In September 2002, Unitronic became part of the Swedish Lagercranzt Group. After this acquisition, it became necessary to build an extensive financial controlling system. Besides the reporting requirements specified by the Lagercranzt Group, the company also needed to consider the guidelines of the German legislation that requires the CEO to establish suitable monitoring that will reveal endangering developments in time.
One of the central questions was how such an early warning system could be adapted to the operational requirements of Unitronic. The project team wanted an early indicator table in the style of Balanced Scorecards, and turnover and liquidity as well as all core business processes to be observed and evaluated for tendencies of future developments. To make this Balanced Scorecard a reality, several KPI blocks for the respective business areas (finances, inventory, sales and administration) were to be developed. The different managers, who needed to monitor these KPIs, should also be granted a specially designed menu to access KPIs and analyses online, via Unitronic’s Intranet.
Fast integration to Dynamics NAV
After these conceptual considerations, Konstantin Gall, responsible for Unitronic IT, faced the following question: How can we access data stored in our ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and how can we process them? In the search for a mature and easy to implement solution, TARGIT BI Suite won the company over already during the first presentation. The presentation was carried through using Unitronic’s own data, and therefore already fulfilled some of the specific requirements of the company.
Within a few weeks, the early warning system was realized using TARGIT BI Suite. With BIA, the Business Intelligence Accelerator, which is TARGIT’s fast integration tool to Dynamics NAV, data were automatically loaded into a Data warehouse; actualization processes were implemented, and access to standard reports and analyses, based on standard cubes for four business areas (Finance, CRM, SCM, Sales) was provided on the fly.
We have chosen the best product
Today, representatives of the different business departments have personalized rights to access stock value, sales charts and financial analyses. Additional KPIs include development of product sales and demand structure. Looking ahead, Unitronic is planning to perform automatic dispatching of the most important reports to the information recipients by e-mail.
CIO Konstantin Gall concludes with great satisfaction: „In the beginning, we did not know whether there was a solution that could meet all of our requirements. These requirements are now completely fulfilled by TARGIT. Furthermore, we were also able to extend the capabilities to analyze our data. Therefore, TARGIT was the best product we could choose.”
