REVIEWER: Stephane Conty, marketing manager for Peugeot Motocycles.

BACKGROUND: Peugeot Motocycles, a subsidiary of the French group PSA Peugeot Citron, is in the business of designing, building and marketing "powered twowheelers" (mopeds and scooters). Our mission fits perfectly into the social trend toward freedom, autonomy and independence; Peugeot Motocycles is achieving increasing success with an ever-wider target market. It is exactly 100 years since the first Peugeot motorbike was born in Montbliard. A century later, Peugeot Motocycles is a major player in the European market and is the leader in France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden and Finland. From the first V-twin four-stroke motorcycle in 1905 to the Elystar (first scooter equipped with ABS breaks) in 2001 and to the Ludix in 2004, on two wheels, once you start to innovate, you can never stop!

PLATFORMS: One biprocessor Windows 2000 Advanced Server in a SAN environment.

PROBLEM SOLVED: Faced with the challenge of rethinking our organization in order to successfully launch the Ludix (a revolutionary scooter), we needed to improve the accuracy and speed of the budgeting and forecasting processes. We started by building a data warehouse that holds all the data required for monitoring sales and profitability. Every department taking part in the project (finance, sales and marketing) validated data definitions in order to ensure its coherence. Next, we needed to develop an application that would allow us to create and simulate scenarios in order to develop the 2004 budget and to export the results in the data warehouse for further use. This budgeting application, code-named ARALIA, was also aimed at improving collaboration between the finance, sales and marketing departments with the goal of improving the whole budgeting process. We had three months to develop an application that would be easy to use, allow us to enter data at any level of our product or customer hierarchies and help us simulate the whole pricing chain - taking into account production costs, client discount levels and type of network (importers or concessions).

PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: We decided to use BOARD because the tool is based on a programming-free environment, allowing us to quickly develop user-friendly applications. BOARD provides us with the capability to enter data at any level in our product and client hierarchies and to then spread the esults to lower levels, saving us time and ultimately shortening the budgeting process. SDG Consulting started to develop our budgeting application prior to our data warehouse being finished. We appreciated the fact that it was easy to switch data sources to load entities and infocubes without having to redesign the whole application. The application we developed with SDG Consulting allowed us to easily define business rules that were then used in our simulation process. Using this application, we will now be able to adjust our forecast during the year based on actual results.

STRENGTHS: BOARD's main strengths are its ease of use, scalability and the ability to develop complex simulation models. Its flexibility and speed of application development allow an organization to deliver results quickly and rapidly gain users' acceptance.

WEAKNESSES: We were a bit disappointed by the limited extraction options of the product (Excel, HTML and delimited text files) and would welcome the ability to export data via ODBC.

SELECTION CRITERIA: We selected BOARD because it appeared to be the only tool that would allow us to reach our objectives in the time frame we had. We also appreciated SDG Consulting's iterative development approach and their ability to map our processes within BOARD. The ease of use and maintenance of BOARD by non technical personnel was another factor of choice.

DELIVERABLES: We now have three budgeting applications covering the needs of Peugeot Motocycles' finance, marketing and sales departments and more than 20 simulation models.

VENDOR SUPPORT: SDG Consulting's experience with BOARD helped us achieve our goals, and the knowledge transfer they carried out enabled us to take control of the product and develop our own processes and applications. SDG's expertise and vision helped us develop an effective application that will be the basis to further extend the product.