The company
The Japanese Kuraray Group, with a global workforce numbering approximately 7000, develops and manufactures innovative products from synthetic resins, synthetic leather, precision chemicals and fibre/fabric materials. At its site in Frankfurt am Main, Kuraray Europe GmbH manufactures annual totals in excess of 74,000 tons of polyvinylalcohol and 29,000 tons of polyvinylbutyral, the basic materials for various PVA and PVB applications.
Starting point
The management team needed to obtain a prompt and simple overview of the turnover and sales data for its numerous PVA and PVB applications, many of them customer-specific, from Kuraray’s data records in its SAP system. The evaluation of this data constituted a recurrent challenge. Thus far, access has been via a program developed in house that writes data to a Microsoft SQL server. From there, these data are transferred into Excel spreadsheets which can then be used for analysis work. To automate this process, and to make it more user-friendly, Kuraray approached UBL Information Systems.
Sales information system with access to SAP data
To build a sales information system, the company decided in favour of Business Intelligence Software (BIS) from BOARD. “The ease of implementation and the integration of a BOARD front end and database made this a simple decision for us”, explains Christoph Lehmann, IT Director of Kuraray Europe.
Access to SAP is provided by a Java-based ETL tool developed by UBL (for the extraction, transforming and loading of data). “The ETL tool uses RFCs to access the SAP sales data required for analysis work, and prepares it for a ‘data warehouse’ that runs on a Microsoft SQL server”, states Christoph Lehmann as he describes the procedure. This is refreshed automatically every night , and the data warehouse and subsequentlythe multidimensional database are loaded up with up-to-the-minute data. Using BOARD’s front-end components – known in BOARD as ‘capsules’ – access can be obtained to the multidimensional database to draw up analyses.
Automated processes
It was important to management to obtain a rapid overview of sales per country and per region, without the prior need to lose a lot of time preparing and compiling those data. “We are now able, at the touch of a button, to obtain the sales data which we previously had to compile and evaluate manually”, states Bernd Frischbier, Marketing and Sales Director for PVA / PVB products, as he enthuses about the benefits of this new solution. This means that management is able to call up sales data and variance analyses at any time, and Sales staff can also call up the sales data they need by product and by customer. “Prior to this, it took countless individual queries to generate overviews of this kind from SAP,” adds Bernd Frischbier. Today however, this can be done using an automated process without further involvement by staff.
Linking in other divisions
At present, 12 members of the management and sales staff are working with BOARD. Due to positive experiences gained to date, there are now plans to incorporate more of the divisions of the Kuraray Group. By the same token, Production at the PVA/PVB division is to be given access to the system to enable them to automate productivity and utilisation level statistics. Dr. Mathias Gutweiler, CEO, views the entire project, which was delivered in 30 person days, as having been an unqualified success. “With UBL and BOARD, we have opted for a very good combination.”
BOARD partners
UBL Informationssysteme provides hardware and software solutions and services associated with computer infrastructure. The company’s product range extends from complex server configurations, workplace systems and network structures, as well as application programs for classical, transaction-oriented, commercial business applications extending up to modern eBusiness solutions.
www.ubl-is.de