Johannesburg, 07 Dec 2007
Venture SA, the just-in-time integrated plastics and automotive parts supplier, has successfully deployed the first commercial Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 deployment in Africa, using a Microsoft SQL Server 2005-based data warehouse in conjunction with Harvey Jones to meet current and future performance monitoring requirements for its manufacturing and financial processes.
The system will be used to gather key performance indicators from the factory floor, collate them and present them to the management team through a dashboard.
"The system is expected to streamline our data collection and analysis while providing a tool to review and compare the results of our global operations," says Mark Walker, CEO of Venture.
Venture SA consists of four automotive plastic plants, a household and packaging plastic plant and two engineering, structural steel and civil entities. Over the past 10 years Venture has invested R1 billion in new plant and technology in its South African operations
The Venture Group operates in South Africa, China, India, Australia and the US. The group has turnover in excess of R6 billion and employs over 7 000 people.
The PerformancePoint system, which integrates with the group`s existing Microsoft architecture, will be rolled out to most of those international sites during 2008.
The initial phase covers manufacturing performance figures with a planned extension to include sales, finance and budgeting in later phases.
"This is another first for Harvey Jones," says Keith Jones, MD of Harvey Jones. "We were the first company in Africa to deploy Microsoft`s Business Scorecard Manager and now we are first to market with the new platform. It has been a pleasure working with Venture."
Harvey Jones launched PerformancePoint Server 2007 in South Africa on 12 October.
"We were very comfortable working with Venture," says Etienne Van Wyk, principal consultant at Harvey Jones, who headed the deployment. "Their culture is performance-based and they were very clear about what they wanted. We were able to deliver the first pass fairly quickly, and with some feedback we were able to alter the solution to meet their exact needs."
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