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Case Study on Applying Business Intelligence and Enterprise Resource Planning- Regency Lighting

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Case Study on Applying Business Intelligence and Enterprise Resource Planning

Regency Lighting

INTRODUCTION TO COMPANY

Regency Lighting is a full-service lightening distributor with more than 30 years in business and lightening distribution centres across the country. Head quartered in California, the company helps clients with everything from pre-construction design support and energy-saving retrofit projects to on-site maintenance, easy product replacement, lamp recycling, and more. The company expertise in lightening maintenance, design, construction, recycling.

Evan Regenstreif is the CEO of the company. The company’s estimated revenue is $165 million with total 345 employees. The vision of the company is to build value-driven peopled centred company. The company strives to provide excellent service and expertise while building meaningful relationships with clients based on trust, respect and integrity.

The values of the company are seen in the form of RISE – standing for Relationship, Integrity, Service and Expertise. The company defines its work culture as a synthesis of vision, values and practices they share.

Regency Lighting’s top competitor is Conserva Limited, led by Benjamin Roberts.

CHALLENGES IN ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING

As an organization with large distribution network, the company in late 1990’s, implemented ERP (resource planning and scheduling, Logistics, Accounting, Human Resources etc.) to help it track materials and information and provide mangers with visibility in its business operations. The ERP system was configured to support the requirements of utility business in order to reap benefits like employee productivity, inventory reduction and enhanced decision making. Even though ERP was implemented, still the company faced the challenge of retrieving information to support decision making, as the information from other existing systems did not integrate with the ERP system for reporting purposes. The organization was exporting data from ERP system into spread sheets and using a lot of pivot tables. The generation of reports caused them to rely on IT department. This caused a major concern and the company needed more accurate reporting system. Thus, the company adopted Business Intelligence to improve information delivery and analysis in an endeavour to support decision making. These two systems, although providing some improvements, also caused a number of issues like lack of proper integration among the systems, failure of employees to retrieve reports from the system.

BENEFITS OF IMPLEMENTING ERP

ERP implementation offers flexibility, adaptability and scalability for growth. ERP system helps in meeting latest reporting requirements by streamlining business processes, thus gaining speed, efficiency and accuracy in business operations.  ERP systems play a significant role, when it comes to organize and process financial data. It also improves the overall business development activity in the long and short term. In addition to these advantages, by utilizing ERP system, a company can increase the efficiency of your processes, decrease costs, streamline processes and as well as improve productivity. ERP helps in easily sharing data across various departments in an organization. In addition, the availability of the company’s information in a centralized location helps in better collaboration and more streamlined completion of tasks. This makes better workflows, transparency throughout the organization, streamlining the business processes and quick and confident decision making. Through proper integration, ERP system can increase organization’s productivity and reduce time and labour costs.

 

BENEFITS OF APPLYING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

The company in addition to the existing ERP system implemented Business Intelligence to improve information delivery and analysis in an endeavour to support decision making.  The benefits that Regency Lighting received from integrating an ERP system and BI were numerous. The dependency on IT department reduced. Users can now retrieve information themselves and run their reports, which were published in a centralized location. The company developed an Information Management Strategy to provide certain guidelines for implementation of Business Intelligence for better positioning of company’s needs. The Information Management Strategy was multi-faced in nature, reflecting a know-how of the different aspects of Business Intelligence for successful implementation. The strategy included - The required information to support decision making with the company (Information Hierarchy); The presentation and delivery of information to support decision making (Reporting Strategy); The software solutions and underlying technologies to sourcing, storage, analysis and presentation of information (Application Strategy/Business Intelligence Architecture); The implementation and management of effective Business Intelligence (Governance Model). One important component of the strategy was to adopt an enterprise approach to the use of Business Intelligence. This was attained through the consolidation of existing Business Intelligence technologies and the implementation of an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW).

Another aspect of the strategy was a Business Intelligence Steering Committee that was established to ensure that reporting requirements were aligned with the strategic needs of the company. Accordingly, all stakeholders were represented on the committee. This assisted in building linkages between the IT area and other functions of the business.

 

CONCLUSION

The case study provides an example of ERP and Business Intelligence integration developed for a utilities company. This strategic approach could be equally applied to companies in other industry sectors. Both ERP and BI provide tangible and repeatable benefits for managing organizations when deployed and utilized effectively. ERP can help provide standardization, operational efficiency and collaboration, while BI can help organizations to drive performance improvements based on data. Data becomes more consumable and business users are more likely to seek it out and integrate it into all decisions. The organization becomes more informed, active and agile.  Although the integration of BI and ERP systems gives many benefits, there are some considerations like technological innovation, size, reliability and availability, efficiency, and system flexibility which need to be taken care of.


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