Through a newly minted partnership with a supply chain benchmarking service, business intelligence software provider Information Builders will deliver a new offering aimed at helping companies measure the performance of their supply chain operations.
The latest offering from Information Builders (IBI) uses the services of the Performance Measurement Group to give manufacturers and other companies insight into their performance against their industry peers, while utilizing IBI’s own performance management software to track supply chain operations against internal corporate goals.
Over the past decade, the Performance Measurement Group (PMG) has built a business on consulting services for companies seeking to grade their supply chain performance against those of their industry peers. Using the well-established SCOR (Supply Chain Operations Reference-model) model for supply chain functions developed by the nonprofit Supply Chain Council, PMG offers companies a detailed assessment of their performance against like companies, as well as expertise on how to address deficiencies.
The bundle of software and services announced this week is a means of giving manufacturers and others coordinated insight into both their external benchmarks and their internal targets, according to David Cook, IBI’s director of performance management solutions, in an interview with Manufacturing Executive. The PMG service supplies the external view, while IBI’s WebFOCUS software provides the internal perspective.
The cornerstone of the new offering is IBI’s WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework, a BI system that delivers operational scorecards, KPIs, and other metrics to business users. Customers who sign up for the new offering get a year-long subscription the PMG benchmarking service as well as access to a new utility in the IBI Performance Management Framework that allows them to, at the push of a button, create the data set that PMG uses to make its assessments.
Cook said the reliance on standardized performance metrics such as SCOR is a growing trend among business intelligence vendors, since it allows companies to take a broader view of their performance.
“Once the metrics become standardized, the ability to do benchmarking becomes much more real,” Cook said. “You can compare apples to apples.”
Another motivation for the latest offering was the drive toward more frequent benchmarks as competition for markets and supply chain efficiencies grows fiercer. Of PMG, Cook said, “They had a lot of customers saying, ‘We’d like to take your service and operationalize it, make it happen real time [and] run my business on it, rather than just do an annual or quarterly review.’”
Although IBI has not signed up any customers for the offering yet, Cook said the company has seen interest, particularly among some discrete manufacturers in the Midwest. A company with IBI’s WebFOCUS-based Performance Management Framework already installed can add the new offering for $30,000. Customers new to IBI would need to first install the framework, whose starting price tag is $150,000 to $250,000, Cook said.
IBI’s WebFOCUS software relies heavily on iWay technology for the data access and integration it needs to deliver business intelligence on a company’s information. Information Builders in 2001 spun out its data access technology to create iWay Software, which now OEMs its adaptors to prominent software providers such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.
iWay specializes in connecting a palette of common ERP, CRM, and SCM applications to legacy systems so that all sources of data are represented in the analytics delivered by the WebFOCUS software.
Information Builders’ industrial customer roll reads like a Who’s Who of the manufacturing world: Ford Motor Co., Lockheed Martin, Sony, Texas Instruments, and many others.