Business intelligence is helping Durban-based McCarthy Motor Holdings to find the best ways to make progress in the Employment Equity arena.
According to McCarthy Executive Director Roy Parkhurst, the highly decentralised nature of the company`s divisions and its 90 dealerships makes it difficult to easily and quickly identify trends both at the macro and micro levels and to spot where the most positive and negative practices are occurring.
Parkhurst says that discussions with ICT outsource partner PQ Africa resulted in the decision to implement a Business Intelligence solution for McCarthy Motor Holdings using Cognos Transformer and Cognos Powerplay.
The solution was implemented late in 2000 and, although McCarthy is still gaining familiarity with these tools, it is already appreciating having instant access to the relevant data in an easily navigable format.
Data can be viewed in tabular or graphical form allowing users to monitor overall trends, spot key variances easily, and drill-down into the data to examine causes.
The system was implemented for McCarthy`s by a team from PQ Africa KZN under senior manager Chris Brown who says that the procedure was relatively quick and painless with the initial step being to define the desired data layout by drawing up a Star Schema.
The next step was to produce an application which would extract the required data from the McCarthy Core Financial and Payroll systems in the format required by Cognos Transformer.
The extracted data was then indexed and converted by Tranformer into a data cube which could be accessed by users who had copies of Cognos Powerplay.
McCarthy Motor Holdings makes regular Employment Equity reports to both government and the UCT`s Breakwater Monitor and the system allows its users to easily switch between the data views required by each organisation.
Users of Business Intelligence systems are not stuck with a limited number of set reports and can query their data to get answers to literally any question they can conceive of asking.
The challenge to them, says Parkhurst, is to develop a mindset which is unbounded by the time and flexibility limitations of traditional reporting systems. No longer should they content themselves with the usual but, instead, constantly look for new questions to ask of the data.
Brown said that the Cognos Business Intelligence solution empowers management to detect problems timeously and take fast, accurate decisions by using in a different way, the data already stored in the organisation`s day-to-day transactional processing system.
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