Company
With nine plants spanning several European geographies and consolidated revenues of over 300 million Euros, Snaidero sells its range of medium-high quality kitchens through 2500 sales outlets in 50 countries all over the world. Snaidero makes big investments in technology and research to constantly improve the quality and ergonomics its kitchens, which are the result of a co-operation with designers of international fame. Look to the future, stay ahead of the market and offer customers excellent products - these goals are at the foundation upon which the Snaidero Group is based.
BOARD Solution
The Snaidero solution comprises several modules that are split between internal and external applications. The internal solutions provide decision support and reside on a high-performance IBM- Windows 2000 Server. This environment is fed with data coming from multiple data sources and company departments, such as company transaction systems and distributed departmental systems, which manage manufacturing and other processes. The external applications support extranet applications for Snaidero’s suppliers and resellers, and are located offsite in a Web farm. BOARD WebServer (BOARD International’s flagship Web-based product) runs on a high-performance IBM server with Windows 2000 Server, and is part of a cluster of application servers, web servers and database servers (mixed Linux & Windows 2000 Server environment).
The Management Intelligence system is based on the Extended Enterprise vision, which was adopted first by the Italian group and then by the entire organization. A mixed team of Snaidero managers and SDG (BOARD reseller) consultants developed and deployed the solution in several phases.
- Decision Support Area (DSA) – The most important and challenging need was to create a common, shared repository of all information used to support the management and control of company processes. Within the DSA every manager and every process owner has an integrated and distributed system to monitor and analyze performance across Sales, Marketing, Quality, Supply chain, Customer Service, Budgeting and Cost Control. Through this, Snaidero has fully implemented the concept of Corporate Performance Management, in addition to planning support.
- Web-based business intelligence – Snaidero already had in place a complex environment comprised of two extranets, which was developed to serve the large and distributed communities of sales reps, resellers and suppliers. BOARD allowed a seamless integration of analysis and performance monitoring functionalities fully tailored to each user group’s need.
Business Benefit
The capability of managing a single, integrated repository of all indicators and information has made it possible to provide effective support to the extended enterprise management. SDG consulting used BOARD to meet all the requirements expressed by Snaidero management, including ease of access, use and customization, completeness and speed. The flexibility and richness of the toolkit approach, combined with its brilliant support of simulation and “what-if” scenarios made it possible to satisfy the diverse needs of multiple departments and processes with a single software tool. The Snaidero Group is made of several companies across Europe and is today redefining its needs in term of analysis, management and consolidation of information at the group level. The positive experience with BOARD, scalability and efficient support for distributed architectures will provide the basis for the development of a corporate management intelligence system fully integrated with each local country environment.
Snaidero Group chose BOARD for the following main reasons:
- Ease of applications development, deployment and maintenance
- Scalability
- Low hardware requirements
- An outstanding price-performance ratio
- The competence and experience in world-class projects of SDG consulting
- Capability to integrate and manage large volumes of heterogeneous data.
- Speed of application development.
- Flexibility and ease of development of complex analysis.
- Tremendous ease in adapting, maintaining and customizing models.
- Ease of integration with existing systems and extranet.
In order to satisfy the needs of 40 users for the DSA and approximately 500 users for the web environment, BOARD produces a wide variety of outputs within the following categories:
- Dashboards
- Management reports & charts
- Operational reports & charts
- Simulation models
- Cost control models
- Web reports and charts which are fully integrated in the extranet
- Output data which is exported to ASCII files to feed other systems
Pierangelo Snaidero CIO, Snaidero Group said: " We especially appreciated the continuous vendor support and the flexibility in changing the software licenses configuration to satisfy the evolving needs of different companies of our group".