Information Builders enables agile

information solutions with the

WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI)

platform and integration technologies

from iWay Software.

OrganizationL.B. Foster manufactures, fabricates, and distributes products for the nation’s surface transportation infrastructure.

The ChallengeAs L.B. Foster grew, managers had difficulty accessing, analyzing, and pre-senting information in a cohesive way.

The StrategyThe company established a self-service BI environment that can directly access enterprise applications without a data warehouse. They also use WebFOCUS PMF to align operations with strategy.

The ResultsThe BI team has created hundreds of WebFOCUS reports and strategic performance management applications, saving time, increasing accuracy, and boosting productivity.

Information Builders SolutionWebFOCUS Self-Service and Managed Reporting environments including the Performance Management Framework; direct access to JD Edwards, Lotus Notes, and Excel data via native data adapters; Education and Professional Services.

Snapshot

Customer Profile

L.B. Foster

L.B. Foster Enhances Operations With BI and Performance ManagementOperational BI Complements Lean Manufacturing

L.B. Foster Company is a leading manufacturer, fabricator, and distributor of high- quality transportation and construction materials. The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based company supplies the materials necessary to build and maintain infrastructure for companies in the transportation, construction, utility, energy, recreation, and agriculture markets.

The company’s diverse software infrastructure, which includes packaged applications such as a JD Edwards World enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a Sage SalesLogix CRM system, and more than 200 IBM Lotus Notes applications – made it difficult to access, analyze, and present information in a cohesive and timely way. As the manufacturer grew and its pace of business accelerated, this capability became critical for company managers.

“In many instances, we could get the information we needed, but it took way too long,” says Bruce Hezlep, manager of business applications at L.B. Foster. “For example, our production personnel were creating bills of materials by hand for shop floor operations – an effort that took two to three hours every day. They had to extract data from JD Edwards, key it into Microsoft Excel, analyze it, print it, and distribute it.”

“As a lean manufacturing organization we embrace continuous improvement,” continues Hezlep. “We are always looking to make things better.”

Hezlep led his organization to purchase business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) technology from Information Builders. L.B. Foster’s BI team has created nearly 400 WebFOCUS reports and applications – from parameterized production schedules to inventory commitment reports – as well as devised a performance management framework that complements and extends its balanced scorecard system.

About 100 users throughout the entire organization, from executives to plant and shop floor managers, can now instantly retrieve information on their own. By empowering users at all levels to generate their own reports about everything from inventory and accounting, to sales orders, L.B. Foster has increased productivity company-wide. For example, production floor paperwork that used to take three hours a day to compile is now automatically generated by WebFOCUS – providing both the cohesion and the timeliness the company wanted.

Scrutinizing BI OptionsHezlep says the information management issues that motivated them to acquire a BI platform stemmed from the fact that, “We had always used JD Edwards for financial reporting.” He explains further that, “ERP systems are good for rapidly processing transactions, but not very good for getting information out and delivering it to executive management.”

L.B. Foster had similar issues with Lotus Notes. “Notes does a good job of automating a workflow, but getting data out of it is tricky,” Hezlep adds.

L.B. Foster evaluated BI technology from Information Builders, Cognos, MicroStrategy, and Andrews Consulting, a firm that offers software and services for JD Edwards environments. “We asked all four vendors to demonstrate their products and to duplicate some custom JDE reports, and, ideally enhance them,” Hezlep recalls. “Information Builders really listened to our needs. They provided a customized demonstration that allowed us to see how their software would work in our organization. The other vendors just wanted to demonstrate why their products were better.”

The chosen BI software had to be able to directly access Lotus Notes and JD Edwards data without requiring L.B. Foster to create a data warehouse. “WebFOCUS could get at any data we needed in its native format,” Hezlep says. “For example, it understands the JD Edwards data dictionary so you can access ERP data right away.”

Next they looked at Lotus Notes. “We had been warned that accessing Lotus Notes would be difficult, but we have built our business around this software and we wanted to make sure that we could leverage those investments,” Hezlep says. “On day one Information Builders loaded its software and instantly accessed our Notes data. Today we have reports that can access JD Edwards and Notes simultaneously.”

Hezlep says the other BI tools were data warehouse-centric and cube-centric. “You have to define everything up front before you can create reports, which is a big job. We’re not a high-tech firm. We bend steel for a living. So we wanted some assurance that our BI vendor would be there when we needed them. Information Builders made it clear that they wanted to partner with us.”

“WebFOCUS could get at any data we needed in its native format.”

