products, including life, dental, disability, and annuities. The company operates in 31 states and the District of Columbia.

Challenge

Shenandoah Life prides itself on delivering outstanding customer service and is always searching for new ways to improve service. As a part of its continuous self-assessment process, the company identified its policy underwriting and issue function as an area for potential enhancement. The policy approval process was paper-based and cumbersome. Paper copies of prospect applications were routed for approval to various departments within the company's home office, resulting in bottlenecks and delays.

Solution

Shenandoah Life implemented an imaging/workflow system to improve the policy approval process, eliminating delays associated with the previous paperbased routing system. With the new system, new business personnel could perform a real-time check of the status of any policy in the approval process. To maximize the effectiveness of the workflow systems, the company turned to SPSS' ShowCase Suite of business intelligence products to provide administrative and executive reporting.

Interested in Shenandoah Life Insurance Company? Download the PDF

Results

Empowered management with current information on pending policies

Reduced the time required to issue certain policies by 20 percent

Improved underwriting and employee performance review processes

Mutual insurer Shenandoah Life Insurance Company provides a variety of insurance and financial products, including life, dental, disability, and annuities. The company, with corporate headquarters in Roanoke, Virginia, operates in 31 states and the District of Columbia. By the end of 2003, the company had tallied record sales and a fourth consecutive year of exceptionally strong growth.

Shenandoah Life attributes its growth to a continuous focus on improving customer service. For this insurer, excellent policyholder service begins as soon as a prospect fills out a policy application. Shenandoah Life sought to reduce the time required to issue its policies and identified the policy application process as an area for potential improvement.

The policy approval process was paper-based, which caused bottlenecks and delays. To solve this problem, the home office implemented an imaging/workflow system that would enable employees to scan each application, making this information available on a company-wide basis. While this solution eliminated certain bottlenecks associated with the paper-based system, others remained. Management turned to reporting analyst Kaffa Shank to provide analysis and reporting that would assist in minimizing these delays.

As documents moved through the workflow queue, files were created to capture the timing of each step in the process. Shank used SPSS ShowCase products to examine these files and produce "time service" reports that revealed how long a policy took to move through the system.

With the file that is created from the workflow system, we can use ShowCase to

monitor specific tasks and determine if those tasks are being performed in a timely

manner. By tweaking these tasks, we can reduce the cost and time it takes to

approve a policy, thereby improving the overall customer experience.

Kaffa ShankReporting AnalystShenandoah Life Insurance Company

Empowered management with current information on pending policies

The time service report that shows pending business is particularly important to management. The data for this report is produced on a daily basis using ShowCase Query, ShowCase Warehouse Builder, and IBM® eServer iSeries™ scheduling software. The final product is presented to management in Excel using the ShowCase Query Add-In feature, which offers a current view of Shenandoah's new business and helps to identify where bottlenecks are occurring.

"With the file that is created from the workflow system, we can use ShowCase to monitor specific tasks and determine if those tasks are being performed in a timely manner," said Shank. "By tweaking these tasks, we can reduce the cost and time it takes to approve a policy, thereby improving the overall customer experience."

Reduced the time required to issue certain policies by 20 percent

Shank's time service reports give Shenandoah Life's management the ability to monitor policies, locate bottlenecks, and devote additional resources to improve productivity.

As a result, Shenandoah Life was able to reduce the approval process time for policies with face values of less than $100,000 by 20 percent, from seven business days to less than six days.

Improved underwriting and employee performance review processes

Underwriters are now doing research on how the company can lower overall costs by reducing spending on medical vendors. They are using ShowCase to explore dimensions such as policy type and age bracket to determine if they can eliminate certain medical tests, which will further streamline issuing new policies.

The company is also able to supplement performance review and goal setting information with data provided on the time service reports.

Shenandoah Life's investment in imaging/workflow and SPSS' ShowCase Suite demonstrates the premium the organization places on technology to help improve customer service. With this kind of commitment, Shenandoah Life can undoubtedly look forward to another year of growth.

Chase-Pitkin Home and Garden

Situation

Chase-Pitkin Home and Garden, a division of supermarket chain Wegmans Food Markets, Inc., operates 15 home improvement stores throughout upstate New York and has more than 2,600 employees.

