Modine CIS accelerates BOARD use
Modine CIS accelerates BOARD use by continually re-engineering its BI applications
The Company
Modine is a thermal management company and a leading provider of engineered heat transfer systems and high-quality heat transfer components. It specializes in innovative thermal management solutions.
Modine was established in 1916 in the USA, has a global operations footprint, a $1.9bn annual turnover and is listed on the NYSE stock exchange.
On 1st December 2016, Modine acquired the Luvata Heat Transfer Solution (LHTS) Group, a leading manufacturer of commercial and industrial coils, coolers, coating services and related products, primarily for the HVAC&R markets with excellent operations, strong customer and supplier relationships and a respected presence in many international markets. This presence comes from Luvata HTS’ heritage in developing from the ECO Group, a worldwide known manufacturer of Coils & Coolers solutions since 1972 and now operating under the name of Modine Commercial & Industrial Solutions (CIS).
Modine has 21 production plants in order to ensure worldwide coverage and closeness to customers, a workforce of about 3,900 people, presence in over 80 countries worldwide, a team of over 200 sales managers and technical support staff, plus more than 200 distributors and agents.
Why BOARD?
BOARD was initially adopted in the year 2000 by ECO Group with the aim of developing an integrated and standardized group reporting environment, which was secure and shared. Thanks to this platform it was possible to better sustain the rapid growth and evolution of the company, which was developing a global footprint, and also reduce and minimize the use of spreadsheets in the accelerated business processes.
Over the years, BOARD has played a fundamental role in the continuous expansion of the Group, supporting the rapid integration of new sites, mainly due to its capability to quickly standardize data from different IS / IT sources and make them comparable.
In addition, the Group’s decision to invest in dedicated internal resources has further reinforced faster and wider extension and integration of new datasets and the development of customized and effective solutions.
The project
A global re-engineering project upgrade of the BI application took place between the years 2014 and 2016, consisting of the migration from the previous version 6 to the most recent 9, characterized by both evolved technology and user interactivity. Details by transaction, daily updates for most of the applications and more robust solutions were just a few of the benefits obtained from the migration.
During this upgrade project, each application was deeply analyzed and optimized in order to maximize the effects of the new technology. Once migrated, the updated version offered a better user experience by enhancing interactivity and the flexibility of analysis. This led to a wider and more pervasive use of the tool across all company functions and dramatically reduced process lead time for many applications.
From a more technical point of view, the new version has simplified the development and maintenance activities while allowing the system administrators to better focus on business needs.
Major migration steps have been supported by Mosaic, certified BOARD partner, whose valuable experience has brought several innovative solutions and optimized evolution.
BOARD today
Now, BOARD covers almost all main functions, especially in CIS EMEA facilities, with extensive use in the main operations and finance processes, such as daily production KPI, sales and purchases comparisons, margin analyses, personnel costs trend, cash plan simulation and the budgeting process.
Some technical highlights as at Dec 2016:
- More than 200 users in all CIS companies (140 in 2010)
- Over 35 databases and 50 reporting areas (more than 1,300 reports), involving all of the company’s main functions
- Databases fed by more than 15 different upstream systems
- Data availability and KPI process from summary (divisional) to detail (transaction) level, most of all updated daily
- An average of 2,000 hours/month of BOARD use in 2016
The diagrams below show some information about BOARD’s use:
The main reporting paths are grouped into the following areas:
- Finance
- Sales
- Logistics
- Production
- Dashboards (transversal to functions)
- HR
- Quality Control
- Purchases
- Other (custom apps for specific business needs)
Updates are made on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, depending on the dataset and business needs.
The advanced data entry capabilities support several processes such as budgeting and forecasting, moreover, they allow users to automatically fill all incomplete information subsets from upstream systems.
System administrators, as part of the Information Systems Department, follow the whole project and development process of new applications, data upload & validation, users security, training and help desk activities and support operative processes.
The Benefits
BOARD is a strategic unified BI and CPM platform for Modine CIS, used and recognized as a key reference by all business functions for the flexibility and reliability offered in data analysis.
It also accomplishes the establishment of routine process improvements with tangible added value to the company. In fact, BOARD already provides:
Effective analysis tools thanks to the large capacity of customization and profiling
– Standardization of data from different sources
– The uniqueness of the data shared across the various locations
– Punctuality of information
Modine’s BOARD applications are constantly changing and being improved, with a focus on global integration. The business continuously requires new analyses and the existing ones are regularly updated with changing business requirements.
The added value achieved by the use of BOARD is clearly perceived by the users, who are interacting more and more with the system administrators throughout the design and development stages of the applications. The users are now the largest proactive source of implementation proposals.
All applications are internally developed from scratch, with minimal outsourcing, and successfully integrate the company’s “tailor-made” philosophy with a global standardization concept.
