Now that the BI system matches up with the way the company conducts its business, it makes improving those processes and sharing the improvements that much easier, as was the case with the PowerPoint template and the quarterly reviews.

"This is not just about reporting," says Phillips. "It’s about using BI to make us smarter."

Access to All: Quaker Chemical

Quaker Chemical used its BI system to completely change the way it manages accounts receivable. In the past, the process of keeping track of whether customers paid their bills, and if they paid them on time, was primarily the purview of employees in the accounting department. Collection managers used the company’s accounting system to identify which accounts were overdue, but they had limited information about the details of overdue balances. As a result, they had visibility only into glaring payment problems—customers who hadn’t paid their bills at all in 60 days or more—and couldn’t proactively identify which customers were at risk for not paying in full. Occasionally they’d ask a sales manager to get involved, but the whole process for identifying which customers weren’t paying, why they weren’t paying and putting salespeople on the case was ad hoc.

To improve accounts receivable, Quaker Chemical decided in early 2005 that salespeople needed to play a larger, more formal role in the collections process. After all, they were the ones who had the primary relationship with the customers and had opportunities to speak with them more often, more proactively and more sympathetically about their outstanding payments.

To get the salespeople involved, the IT department created a data mart that extracted accounts receivable information, historical payments and historical balances by customer and by transaction from transaction systems and loaded it into the data warehouse. By using its BI tools from SAS to analyze factors such as the amount of time it took Quaker Chemical to collect payment from a customer on a given invoice, and the number of times a customer paid part but not all of what he owed, the company was able to identify which customers were consistently paying late and which customers weren’t paying at all. The IT department programmed the data warehouse to automatically run reports on which customers still owed money to Quaker Chemical. The system would then send those reports directly to the sales manager in charge of those accounts several times a month so that they could follow up with those customers. Collections managers no longer have to manually keep tabs on this information.