Customers

Crown Worldwide Group

"Using BusinessObjects Web Intelligence as our BI platform allows our managers to slice and dice information like never before to gain real-time insights into operational details. With the drill-downs that are now possible, our 200 global offices make faster, more informed decisions and focus training efforts in the right place, which has translated into direct savings in the amount of money Crown pays in insurance claims."

Chris Davis-Pipe
Group Vice President IT
Crown Worldwide Group

Challenge

Hong Kong–based Crown Worldwide Group specializes in relocation, records management, fine arts, wine storage, and logistics, maintaining 200 offices in 50 cities around the world. As one of the largest Asian companies in the relocation market, Crown operates more than 4 million square feet of warehouse space valued at over US$200 million and owns a massive vehicle fleet.

Driven by a desire to deliver consistent, quality service to all of its clients, Crown continually invests in new locations, facilities, equipment, and technology to serve its clients. This determined approach to quality is demonstrated in the Crown's proprietary quality management program called QUEST. Implemented across the company, QUEST provides quality scores to each Crown office, ranking them on quality, performance, customer satisfaction, and operational metrics.

Generated by QUEST and other programs, Crown routinely collects massive amounts of customer and operational data. Office managers and senior executives were unable to drill into the information. Lacking insight into business operations hindered Crown's ability to make efficient business decisions. The company's emphasis on efficiency and quality demanded a proactive approach to analysis and reporting. Crown realized it needed to upgrade its business networks for more in-depth reporting and analysis, better decision-making, and improved business performance.

Approach

With better decision-making a central goal, Crown selected Business Objects, an SAP company, to design and deploy a business intelligence (BI) platform. Providing the detailed analytical reports Crown requires, the BI platform enables Crown to make better use of customer and operational data. BusinessObjects™ Web Intelligence® and Crystal Reports® offer Crown managers the right combination of reporting functionality, providing its managers the granular BI they need to be more informed and nimble in their decision-making.

Implementing BI was part of a larger project to upgrade or replace several legacy systems. By migrating to a J2EE platform running IBM WebSphere, Crown hoped to use Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence to better mine its data and provide a level of interactivity and detail that the canned reports from the older system simply could not match.

Prior to implementing the Business Objects solution, Crown managers were unable to drill down to solve quality issues, and lacked adequate understanding of internal quality scores. Using BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, Crown's office managers now benefit from integrated query, reporting, and analysis functionality, demystifying QUEST reports to see what specific areas resulted in a low score. The new insights let them focus training and improvement efforts in the business areas that truly need attention.

Crown's IT upgrade project is an ongoing effort. Eventually users will have even more flexibility to draw information out of the system without going through the IT department. The company is evaluating dashboard products from Business Objects, as managers are eager to incorporate these powerful tools for driving business success by representing a real-time look at their operations via stunning and meaningful visuals.

Results

Since deploying the Business Objects BI solution, Crown Worldwide has significantly improved its management team's ability to drill down into its vast data stores to derive greater business insights that better inform decision-making. By letting managers focus on specific areas of improvement, Crown is positioned to better train its staff. Additionally, using the new analytical reporting tools, Crown compares insurance claims, profits, and customer satisfaction results in countless ways to map out trends and support future planning.

This compare-and-contrast functionality has proven to be of great benefit to Crown's office managers, who can access other office's QUEST reports and best practices. In this way, inventive ideas rapidly spread throughout the company without needing costly investments in new training and information-sharing programs.

With access to analysis and reporting from BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports, Crown enjoys a number of benefits. For example, the company attributes a 4% decrease in number of claims over a comparable quarter in 2006 to improved business insights hailing from Business Objects BI. Crown now enjoys a stronger negotiating position with insurance providers, based on real-time analysis of risk. The company's quality improvement efforts are more focused, driving down the average value of each insurance claim by 12%. Additionally, for branches with more insurance claims, Crown uses Business Objects solutions to facilitate better training and best practices.

Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports are the foundation for Crown's future dashboard and BI solutions. Chris Davis-Pipe, group vice president IT at Crown Worldwide, says, "Using BusinessObjects Web Intelligence as our BI platform allows our managers to slice and dice information like never before to gain real-time insights into operational details."

"As a quality-driven organization, Crown relies on training and ongoing assessment to improve performance," says Davis-Pipe. "With the drill-downs that are now possible, our 200 global offices can make faster, more informed decisions and focus training efforts in the right place, which has translated into direct savings in the amount of money Crown pays in insurance claims."

Smaller textLarger textPrint this page, properly formatted for paper

Quick Facts