Company
O.R.V. Ovattificio Resinatura Valpadana is the flagship company of the textile arm of Industrie Maurizio Peruzzo. To address the data analysis needs of its Product Managers and of Sales Management, O.R.V. decided to adopt BOARD International’s BOARD Management Intelligence Toolkit.
This decision was made at the time of a move to centralize the information systems of the companies making up the group. In total, there were more than 150 accounting and statistics programs and more than 6000 queries on specific situations. To convert all these programs and queries would have been extremely costly.
The need for a “Management Intelligence” solution arose above all out of the need to adopt a tool that would be flexible, making the necessary data and information available quickly, integrated with the existing information system so that the data will be certified and dependable, and simple to implement and utilize on the part of the Sales Managers and Product Managers in supporting their sales policies and defining budgeting activities.
Based on this scenario and with these requirements, Datatex (Datasys Group), which had supplied O.R.V with a TIM management system (used to run textile production on As/400), responded by recommending BOARD International’s BOARD Management Intelligence Toolkit solution.
As confirmed by Dr Cordioli, Information Systems Director of ORV, thanks to the Rapid Applications Development (R.A.D) functions in BOARD, it took less than 40 days for the team (made up of Datatex consultants and ORV’s Head of IT) to render the Management Intelligence Toolkit fully operational, creating minimal impact on the everyday work environment and satisfying all the requirements of the company’s management functions.
At all stages, the implementation of the BOARD project has led to the realization of other objectives, such as:
- Providing top management with a broad picture of how the company is progressing, through the creation of an “ad hoc“ reporting tool that can be utilized easily and immediately. Users of the reporting function can analyze sales data and compare them with budget data, and in effect build up a full profit and loss account. A Profitability Analysis by Factory has since been created, and
- The creation of an effective orders pending control and analysis system (thanks to the native BOARD function dubbed “date translation“) which allows the calculation of dates in an extremely simple manner, and, using the simulation functions, evaluation of the possible repercussions on all departments in the event of delays or of delivery dates being postponed.
In particular, with its ability to handle “what-if” and “what-for” type simulations, BOARD is a tool that reaches beyond normal Business Intelligence, which goes no further than “what-is” simulations, relating only to analysis of “historical” data. In contrast, BOARD has the capability to run simulations which are predictive in nature and consider the effects of “future events,” for activities that are strategic and forecast-oriented – the kind that senior management like to be right about.
Because BOARD is an integrated type of solution, it favours the distribution of information at all company levels, since support for every decision-making process can be supplied by a single IT tool. Dr Cordioli concludes by stressing that the simplicity of use and the versatility offered by BOARD have fully satisfied more than 50 users inside O.R.V., who are able to find the information needed to carry on their business, accessing the system independently, swiftly and, best of all, directly.