The Company
ABB AG, based in Mannheim, is a leader in power and automation technology that enables its utility and industry customers to improve their performance and reduce environmental pollution. ABB employs about 110,000 people in more than 100 countries throughout the world. The group is divided into several units such as robotics, process automation, power systems and products.

Business Challenges
In 2005, the Power Systems Division introduced a central Business Intelligence solution to analyse data from different systems, such as SAP, as they did not have an integrated solution for their analysis and planning requirements. The issues with a growing number of Excel applications, and the use of different software solutions throughout the various departments, were therefore solved and a central tool was made available.
It quickly became clear that the selected solution could not cope with all of ABB’s requirements for integrating analysis, planning and reporting. Problems such as performance, a low level of user-friendliness and time-consuming modifications were some of the difficulties that the staff faced. For example, there was no way to transfer and integrate data from Lotus Notes databases in order to create a central performance management, indicator and planning system for the whole division. The company therefore decided to look for another tool that would be better equipped to cope with these requirements.

BOARD Solution
After an exhaustive search, the decision was made to go with BOARD’s integrated programming-free Toolkit. As BOARD’s longtime implementation partner, Qurius Advanced Solutions were chosen to deliver the solution.
Within a few days, Qurius carried out a prototype and demonstrated, among other things, how easy it was to access data from the source systems such as SAP and Lo-tus Notes. The simple, flexible reporting and visual capabilities, together with BOARD’s integrated workflow support, were further reasons to adopt the Toolkit. Other products on the shortlist could not compare because of high costs, insufficient userfriendliness, complexity and poor integration. “Obviously this time we wanted to be sure that we had opted for the right tool and looked at many other manufacturers’ products. But in the end only the BOARD toolkit convinced us”, explained Bernd Vieten, Information Systems Manager at ABB AG, Power Systems Division.
First of all, Qurius Advanced Solutions implemented a comprehensive reporting and planning solution for ABB Germany's Power Systems Sales under the name of BIM (Business Intelligence Markets).
After this crucial test was passed, they went on to pro-duce an SPR, a seamless planning and reporting solution. In January 2010, an analysis application based on reporting data coming from SAP and planning data covering several financial key indicators (which was initially manually loaded) went live. Subsequently, ABB and Qurius started to build a comprehensive planning application. In June, a complete cross-divisional bottom-up-planning of financial data could go live thanks to BOARD. The planning application enables the business to actively plan the budget for the following year, as well as carry out rolling forecast planning. Further project phases for reporting and cost centre controlling are already planned.

Customer Benefit
Compared with the previous time and resource consuming procedures using Excel and other tools, BOARD provides ABB with a single integrated platform for the most varied analysis and planning tasks, enabling great savings to be made. Now it no longer takes days to adapt the application to changing basic conditions, but can be done with just a flick of the wrist.
The new reporting and planning solution has given the commercial division management a system that enables them to analyse the relevant data from many different points of view with just a few clicks of the mouse. The information gained from this is the basis for quick, reliable decisions to actively control the company.