Global supply chain specialist UTi Worldwide has chosen Cognos as the basis for extending the functionality of its offering and adding value for its customers. The key benefits brought about by the adoption of this platform are already being enjoyed by a number of South African organisations, and will soon be rolled out to the international market.
UTi, founded in 1976, is already strongly positioned in the global supply chain market, but has seen this market evolve since it introduced its eMpower offering 10 years ago. Walter Mapham, UTi director of strategic services, explains: "We are seeing a worldwide trend in supply chain management to move away from an operational focus to tactical and strategic issues. Being the best transactional system is no longer enough to maintain leadership, it is now important to be able to do performance management, cost trending and identification of specific management action."
This is where the Cognos suite becomes critical in delivering such a tool.
As a result, UTi has purchased global licences for the Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBI) Series as well as ReportNet. Mapham states: "It`s a brilliant tool. I use it myself. And all senior managers will be able to do the same."
Graham Chapman, Cognos account manager, comments: "The passing of ownership of the suite went very quickly. UTi has taken to it like a duck to water and is already using it very effectively."
The depth of analysis that these tools are capable of has enabled UTi to provide its customers with supply chain data which is truly essential to the respective businesses. And with ReportNet able to deliver this key information in an instantly publishable format, critical actions can be identified and acted upon far faster and with fewer overheads than ever before.
Mapham continues: "With the older reports, it was far more difficult to identify management actions or even track progress, but now with Cognos these can be easily recognised and actions to rectify the problem can be executed rapidly. What`s more the snapshot capability offers an excellent means to track the progress of any such actions."
Total costs of components can now be monitored, allowing UTi`s automotive customers in particular to pull piece-part pricing data from the system for a more complete overview. Also provided is time-trend analysis of temperature tracking data, often an imperative in the pharmaceutical arena.
"Another key benefit of using the Cognos EBI Suite is the ability to integrate data sources using the ETL tool, DecisionStream. This is incredibly useful as it extracts data from a variety of sources, including eMpower and any ERP system, for presentation in a unified, tactical view," Mapham states.
Use of the system is being driven from South African shores, where clients including Delta Motor Corporation, DaimlerChrysler and Nampak are prototyping the new features. "We drive a lot of innovation from here. It`s both an enormous challenge and a huge opportunity for our local development team, who literally have the world at their feet working on a project such as this one."
Following its recent $40 million acquisition of pharmaceutical organisation IHD, UTi will also be extending these competitive advantages. UTi already has the majority of the major players in this industry vertical as customers, and the extended features will be available to these organisations too.
Chapman comments: "What has been fantastic is that we have the full buy-in from the bottom, middle, top and executive levels at UTi and we look forward to building on this very strong relationship."
"The Cognos suite has become a very important differentiator for us in the way that we service our customers. While only local for the moment, this will soon be true of our worldwide client base," Mapham says.
This re-discovery of BI to extract the detail needed at the board level from traditionally transactional systems comes at just the right time. As customers are evolving to require this data for increased competitive advantage UTi, with the assistance of Cognos, has answered these needs.
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