Bringing Guided Analytics to Bond International
With a £60 million turnover Bond International is the UK’s third largest independent tyre wholesaler, delivering around 2.2 million tyres per year. It operates a fleet of 80 vehicles from depots in Stevenage, Taunton and Pocklington near York.
Bond International was introduced to Contemporary through a recommendation from Business Objects. Bond had approached the software vendor in order to learn more about their reporting software and as a Business Objects Platinum Partner Contemporary were recommended to provide Bond with training, on the basis of their experience and expertise in the complete Business Objects product set.
Bond International is a longstanding company with traditional methods and values and as such were mainly utilising a paper-based reporting system. However, committed to customer service and modernisation, Bond International had recently invested in a Supply Chain Management system (VSC) that they were using extensively for sales order processing and stock inventory as well as vehicle tracking and service performance.
Reg Bond, Managing Director of Bond International had recognised a need for a sea-change in the business to increase their visibility onto the vast quantities of data that they were gathering. He also saw a need for an effective reporting solution to monitor sales performance and generate reports for the senior management. They wanted a scaleable solution that they could easily deploy and manage in-house; skill transfer would be an important part of the project.
The resulting solution from Contemporary is a leading edge business intelligence solution delivering a comprehensive set of operational sales reports as well as guided analytics for management reporting.
The steep change from Bond performing paper based reporting to on-screen analytics was a key issue for their staff but important to show the additional value and flexibility a new system could bring both Bond’s business and its customers.
To maintain the solution’s flexibility, the operational sales reports are customisable through selected parameters and drill-down and management reports are delivered using guided analytics which allows for free-form reporting against common dimensions using a dashboard style of selection.
Contemporary provided Bond International with the complete end-to-end solution. They performed requirements analysis, program specification, development, testing, deployment and skills transfer. The project took approximately two months and was deployed to 30 users.
The solution deployed was a data warehouse built on SQL Server 2000 and Analysis Services. The front-end reporting was delivered using Business- Objects XI, Crystal Reports and OLAP Intelligence. Whilst Bond International had to take the step of upgrading their IT infrastructure in terms of network connections and bandwidth to support the solution this was something that allowed the business to move forward.
The Bond data warehouse features a fully automated incremental load process. It is populated with large quantities of data sourced from the VSC Supply Chain application employed at Bond International.
The system not only delivers valuable insight into sales performance but also adds value through customer intelligence. This is achieved with reports such as ‘Customer Spend Patterns’ that ascertain the optimum time to contact existing buyers and ‘Top Monthly Sellers’ which is used for managing stock levels in accordance with demand and fashions. Risk reduction reports are also a feature of the system with Bond being able to grade their end-chain fitters according to key performance indicators that allow them to minimise their exposure to financial risk.
The “Reporting System” has been designed to be a fully scaleable solution and Bond has some clear and exciting ideas about how they see their systems progressing. Further phases planned include the introduction of logistics optimisation and financial reporting.
Contemporary
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