Hyperion Planning has enabled O'Bryan to recast her IT group's role within the company from that of a mere service provider to a strategic player. The application links to multiple reporting applications, giving Hudson executives a better view of IT investments, the department's cash flow and tax reporting issues. "Internally, it has helped us to understand the expenses contained in monthly forecasts while making us more sensitive to what's being spent," she says.

Smarter Reporting
Jim Burger, director of information systems at AET Films, based in New Castle, Del., one of the nation's largest suppliers of plastic packaging films, moved to a business intelligence dashboard by Troy, Mich.-based iDashboards about a year ago. Five executives and 50 manufacturing and sales managers are now using iDashboards, along with an internally developed dashboard application. Burger notes that the dashboard, with its visually oriented interface, gives managers the ability to spot critical data at a glance, rather than forcing them to pore through pages of spreadsheet data. "It's much more convenient and far less time-consuming," he says.

The iDashboards application pulls in data from AET's enterprise data warehouse, which is integrated with the company's Infor enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite. The continuous information flow means that AET's manufacturing executives no longer have to wait for spreadsheets, prepared by subordinates, containing already outdated information. Burger notes that one reporting process, which used to require up to 15 employees each morning to create spreadsheets manually, has been replaced by a manufacturing performance dashboard that's instantly available and up to date.

"We took a lot of the underlying energy that was being consumed each day by key people in the organization just to put data together for senior managers," Burger says. "Now these folks are off doing their normal functions of selling, planning and so on."

Helping ease the transition was iDashboard's ability to lift programming out of existing Excel spreadsheets. "We literally copied queries out of the Excel spreadsheets and pasted them into iDashboard," says Burger.

Burger says the changeover has allowed manufacturing executives to act much faster on issues such as halting a production trial run. Spreadsheets are still used in finance for daily output performance analyses, Burger notes.

Answer May be Inside ERP
Eric Piersol, global business applications unit manager for Alltech Biotechnology, a feed additive supplier located in Lexington, Ky., is in the process of waving goodbye to spreadsheets, having found faster and better planning software in his ERP suite. In an effort that just passed its one-year mark, Piersol has adopted the business analytics module contained in his Exact Software ERP suite for the company's sales, marketing, finance, production, operations and executive staff.