Customers

Metarom

Metarom"Because of the complexity of our business, we face challenges similar to those of large companies. With Business Objects, we can supply information of higher quality to control all our business activities, whilst enabling our IT users to be self-sufficient. The result is impressive cost savings"

Christian Viel
Financial Director for Purchasing and IT
Metarom

Challenge

Metarom is a French small to medium enterprise which was founded in 1953 and specializes in the creation and manufacture of flavoring products for use in the food processing industry. To strengthen its market position and increase turnover, the company needed relevant information to enable it to be ahead of the competition and take the right business decisions.

At the end of 2005, after a comparative study of the market, Metarom selected BusinessObjects to implement an ambitious business intelligence project throughout the company. “The project was scoped as a three-year project”, explains Christian Viel, Financial Director for Purchasing and IT. Synergy, a Business Objects partner company, provided Metarom with consultancy support for the BusinessObjects XI Release 2 implementation.

Metarom has been processing a large amount of data since 2000 using the Adage ERP software by INFOR. However, data was extracted from the ERP solution manually using SQL Server and then converted into Excel spreadsheets. This was a complicated process taking between two to three hours. It was a long process to provide purely static information as it only provided an end-of-month snapshot, not in line with the company’s ambitions and took up a lot of IT resources. “Before BusinessObjects, we were unable to aggregate the data. Now we can do this, it makes it much easier to organize our information”.

When asked about the reason for choosing BusinessObjects XI Release 2: Christian Veil states: “The fact that Business Objects is used equally well by both large groups and much smaller businesses was evidence that the solution had proved its worth in all types of environment”.

Approach

Metarom decided to implement BusinessObjects throughout the company. The first sector that became involved was the sales division in 2006. Today, thanks to BusinessObjects, the sales division and its sales teams can access each customer’s turnover figures automatically and in real-time. These fully automated charts provide information both at an extremely detailed level and as a summarized overview. Sales representatives can easily prepare for visits to customers by quite simply printing out a summary report showing the customer’s history. “A very real improvement," is Christian Viel’s view.

Metarom is also intending to use BusinessObjects in its Research & Development department using data from the ‘’Research’’ tool to answer questions such as: Which of the products that we have developed are selling well today? Which ingredients are the most successful? What margin do we earn on them? Previously, these types of questions were impossible to answer as there was no connection between products, sales figures and customers.

Results

From an IT perspective, the 200 tables relating to Sales in Adage are represented by just 20 tables in the Metarom data warehouse. “Moreover, the data is verified and controlled which provides an improvement in quality. The simplified and improved system has allowed us to release time that can be spent on new projects.”

It has been a success too from the Business point of view: For the Sales department, Metarom analyzes their results in real time, leading to better overall control of their activities. “If a large order arrives, we can immediately see its impact on our margin, our turnover and can plan supplies and human resources management. Before, we would receive the information at the end of the month, meaning that we could only report on it after the event”, explains Christian Viel.

Christian Viel concludes: “In a small company like ours with only two people in the IT department, it is essential for the users to be self-sufficient with no reliance on the IT teams. Business Objects solutions have provided us with the facilities to change our working practices by equipping users with everything they need to be self-sufficient”. Thanks to the aggregated data which is documented and reliable, fifty users with no specialist IT skills can work with Business Objects quite independently. “The Web Intelligence interface is very user friendly and we have noticed that a data culture is being to develop at Metarom. From the top management level down to the average user, business intelligence is for everyone!”

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