Hezlep also evaluated all of the BI tools from a future-proofing standpoint. “What applications might we acquire in the next three to five years?” he asked himself. “If they run on an SQL Server database, an Oracle database, or hundreds of others, I know that WebFOCUS can get the data. This was a big selling point for our executives.”

Another big part of the evaluation involved WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework (PMF), a turnkey performance management system that complements and extends an already existing balanced scorecard system. PMF encourages a culture of visibility, accountability, and enhancement that reinforces L.B. Foster’s lean manufacturing philosophy. It helps managers set strategies, communicate plans throughout the organization, define metrics, and involve all stakeholders in monitoring and measurement from an intuitive, browser-based environment.

Extending BI Throughout the EnterpriseL.B. Foster’s first BI project entailed creating enterprise reports for the “three Bs” – daily bookings, billings, and backlogs. Working with Information Builders Professional Services, the BI team created parameterized reports with drill-down capabilities, bringing a whole new realm of utility to the three B reports.

“Our previous reports were fixed, with no parameterization,” Hezlep explains. “You had to continually make special requests, and if it wasn’t right you had to go back to accounting and request something different. Information Builders’ concept of self-service, parameterized reports was revolutionary for us.”

Users gradually adopted the new WebFOCUS reports throughout the company. The turning point came when Hezlep demonstrated some of the new reports at a national operations meeting. “I showed people how they could get all this information on their own without requesting a custom report,” he says. “After that, the floodgates opened.”

The BI team soon found themselves developing parameterized production schedules, AP inquiry reports, inventory balance reports, inventory commitment reports, cash forecasting reports, credit analysis reports, sales order reports, and freight cost reports, to name a few.

“We use Information Builders’ software to define measurements and give people goals to strive for. These products help ensure that the correct information is available when people need it, in a form that lets them take action.”

WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework (PMF)WebFOCUS PMF encourages a culture of visibility, accountability, and enhancement that reinforces L.B. Foster’s lean manufacturing philosophy. It helps managers set strategies, communicate plans throughout the organization, define metrics, and involve all stakeholders in monitoring and measurement from an intuitive, browser-based environment.

The BI team created another high-impact WebFOCUS application for the Safety Department. Formerly, L.B. Foster’s manager of safety and health had to manually compile information about accidents, lost work, disability, and other metrics in Excel spreadsheets. The information found its way into an executive report 45 days later. Now he can run a WebFOCUS safety report whenever he wants to track the Days Away, Restrictions and Transfer (DART) rate. Whenever there is an accident or other lost-time incident, the Safety Department can broadcast the details to other facilities to help people avoid similar incidents. This practice has inspired healthy competition to improve safety records and programs at each plant.

Better Performance ManagementLean manufacturing involves scrutinizing business processes to remove waste and eliminate unnecessary effort – not just in the production lines, but also throughout the organization. L.B. Foster frequently stages lean manufacturing events where a cross-functional team can examine a process and ask questions such as, “Why are we billing so much in the last week of the month?” Using WebFOCUS to analyze enterprise data through parameterized reports makes it easier to answer these types of questions. In this case, by drilling down they can quickly determine which sales offices are billing late and analyze the root cause of the problem.

L.B. Foster’s lean effort is driven by metrics from balanced scorecards, helping managers to measure their progress and improve corporate performance. Now they publish the results through a WebFOCUS dashboard that uses a visual metaphor of red, yellow, and green stoplights as key thresholds are met or exceeded. In addition, they use WebFOCUS PMF to reveal metric relationships and align operational activities with corporate strategy.

Hezlep explains. “Think of a strategy map like a waterfall, a cascading series of events that depicts how all of the metrics are related. Financial growth metrics might be directly impacted by how you deal with customers and how you modify internal processes. PMF does a nice job of putting all this together so you can analyze and display trends. It helps you measure where you are and compare that to where you thought you were going to be.”

For example, management might set a goal to increase sales by five percent and to increase earnings before depreciation, taxes, and amortization (EBDTA) by two percent. PMF makes it easy to define these targets and thresholds, and then alerts them based on actual results. “If this metric is one standard deviation from where we want it to be, turn it yellow,” Hezlep suggests. “If it is two standard deviations, turn it red. WebFOCUS lets you do this to an extent, but PMF makes it much easier to create a complete strategic planning and management system.”

As Hezlep helps integrate seven new business units in the wake of a recent acquisition, he believes WebFOCUS and PMF will help IT make additional improvements in the future.

“We use Information Builders’ software to define measurements and give people goals to strive for,” Hezlep concludes. “These products ensure that the correct information is available when people need it, in a form that lets them take action. We’ve done stuff with these tools that I couldn’t have imagined five years ago.”

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