Challenge

Chase-Pitkin faced a problem known in the retail industry as "shrink"—an unexplained absence of product. Shrink can occur a variety of ways, such as through theft or a clerical error in receiving. To reduce the occurrence of shrink, Chase-

Pitkin's IT department, led by CIO/Controller T. Christopher Dorsey, searched for a business information system that could track items and uncover sources of shrink.

Solution

Chase-Pitkin implemented the ShowCase Suite from SPSS, a user-friendly, interdepartmental software solution that enabled users to track items and calculate shrink. The ShowCase Suite is now used corporate-wide as the source for all store information, enabling departments to uncover trends and make quicker, more strategic decisions.

Chase-Pitkin Home and Garden — In The News

Reacting to Demandby Lisa Terry, RIS/Retail Info Systems News, September 01, 2004

Make Short Work Of Shrinkby Julie Ritzer Ross, Integrated Solutions for Retailers, September 01, 2004

Interested in Chase-Pitkin Home and Garden? Download the PDF

Results Reduced shrink Increased corporate-wide visibility of

store data Improved supply-chain practices

Chase-Pitkin Home & Garden, a division of supermarket chain Wegmans Food Markets, Inc., is based in Rochester, New York. Established in 1974, the company operates 15 home improvement stores in upstate New York. It also has a Commercial Sales division that sells commercial and industrial products to businesses, as well as an Installed Services division that installs home furnishings such as kitchens, baths, and doors.

Chase-Pitkin faced a problem known in the retail industry as "shrink:" not all products in the general ledger make it to the shelves or become part of a legitimate customer transaction. The amount of product lost represents shrink as well as a loss of potential sales revenue.

Shrink can occur at any time from when goods are received to the point of check out. Theft is a significant source of shrink, and can come in the form of internal or external theft. For instance, a dishonest cashier may scan only some of the items, a practice known as "sweethearting." Shrink can also occur through accounting issues in receiving or when items are transferred between stores.

Chase-Pitkin's original vision was to have a "no guesswork" policy for the source of shrink. Once its sources were identified, management could then enact the necessary procedures and policies to minimize it. However, in order to do so, they needed software that would allow them to track every attribute of an item, to include how much was purchased, how much was sold, how much was transferred to other stores, how much was sent back to vendors for various reasons, how much was defective, and how much was already identified as "known" shrink. Unfortunately, Chase-

Pitkin's category management system only reflected departmental or category inventory, not item-level detail. Chase-Pitkin's IT team—T. Christopher Dorsey, CIO/Controller; Matthew Dempsey, senior IT specialist; and Rob DiMarco, senior financial manager—researched tools that could drill down to the item level.

The team chose the ShowCase Suite from SPSS.

"The most impressive part of the ShowCase Suite was that it was the complete package," said Dorsey.

The ShowCase Suite enables enterprises to efficiently organize and update their data (through Showcase Warehouse Builder), analyze it from multiple perspectives (using Showcase Essbase), study it graphically through a Web browser (with Showcase Analyzer), and create presentation quality reports (using ShowCase Report Writer). Dorsey's team also valued the ease with which they could implement the software, saving money that otherwise would have been used to compensate consultants.

SPSS' ShowCase tools allow our user community to understand and analyze any

attribute of the 45,000 plus SKUs we carry in our stores.

T. Christopher DorseyCIO/ControllerChase-Pitkin Reduced shrink

Dempsey and DiMarco used ShowCase Essbase to build a multidimensional database to calculate shrink. They started with the tools department, a department that represents approximately 10,000 items, including power tools. Using ShowCase, Dorsey's group successfully identified the top 16 items that represented 50 percent of the shrink.

By focusing on these 16 items, including monitoring them by store cameras, Chase-Pitkin managers were able to determine that shoplifters smuggled these particular items. They have since developed policies to prevent theft and also now inventory these items on a weekly basis. As a result, shrink on these items has been reduced by more than 50 percent. Based upon the success achieved with this first department, Dorsey's team is anticipating recouping a half to a full percentage point of shrink within the next couple of years. They also estimate that ShowCase will pay for itself within the year.

