With TARGIT Business Intelligence, the data includes more details than before giving a much greater overview and a better basis for decision making. In addition, it is very time-saving. LINAK’s CFO Carsten Borchert explains: “We definitely save time in gathering LINAK’s quality statistics and communicating the data that we generate here. Some of the other reports also give us significantly faster access to data but it is difficult to measure the exact and actual value of these reports.”

The LINAK Group, with 19 LINAK companies worldwide totalling almost 1000 Microsoft Dynamics AX users, primarily employs TARGIT BI Suite in production, quality assurance as well as in the sales and finance departments. “In the future, we expect a far more widespread use of TARGIT, both in more functions and in the global LINAK organization, and that is why we recently decided to invest a considerable amount in TARGIT,” reveals IT Director IT Lene Jensen reveals, and Carsten Borchert adds that most employed views in sales are the profit margin analyses.

“It is a great advantage for us that we can quickly generate topical managerial information which formerly took us a long time to generate. In addition, it is a great benefit that the TARGIT users have an expanded overview of data in their own field of responsibility, which they can react to quickly,” explains Lene Jensen and continues: “TARGIT gives both the management and the individual employee the possibility to immediately analyze the data in details when they need it, and this provides everyone with the possibility to make fast and more precise decisions. Moreover, a BI solution, rather than manual generation of reports, is a much more reliable provider of valid data - and the identical reporting process throughout the LINAK Group ensures that everyone speaks the same language. Furthermore, it becomes cheaper to generate reports since we make an effort to design reports that can be employed at every LINAK site. Last, but not least, it is highly beneficial that the reporting can be customized to the target group.”

Data consolidation
When LINAK decided which BI solution to purchase, it was of the utmost importance that the BI solution works perfectly with the LINAK Group’s existing IT systems, especially with AX. Therefore, they chose TARGIT: “We wanted a solution which was reasonably simple to use making us able to generate views ourselves in order to reduce the expenses otherwise used on consulting hours. Beforehand we had scanned the market to see the different options, and it was decisive for our choice that both our AX reseller and Microsoft pointed towards TARGIT,” says Carsten Borchert.

The CFO explains that it was evident for LINAK to consider a BI solution as a part of their MS Dynamics AX project named “One LINAK - One System”. With a BI tool and AX, they would be able to generate managerial information fast which the LINAK Group could react to. Not only would they be able to generate a basis for decision-making per LINAK site, they would also be able to consolidate data across the entire LINAK Group for the management to react to.

The LINAK Group’s CRM reporting also runs in TARGIT.