Quaker Chemical hopes that by transforming the accounts receivable process, it will improve cash flow by getting customers to pay up sooner. At the end of the third quarter 2005, however, accounts receivable were up from the same quarter a year ago, so the changes haven’t quite taken root yet.

CIO Tyler says this business process change was successful in part because IT was careful to deliver only the most specific, relevant information in these reports to salespeople—things such as which customers were taking more time to pay their bills, which customers were paying portions of what they owed, and which customers had not remitted their payment in the allotted time frames—so that salespeople would know exactly what the problem was with each customer and how to follow up. "If you don’t focus the information and deliver it intelligently, people won’t understand how to incorporate it into their workflows," says Tyler.

This kind of dramatic change in process needs to be linked to the overall business strategy, according to Tyler. "Information doesn’t necessarily change anything. You have to have a strategy [to drive any change]," he says. The scope and scale of change would not have succeeded if Quaker Chemical had not decided in 2000 to stop operating regionally and reorganize as a global company. Executives realized that to run their business globally, they needed to standardize specific business processes across the world, such as order to cash. To support the move, the company is in the process of replacing its 15 separate transaction systems with one ERP system. The single-instance strategy underscored the move to standardized processes—in fact, the new system demanded it. In the course of the project, IT met with business users to discuss their workflows and understand how transactions are processed inside the company. At that time, they also discussed how information from the company’s BI systems could be incorporated into employees’ workflows and business processes. The company’s strategic transformation marked the beginning of the new era of BI at Quaker Chemical. "Because we changed organizationally, because we changed our business objectives, because the way our leadership was looking at the business changed, we were able to use BI to support our enterprisewide transformation," says Tyler.

Seize the New BI Opportunity

Avnet and Quaker Chemical demonstrate that BI is about more than decision support. Due to improvements in the technology and the way CIOs are implementing it, BI now has the potential to transform organizations. CIOs like Avnet’s Phillips and Quaker Chemical’s Tyler who successfully use BI to improve business processes contribute to their organizations in more far-reaching ways than by implementing basic reporting tools. "Our BI system provides information that helps us seek out greater efficiency," says Avnet’s Phillips.