Increased corporate-wide visibility of store data

In the process of calculating shrink, Dorsey and his team realized that the ShowCase Suite could satisfy the business needs of many different departments. At Chase, as in other companies, the merchandising, inventory, operations, loss prevention, and other departments each had different management systems. These islands of information made it difficult to get a complete, accurate view of the business. ShowCase enabled the IT department to roll out a common system that served as a one-stop shop for any information request.

Chase-Pitkin users log on to ShowCase Analyzer and can view store, category, and item level data from myriad perspectives, such as by sales revenue, by inventory level, by markdown amount, and by theft level, as well as views by merchant and vendor, via multidimensional cubes produced in ShowCase Essbase. With this information readily available, Chase-Pitkin can now identify trends, react more quickly, and make more strategic decisions. "SPSS' ShowCase tools allow our user community to understand and analyze any attribute of the 45,000 plus SKUs we carry in our stores," said Dorsey. "Due to the breadth of information available, ShowCase has also satisfied various department needs, and consequently replaced several of these departments' once-mandatory legacy and third-party software packages."

The savings from migrating to ShowCase included scrapping three legacy applications, freeing developers from managing them on a weekly basis. In addition, Dorsey's IT team replaced their Cognos® category management system, saving not only annual licensing and Windows® upgrade fees, but also the time spent by Dorsey's team supporting the applications.

Improved supply-chain practices

Finally, ShowCase has been one of the leading drivers in pushing Chase-Pitkin to revisit and rethink its supply chain. The company determined that the cause of shrink behind some items was due to the way the products were shipped to the store. They have begun making changes to these distribution channels, including centralizing purchasing activity in the main office instead of having store employees order items.

Finding a way to reduce shrink has resulted in big changes for Chase-Pitkin—thanks to some help from SPSS.

Contrans

Situation

Contrans has ten divisions, each operated independently, and each using its own business model and metrics.

Challenge

Accessing data, generating reports and distributing them to company offices in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, had become a slow, labor-intensive process that taxed IT resources without meeting the needs of internal customers — managers and executives — for timely, accurate information. "Our companies offer a wide variety of services and each of them faces different business conditions, so they tend to use different methods to analyze performance," explains Larry Edney, Contrans project manager. "For example, our tank and bulk businesses are very much weight/volume oriented, and tend to do analysis on a per-ton basis. The van and flatbed operations, though, are more mileage oriented, and tend to

analyze their businesses on a cost-per-mile basis. These differences made data analysis cumbersome, as it was hard to create one set of standard reports that suited all companies."

Solution

Contrans implemented an enterprise-wide business intelligence (BI) solution from SPSS that could capture detailed, real-time information, and translate it into a usable data model that end-users could access from their desktops.

Once salepeople and managers see how fast this solution can deliver the information

they need, in the format they want, they make it part of their routine.

Larry Edney, Project Manager, Contrans Results

By using their SPSS solution, Contrans now:

Supplies management with desktop access to real-time operational and sales information, almost instantaneously

Reduces the time spent by the IT department on report generation and allows them to focus instead on initiatives that contribute to overall company growth

Enables the company's sales force to save hundreds of man-hours per year by enabling them to generate customized reports quickly

Allows employees to access and interpret specific sales and operational data faster than ever before

Contrans already had a number of ShowCase Query and Report Writer licenses when, in 1999, Edney decided to attend an SPSS user conference, COMPASS. There, he learned about the capabilities of other SPSS solutions.

As a result, Contrans chose to add Warehouse Builder, with Analyzer as a front-end for viewing information, and Enterprise Reporting for report delivery. Factors that influenced the company's decision were the solution's speed, functionality and flexibility of information delivery, as well its compatibility with Contrans' current iSeries™™(AS/400®) computing platform.

The new solution is rapidly winning rave reviews from Contrans users. "Once salespeople and managers see how fast this solution can deliver the information they need, in the format they want, they make it part of their routine," says Edney.

Additional applications

Currently, the company has approximately 40 installed users in eight locations. They use the software primarily to monitor sales revenue and day-to-day operations. Edney says that he expects to add 40 to 50 more users, and expand the solution's

use to other areas of the business, including accounting, financials and vehicle maintenance.

