Business Intelligence Symposium

In May 2011, the Carl H. Lindner College of Business and LÛCRUM, Inc. began co-hosting Quarterly BI Symposia.  The purpose of these events is to provide thought leadership in the rapidly evolving area of analytics.  By bringing together business and IT professionals from various industries, each can share best practices, lessons learned and walk away with actionable information.

Graduate Course Series

LÛCRUM is also excited to support a Graduate Course Series in Data Analytics offered by UC. The seven-course series prepares students to lead Data Analytics initiatives in their respective businesses by providing a broad and deep understanding of the Data Life Cycle—design and implementation of a database and data warehouse, statistical analysis/mining of data for business insights, techniques for effective presentation of information, and managing BI projects. LÛCRUM associates are currently scheduled to teach the courses on Data Visualization and Managing Business Intelligence Projects.
Download Course Brochure

· · ·

About LÛCRUM

LÛCRUM creates long-term relationships with Clients to build Business Intelligence Solutions that increase profitability, drive operational efficiency and maximize decision-making capabilities. Contact Tom Toerner, Marketing Director for additional information (ttoerner@lucruminc.com) www.lucruminc.com

About The University of Cincinnati Carl H. Lindner College of Business

Since 1906, the Carl H. Lindner College of Business has delivered academic excellence with an emphasis on experiential learning in a multi-disciplinary environment, adding real-world value to the students and communities they serve. In living and breathing this promise every day, the Lindner College of Business provides an education you can’t get anywhere else.  Learn more at business.uc.edu

LÛCRUM is sponsoring the course and would like to invite you and/or your team to attend.

The author of the approach is Dan Linstedt and Bill Inmon has supported the model in his DW2.0 publishing’s as well as Gartner is also acknowledging the productivity gains it can have. It complements Ralph Kimball dimensional modeling methodology. Learn More…

Mr. Whitacre brings with him over thirty years of experience in the IT industry including application development, business liaison, end-to-end development of business intelligence solutions, information strategy development and business strategic consulting.  He comes to us from IBM, where he served in the IBM Federal CTO Office for three years focusing on building strategic relationships and developing opportunities within the Federal Government Sector.  He also served as Senior Director of Information Management & Merchandising Systems during his ten years at Kroger.

Mr. Whitacre holds a BBA in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati and has previously held several management positions within the IT industry.  We are pleased to have Mr. Whitacre on board, and look forward to a prosperous future with him.

———About LÛCRUM

LÛCRUM creates long-term relationships with Clients to build Business Intelligence Solutions that increase profitability, drive operational efficiency and maximize decision-making capabilities.

Contact Tom Toerner, Marketing Director for additional information (ttoerner@lucruminc.com)

The Client

A large utility company that engages in the natural gas and electric businesses, including generating, transmitting, distributing and selling electricity; transporting, processing, storing and marketing natural gas; and operating power plants.

What the Client Wanted

A better process was needed to monitor the operation and manage the costs of using contracted (outsourced) IT services across all business units. They needed to shorten the time it takes to make decisions on purchasing and allocating IT contractor services and devise a more efficient process in the Accounts Payable Department for reconciling hours worked with contractor invoices.

Challenges

The Client had six major service vendors supporting its IT organization, each segmented to support various business areas. Each business unit had its own unique needs that had to be factored into the decision-making process.

The Solution

LUCRUM created a new application within the existing data warehouse that would automatically gather the necessary data such as “Committed,” “Approved,” “Actual” and “Forecasted” spending from sources throughout the enterprise, cleansed and merged the data; making it available to users throughout the company. The new process included an automated system that tracked:
– IT needs of each business unit
– Budgets versus money spent
– Results achieved and ROI on the cost of services versus the benefits received
– Contractor time involved by department; reconciling that time with bills received so that timely payments could be issued
The new application supports decision-making on the assignment of the appropriate outside IT resources to help each department. User-friendly “canned” reporting tools were created, as well as, tools that can be used to create customized “slice-n-dice” reports.

Development and Implementation

In-depth meetings were conducted with all departments in order to understand each unit’s needs so that the appropriate technology solution could be developed and deployed. The application developed utilized existing processes, hardware and tools. Following application development, LUCRUM helped train users throughout the organization on how to utilize the new planning and management tools. The new application development and implementation was completed in six months.

Benefits

* Improved planning tools have helped the organization move from reactive management to proactive management of its outsourced IT services, saving the company significant time and money
* Improved financial controls over spending on outsourced IT services
* Increased data analysis capabilities now allow users greater flexibility in how they can “drill down” to the supporting detail they need to make better decisions
* Billable time on contractor invoices can now be reconciled more quickly and easily because the Accounts Payable Department has better and more timely access to key data such as number of hours and for which department each contractor worked
* Increased data quality
* Contracted IT partners now use the tool to manage their own interactions with the client

“Our project team leveraged the client’s existing processes, hardware and tools to deliver meaningful and measurable business value. We then assisted business users throughout the organization with the transition from reactive to proactive management.”
Jodie Heflin Director, Energy Delivery Services

Download PDF Version

The Client

The manufacturing division of one of the world’s largest automakers

Background

The company first approached LUCRUM and asked for help integrating its internally developed vehicle planning application with financial information which would allow for ‘what if’ scenarios to measure profitability. The lack of integration was resulting in an inability to measure the effect on profitability of a given production mix across all of the North American plants. Working with the company’s planners and leadership team, LUCRUM delivered a “profit analysis” application that gave the client much greater visibility into the expected profitability of any planned manufacturing mix. Subsequently, the client’s Production Planning team approached LUCRUM to deliver a solution which would fully automate the process of creating an optimized production plan.

What the Client Wanted

The first step in their quest for continuous improvement was to create a “profit analysis” application. Their next goal was to develop a system for production planners that would improve and automate the full process of planning monthly schedules to optimize production and maximize profits; eliminate manual data entry so that production planners could focus on higher value activities.

Challenges

The client needed to define the integration of financial data with the vehicle production plans in such a way that expected profits could be measured. They wanted the ability to create “what if” production scenarios and related effect on profits. Production plans needed to take into consideration multiple manufacturing constraints that vary by plant — such as plant set-up, capacity, staff and robots — as well as fluctuating consumer demand for each of the various products. Achievement of these goals would require replacing a time consuming and tedious production planning process based on disconnected, desktop applications used by production planners.

The Solution

LUCRUM developed a profit analysis application that integrated financial information from multiple sources with the existing production planning desktop applications. They assisted in the evaluation and selection of an industry leading “optimization” engine to be used in a new application which would generate an optimized production plan.
LUCRUM developed a working prototype of a relational database, and a web-based application, integrated with a leading optimization engine, providing planners the ability to generate the optimized monthly production plan.

The Benefits

• Better decision making and improved profits; profit analysis provides greater insight into the expected profitability of a given production plan
• Positioned the client to replace its current set of standalone production planning applications; once in production, the new planning application is expected to generate several million in incremental profits
• The new application is expected to cut the planning group’s production plan modeling cycle time by 75 percent and enables rapid “what if” analysis capabilities
• The company is now looking at how the new solutions can be leveraged in other global markets

“We were able to help them develop a process that enables planners to do their jobs dramatically faster and more efficiently. Now they can more easily determine how many to build of each model at each plant and what combination of production will yield the most profits.”

Managing Director of Business Development, LUCRUM

Download PDF Version