Company
Biomet, Inc.
and its subsidiaries design, manufacture and market products used primarily
by orthopedic medical specialists in both surgical and non-surgical therapy,
including reconstructive and fixation devices, electrical bone growth
stimulators, orthopedic support devices, operating room supplies, general
surgical instruments, arthroscopy products, spinal implants, bone cements,
bone substitute materials, and craniomaxillofacial implants and instruments.
Biomet has corporate headquarters in Warsaw, Indiana, and manufacturing
and/or office facilities in more than twenty-five locations worldwide
and distributes its products in more than 100 countries.
Company
Problem
At Biomet, the drive towards customer service meant that instant access
to sales information was critical. Business users and executives needed
immediate and flexible access to their information to review sales shipments,
revenues and margins (by product, product group/family, distributor, and
customer), all over different time periods.
Critical
sales information was locked away in the ERP database and was manually
gathered, primarily through custom SQL queries. The process was burdensome,
required detailed knowledge of the database and was time-consuming. The
existing queries and reports resulted in only summary information, which
raised more questions than answers. This in turn required additional queries
to be developed by IT.
Solution
Biomet launched a Business Intelligence project to provide its users with
the information they demanded. Biomet found that potential solutions fell
into two categories, tools and application products. "Most of the products
we found were development tools. With them, we had to build our own solution,
relying on our own technical staff for knowledge of our ERP system. We
saw that as a long and expensive process" said Tom Orr, Biomet Project
Leader. They also found some application products that provided a shrink-wrapped
approach. Tom Orr explains, "It was interesting that all the demonstrations
looked the same, the tool vendors were showing us what was possible with
their tools while the application solutions showed us what they delivered."
Biomet
licensed Vanguard
Solutions Group's Graphical Performance Series (GPS),
a business intelligence solution to tap into their existing ERP system.
"GPS proved to be a complete application solution. It came pre-mapped
to our ERP system with ready build information views for my users. I was
able to install GPS, build the warehouse and have my users viewing the
information all within two weeks. The new system proved very easy to use.
Most users can begin using it after a 15-minute overview" states Orr.
Value
Users now receive multi-dimensional cubes of customer and product information
with the ability to sort, format, highlight exceptions, perform analysis
and explore the information from multiple angles. These users include
windows based users connected to the ERP system and remote, dial-up users,
using a web browser.
Biomet's
Business Intelligence project began providing a return on the investment
to business users from the beginning. Benefits included a saving time
and money, for example:
- 320
hours compiling one quarterly report is now reduced to 2 hours per
year generating monthly reports and multi-dimensional views.
- Slashed
75% of the time required for typical financial analyst SQL development
projects.
The new
system also elevated opportunities, for example:
- Users
hone in on opportunities and issues quickly now that the old fixed
format reports and queries have been replaced with multi-dimensional,
multi-leveled OLAP views.
- Sales
results are analyzed to determine sales promotion impacts while
there is time to react.
"The
users are able to perform deeper analysis", says Tom Orr. "I give
them a GPS cube and they are able to do their analysis without coming
back to the Information Technologies department. Information is now
a mouse click away!"