SPSS solutions have transformed Contrans' information access. As a result, executives have immediate access to the information they need to make proactive business decisions, and IT staff, instead of being burdened with generating reports, can now turn their attention to more strategic initiatives.

*Fortis Luxembourg Assurances

Situation

Fortis Luxembourg Assurances is a subsidiary of the Belgian-Dutch Fortis Group, an international financial services provider active in the fields of insurance, banking and investment. Fortis Luxembourg offers private banking in various European countries, and also markets life insurance, property and casualty insurance and other financial products.

Challenge

Formed by the merger of two insurance and financial services firms, Fortis Luxembourg Assurances first faced the challenge of integrating multiple information systems. Because of the complexity of its record-keeping requirements, the company needed both reliability and scalability. So they selected the IBM® eServer iSeries™ (AS/400®) as their platform of choice.

In addition, because of the highly competitive nature of the financial services industry, Fortis Luxembourg needed to gain a better understanding of customer preferences. This would allow the company to develop more offerings to which customers would positively respond.

Solution

Fortis Luxembourg initially chose a software vendor with a solution tailored for the insurance industry, but found that this solution required additional customization. As time progressed, they realized that their customized solution also required that an IT staff member be dedicated full-time to generating reports and analyses. And it could not be modified to allow end-users to create reports, nor evolve quickly as the company's reporting needs changed.

So Fortis Luxembourg researched other options, including a solution from SPSS Inc. In evaluating this solution, they were particularly impressed by the depth of functionality offered by Essbase, the online analytical processing (OLAP) component.

Now that the SPSS solution has been implemented, Fortis Luxembourg business staff in various departments can quickly create the analyses and reports they need both to manage day-to-day activities and to support executive-level decision-making. With training from SPSS consultants, Fortis Luxembourg staff members can create these reports without any direct help from their IT department.

Fortis Luxembourg also deployed SPSS' Enterprise Reporting, which enabled the company to provide access to information more easily and cost-effectively.

Interested in Fortis Luxembourg Assurances? Download the PDF

We wanted a more flexible software solution, and also a partner who had the skills to

put the solution in place then transfer those skills to our internal teams.

Christian AdamIT ManagerFortis Luxembourg Assurances

Results

Benefits Fortis Luxembourg realized all the benefits they had anticipated, including:

Faster access to more detailed information More efficient use of IT skills and resources Cost-effective distribution of information to

end-users

Exploring the preferences of its customers with respect to the various products it offers posed a challenge that Fortis Luxembourg felt could best be met with a data mining solution. Consequently, they have selected Clementine, one of the world's most popular data mining solutions.

"We plan to work with SPSS Inc. and use data mining to develop profiles that will help us understand our customers' needs and preferences, so that we can offer the right products to the right people in the right way," says Christian Adam, IT Manager at Fortis Luxembourg Assurances.

Mississippi Chemical Corporation

Situation

Mississippi Chemical corporation produces and markets fertilizers through three wholly owned subsidiaries. It has production plants in three U.S. states and the Caribbean.

Challenge

Each of the company's 100 units stored its financial and sales data in an ERP system. However, managers had an incomplete overall picture of the company's financial situation because each accessed different parts of the system, or retrieved information using different data attributes.

Solution

Mississippi Chemical turned to the ShowCase Suite from SPSS to help consolidate its financial data, and efficiently retrieve and distribute this information throughout the company. Additionally, management now uses the software to conduct ad hoc analyses of the financial and sales databases, providing real-time insight into the company's financial situation.

Interested in Mississippi Chemical Corporation? Download the PDF

Results Reduced by half the time needed to close

monthly books Increased frequency of sales reports from

monthly to daily

Mississippi Chemical produces and markets nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers. Based in Yazoo City, Mississippi, the company has three wholly owned subsidiaries (MissChem Nitrogen, Triad Nitrogen, and MS Phosphates Corporation) and production plants in three U.S. states and the Caribbean.

