Johannesburg, 07 Sep 2004
Collecting sales, financial and operational information is a mainstay for any company, but the challenge for many is turning that information into knowledge that supports business decisions.
In its drive to maximise information resources and enable faster, superior decision-making, international freight clearing and forwarding company R"ohlig-Grindrod has implemented an analytical solution from ProClarity, represented locally by Harvey Jones Systems.
"We had a number of legacy systems that we could not get to talk to one another," says R"ohlig-Grindrod executive director Walter Grindrod. "The result was that we could only produce static reports which, in our type of environment, means that you end up managing the business from a static point of view. It also means that you are required to spend a great amount of time looking through directory reports to find the information you need. We based our implementation of the data mining solution on our requirement for obtaining information without wasting costly operational and human resources."
ProClarity has been implemented across R"ohlig-Grindrod`s credit control, quality control, key accounts and operations divisions, including imports and exports.
"With debtors and credit control the information we receive through ProClarity is real-time," says Grindrod. "Before, we could run reports on a daily basis, but again the information was always static. In terms of numeric value, our investment in the solution has improved our debtors` book by between R20 million and R25 million in the past six months. Prior to implementation, the company was operating in overdraft. Now we can identify targets and slice and dice our debtors` book into management chunks, with the result that we are in overdraft only eight or nine days out of every month. Having access to information in a format that you can query has made a world of difference to our business by making day-to-day management so much easier. With ProClarity, information can be downloaded into Excel, PowerPoint and Word without having to go through the cumbersome process of producing Crystal reports."
From an operational point of view the solution is yielding up-to-the-minute information in areas such as trade route measurement, the tracking of cargo, the definition of levels of pricing systems, and all analytical behaviours throughout the company.
R"ohlig-Grindrod is also able to measure operational issues such as the number of errors that local customs is responsible for. This removes subjectivity in its interactions with clients as they can be informed with certainty of the percentage of errors that occur from within the company and from without.
As a result, the solution has also enabled improved service to clients from an information and delivery level.
The biggest challenge in R"ohlig-Grindrod`s implementation of the solution was the quality of its data. The company was initially unaware of how dirty its data was. However, Grindrod says that through the process of implementation, the company came to understand its data a lot better, making the implementation a very worthwhile process.
"As a result we now have fewer staff making operational errors and we also have a better handle on what people are actually doing on a daily basis."
The implementation also had a positive impact on the company`s ISO drive. Changes were made to the legacy systems to prevent common user errors, and much emphasis was placed on scrutinising the input and delivery of data.
"Perhaps the most significant impact of this whole process has been the fact that management is now making decisions on information that we believe in, and we are far more aware of the consequences of our decisions," says Grindrod. "Also, we no longer have to wait three or four days before being able to reach conclusions based on outdated or questionable reports."
He says ProClarity was evaluated against various other products in the market, and that it was chosen on the basis of ease of use and ease of implementation.
"Thus far we have derived enormous value from the solution, and we expect that to grow even further as we improve our own knowledge of the product. There is no doubt that if this tool were to be removed now, we would have great difficulty executing business tasks."
Keith Jones, MD of Harvey Jones Systems, says one of the major advantages of ProClarity is that it gives decision-makers in an organisation one version of the truth on which to base business critical decisions.
"The solution radically cuts the amount of time it takes for people to analyse and act on information, regardless of their analytic skill level."
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