For local glass manufacturer, PG Glass, the investigation into a replacement for its existing executive information system (EIS) began as far back as October 1996. And after evaluating a number of products, the company chose Seagate Holos because it was deemed to be the `best fit` for its vision of the future.
According to Antony Tooley, MD of PG Glass, the company`s existing in-house developed EIS system was nearing the end of its useful life. "Broadly speaking," he says, "we were looking for a product which would provide extensive analysis capabilities, deliver more information, faster and across all of our business entities. Everything pointed to the need for a sophisticated business intelligence tool which extends across the organisation, encompassing everything from sales and finance, to marketing and operational systems."
During the research phase of the project, systems development manager, Elza le Roux, compiled a comprehensive check-list describing the functionality and features which management saw as either necessary, or desirable in the ideal solution - a device used as the benchmark for evaluating potential solutions. "It [the check-list] provided some 43 valid criterion by which to judge the various products available," she says.
Split into five broad categories, these considerations included:
business functionality of the product;
the company behind it; and the total enterprise-wide solution
maintenance -- and upgrade -- costs involved;
the product`s development environment; and
issues such as standards compliance, scaleability and user-friendliness at a client level.
Another aspect of the decision-making process involved an investigation by financial director, Paul Roberts, into the potential suppliers. "PG [Glass] regards itself as a market leader and one which is exploits the `bleeding-edge` of technology in order to maintain competitive advantage," he says.
"We view the supplier-client relationship as a strategic business partnership rather than a mere exchange of cash for products and services." "After completing the lengthy process of rating each evaluation product against all of our criteria," says le Roux, "we were effectively left with only one contender -Seagate Holos."
She explains that this is due partly to the power and flexibility of the product, and partly as a result of the synergy between the two companies.
Seagate Software`s Holos product manager in South Africa, Adriaan Botha, agrees, stating that the two companies are quite similar in their outlook. "PG Glass places as much emphasis on research and development in its own industry as Seagate Software does in business intelligence software," he says.
As one of the principle beneficiaries of effective business intelligence tools, Roberts explains precisely how the technology works in simple terms. "In understanding the principles behind business intelligence software, it is critical to first differentiate between two distinct categories of data," he says.
Elaborating, he describes transactional data as that which is accumulated by standard ordering, accounting and other financial systems and analytical data as the end result after data-scrubbing techniques have been applied to day-to-day transactional data.
Botha takes up the story there and explains that this is usually done on a separate machine - often called a data warehouse - so as not to negatively impact business continuity. "Typical results," he says, "are the ability to establish trends, buying patterns and any manner of other useful business information."
Roberts agrees, pointing out that Holos` delivery of critical business information through a convenient and easy-to-read graphical interface is what makes it so effective. "Enabling managers to dynamically manipulate graphical representations of data for clarity or pose `what if` scenarios," he continues, "allows them to forecast and identify specific trends to the benefit of the business."
Botha points out that PG Glass is among the first companies in the world to go live on Seagate Holos 6.0 and has exploited the latest version`s new Compound OLAP Architecture (COA) extensively. "This architecture represents an acceptance of the soaring data volumes in real world OLAP systems," he explains, "and offers the flexibility and scaleability that makes traditional OLAP data constraints a thing of the past."
Nigel Pendse, co-author of The OLAP Report concurs: "In retrospect, it`s amazing that no OLAP tool has introduced this concept before. The new Seagate Holos COA is ingenious and adds an enormous range of flexibility and extensibility in manipulating and presenting multidimensional data."
Discussing PG Glass` actual implementation, le Roux expects the first application to be complete and rolled out by the end of August 1997. "We expect to eventually migrate the entire reporting function of our business across to Seagate Holos," she says, "and dedicate our AS/400 system exclusively to satisfying our transactional needs."
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