As one of the case studies presented at ITWeb's BI Conference 2007 in Johannesburg last week, Nampak showed how it used business intelligence (BI) to generate profit.
Using the JD Edwards BI v4.0 suite, as well as BI tools from Microstrategy and Informatica, the packaging giant found great success, said Nampak's business systems manager for BI, Andrew Brown.
"We now have 900 users of the BI solutions in the company, 60% of which are very active. We process about 4 500 reports per day," he told the 180-strong audience.
Aside from better quality data management, the deployment has brought about a change in the analytical culture, noted Brown.
"Enterprise systems are driving enterprise behaviour."
Estelle de Beer, BI practice manager, spoke of the importance of determining exact BI requirements. "Don't push it to users who don't need it, and it doesn't always have to be in real-time," she reasoned.
However, she noted that in many cases, it is important that business information be processed and used to effect change as quickly as possible, as evidenced in Nampak's experience. In these cases, there are three areas a firm can address to reduce "action time", she noted.
"Firstly, we have data latency issues; we have to clean it, scrub it, match it, move it. We need to do this within a quicker timeframe," she said. Reporting latency and decision latency are the other two highlighted areas, delegates heard.
Related story:
BI ranks as main concern
Share