Mississippi Chemical and its subsidiaries comprise more than 100 different "cost centers"—organizational units that generate costs—which makes collecting and consolidating budget information a complex task. While each unit stores its financial and sales data in a common ERP system, management accessed different parts of the system and retrieved information using different attributes. Thus, managers had significantly different views of the company's financial situation, resulting in lost time in the boardroom deciding whose information was right.

David Ashley, the company's business systems manager, was asked to find a technology that could consolidate the financial figures in the ERP system and provide management with one true view. After investigating a number of software products, he concluded that the ShowCase Suite from SPSS Inc. best met the company's needs. The ShowCase Suite supports information access, data warehousing, data management, online analytical processing, report distribution, and interactive querying of data over the Web.

We've been burned by other query-type products. Compared to other report writers,

SPSS Query interfaces much better with the IBM eServer iSeries, and allows us to do

both batch and interactive processing.

David AshleyBusiness Systems ManagerMississippi Chemical Corporation Reduced by half the time needed to close monthly books

Ashley is now able to transfer the budget information into ShowCase's data warehouse for consolidation via third-party software. This enables the finance group to generate and distribute monthly reports, giving each manager the same view of the organization's financial situation. In fact, the new system has helped Ashley reduce the time needed to close the company's monthly books from seven days to as little as three days.

In addition, the finance group can conduct ad hoc analyses using ShowCase Query to provide real-time insight, or as Ashley puts it, "to determine what is really going on in the business." Ashley is also impressed with the flexible processing options of SPSS Query.

"We've been burned by other query-type products," said Ashley. "Compared to other report writers, SPSS Query interfaces better with the IBM eServer iSeries, and allows us to do both batch and interactive processing."

Increased frequency of sales reports from monthly to daily

Before adopting ShowCase, Mississippi Chemical's sales group relied on monthly sales reports. The group needed more timely insight since manufacturing and selling nitrogen and phosphate is a commodity-driven business with daily price fluctuations. Additionally, the reports couldn't be organized by customer or product, which prevented the sales staff from gaining a real view of a product's movement in the marketplace.

Ashley used ShowCase's Warehouse Builder to develop a sales data warehouse, which conveniently shows which products are being sold at what quantity and cost, which customers are buying, and how much product remains in inventory. Using ShowCase Query, the sales group can now look at the data daily.

"Thanks to Query, the sales group can get a daily snapshot to see how close they're coming to projections," said Ashley. "Another benefit is that they no longer need to go to IS staff to access sales data, and can generate their own reports via Excel™ and Access®.

Overall, Mississippi Chemical has been able to reduce its IS staff by half and realize significant cost savings, due in part to ShowCase empowering company employees to retrieve, analyze, and report their own data.

Just as Mississippi Chemical's fertilizers help its customers' crops to grow and flourish, the ShowCase Suite from SPSS has enabled the company to gain valuable insights and transform its raw data into invaluable business information—and that's a harvest every company can benefit from.

PUMA North America

Situation

PUMA North America, a major producer of athletic footwear, apparel, and accessories, has more than 70 independent sales consultants who are required to make important daily business decisions based on data regarding orders, shipments, and product availability.

Challenge

PUMA's data was housed in an ERP system that provided limited reporting capabilities. To view sales data, sales people contacted PUMA's internal database analysts, who sorted through the database, extracted the requested information, and forwarded it to the sales representatives via e-mail. Sales people would then import the information into an application, view it, and make the appropriate decisions. For analysts, the majority of their daily tasks focused on fielding requests rather than on proactively managing the database. For sales staff, it took hours to receive the information they needed to make critical business decisions.

Solution

PUMA invested in three components of SPSS' ShowCase® Suite: Enterprise Reporting, Query, and Report Writer. These products allow an unlimited number of employees, business partners, suppliers, and customers to access and share information through a standard browser, as well as create professional-looking printed reports.

PUMA North America — In The News

PUMA Manages Inventory in Real-timeby Staff, Consumer Goods Technology, March 30, 2005

PUMA North America Making The Shoe Fit With SPSSby Colin Beasty, Destination CRM, March 29, 2005

Interested in PUMA North America? Download the PDF

Results Reduced calls from sales people to

PUMA's internal database analysts by 20 percent in just two months

Decreased the time required to produce reports from days to minutes

German-based PUMA is a leading producer of athletic footwear, apparel, and accessories. The company's North American operation has more than 70 sales staff members and executives who make daily business decisions based on data regarding orders, shipments, and product availability. Unfortunately for database analysts like Karen King, delivering that information to key decision makers was a time consuming, laborious process.

