Company
Baxi Group is one of the largest home comfort companies in Europe with a turnover exceeding 1.000 million € and over 5.600 employees. From centers of manufacturing excellence in the UK, Italy, France, Germany, Turkey and Denmark, the Baxi Group produces: energy efficient central heating boilers, hot water heating and storage units, space heaters, radiators, showers, air management systems providing homes, workplaces and public buildings with warmth, hot water supplies and clean, fresh air.
The Italian subsidiary has a turnover of 220 million € and 900 employees. Certified ISO 9001 in 1993, Baxi S.p.A. was among the first Italian companies to obtain the ISO 14001 certification in 2001.
BOARD Solution
The Sales area was the first where SDG Consulting delivered Management Intelligence solutions based on BOARD The system, evolved along time, is today structured in three main modules:
- Sales Analysis
- Sales Forecast
- Three-year Plan
The BOARD multidimensional database is updated daily from the company ERP, Movex with data about actual sales, orders, shipments and related costs.
The model has been structured by the dimensions emerged as relevant for the business. Users therefore immediately were able to appreciate the benefits of navigating sales information at any level and from any view-point with a high-performance system.
After actual sales data analysis, the next goal was supporting the planning process. The Forecasting model built for Baxi enabled users to build sales forecasts along various analysis dimensions: data-entry modules allow entering data by product or product-group, by geography down to single customers. The different hypotheses can then be saved as scenarios.
BOARD “split & splat” native simulation function, whereby data can be entered at any aggregation level with automatic reallocation at the lowest level, makes the model irreplaceable for planners. The user can select to perform the reallocation based on weights and seasonality from actual data or from previously generated scenarios.
In addition to this feature, the model allows working with totals fixed by family or business unit: a variance inputted for a given product determines a variance which is then reallocated to other products, keeping the total value fixed.
The three-year planning model is similar in functionalities to the Forecasting one, with the same flexibility and interactivity. The difference consists of the planning range where the Budget year is managed differently from the following, due to the higher riskiness of future events.
“The Business Intelligence tool allows today managing, integrating and sharing a wide range of heterogeneous data, transforming them in information for strategic support: as a direct consequence, the information system evolved from simple operational support to a day by day results monitoring and company's strategy execution checking”.
“Today the IT department in Baxi S.p.A. is considered the 'company neural system', an essential technical and human infrastructure. Technology therefore is an essential component of a wider organizational system, where strategy, people and tools interact, aligned toward the same goal”.
Flavio Dalla Zanna, Baxi S.p.A. CIO.