Sales representatives had to contact King to request specific sales information. She then searched for the desired information, extracted it, and e-mailed it back to the sales person. The sales person then imported it into another application, viewed the

data, and made the appropriate decision. Depending on the inquiry's magnitude, the process could take as long as a day.

To make changes such as canceling an order in the database, King had to check a manual, review each line of each order, write down the information, "jump" to a different screen, and change the information.

Tracking order refusals was also difficult. PUMA credited accounts when a product was returned, but did not track why it was returned. As a result, PUMA could not determine whether the retailer or PUMA was at fault.

PUMA's problems were rooted in the limited reporting capabilities of its enterprise resource planning system (ERP), an application that helps the company manage product planning, inventory, supplier interaction, customer service, and order tracking. In fact, to reformat a report, PUMA had to call the software vendor to request template changes.

Recognizing that its ERP's reporting system was inadequate, PUMA selected three software packages from SPSS' ShowCase Suite: Enterprise Reporting, Query, and Report Writer. These products helped PUMA gain a better view of its sales activity and provide its sales force with updated information to make more informed purchasing decisions. With SPSS' reporting capabilities, PUMA can now create any type of report it wants and share it with any person in the organization.

In the past, it would take a day or more to create a report. Now we can obtain reports

in less than an hour, and in some cases as quickly as 10 to 20 minutes. With SPSS,

we have completely replaced 80 percent of our ERP system reports!

Karen KingDatabase AnalystPUMA Reduced calls from sales people to PUMA's internal database analysts by 20 percent in just two months

Ninety percent of the reports PUMA generates are used by its sales force to track retail sales, identify which products are selling, and perform size run analyses (for example, how many size 13s sold versus size 8s). Reports also track individual store performance on an hourly, monthly, or yearly basis; measure how stores compare with one another; identify which clientele visit each store; and determine if the right people are in the right stores at the right time. If sales of a particular shoe model increase, PUMA can subsequently ramp up production of that shoe. Likewise, if a store falters, PUMA can shift inventory elsewhere or close the store entirely.

With Enterprise Reporting, PUMA can share information with all of its employees, business partners, suppliers, and customers, through a standard Web browser. Since originally implementing this solution, PUMA has introduced 200 users and more than 70 sales people worldwide to Enterprise Reporting. Because it is protected by a firewall, the sales force can securely use Enterprise Reporting to analyze schedules, open orders, customer purchasing habits, and sales forecasts, even when they are working remotely.

"Internal and external personnel leverage Enterprise Reporting to track inventory and provide customers with updated information regarding their orders," said King. "With the information available via the Web, calls to PUMA's internal database analysts from salespeople have been reduced by 20 percent in just two months!"

Decreased the time required to produce reports from days to minutes

Query and Report Writer have become vital reporting tools for PUMA. Query lets users securely access PUMA's relational or multidimensional databases from a variety of platforms. Report Writer eliminates the need for users to manually format reports. Since users can generate their own reports, PUMA's information technology staff can focus on technology issues instead of fulfilling reporting requests.

"In the past, it would take a day or more to create a report," said King. "Now we can obtain reports in less than an hour, and in some cases as quickly as 10 to 20 minutes."

Tracking the future

In the future, PUMA plans to roll out two other applications within SPSS' ShowCase Suite — Essbase® and Analyzer™. With Essbase data "cubes," PUMA's executive team will be able to look at data from multiple perspectives and in real time to analyze orders, sales, and customers. Analyzer will enable PUMA's executives to rank, filter, and sort data as well as identify variances or exceptions and determine where areas of opportunity exist.

For now, though, PUMA has replaced 80 percent of its ERP reports by using a combination of SPSS' ShowCase Suite applications. It has slashed valuable time off its reporting processes, providing the company with an advantage in competing more effectively as it races to gain ground on its larger rivals.