An Intelligent Approach

In few industries is the pace of change as relentless as in consumer electronics. A company producing the latest and greatest cell phone has no time to rest and is typically busy designing and testing future models before the current one is in stores. To win the race to provide market-leading products, many of the best consumer electronics manufacturers work with Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. (Toshiba), designer and builder of high-quality electronic components for product manufacturers worldwide.

Just like its customers - and in collaboration with them - Toshiba must constantly produce more powerful and versatile products faster than competitors. Core to this strategy is its Six Sigma program, which focuses on the company's transformation through a customer-centric, data-driven corporate culture that continuously improves business processes and rapidly develops new products and services in response to customer needs.

But, Toshiba's existing data systems couldn't furnish the data-driven, decision-making environment core to the Six Sigma methodologies. "We didn't have a single version of our data," explains Stephen Marlow, executive vice president, Toshiba. "At the same time, we were going through a major upgrade of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. We had a choice - upgrade what we were already using or transform our business with a business intelligence (BI) solution."

According to Toshiba, they chose to invest in a comprehensive BI solution for easy-to-access, up-to-the-minute data and analytic information. "We deal with a fast-growing global market, and we've tripled our business over the past three years," says Marlow. "We need to help employees work smarter by giving them the information they need - when they need it, and how they want to see it."

A Total Solution
Toshiba realized a comprehensive solution that leverages BI from Business Objects, an SAP company, and financial planning tools from Percentix, a Hyperion partner. Malcolm Wood, director of business analysis and strategic planning, Toshiba, says, "For our BI solution, we chose to focus on the architecture of the infrastructure to give us a foundation for growth, and then developed solution sets on top."

As its BI base, Toshiba implemented Business Objects XI Release 2. The company's solution includes BusinessObjects Data Integrator, BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, BusinessObjects Performance Manager and BusinessObjects Knowledge Accelerator for Web-based learning and support service.

Business Objects Global Services experts, including a project manager and BI specialist, helped integrate Toshiba's various data sources and resolve issues that arose, dealing gracefully with multiple shifts in priorities and requirements. They also helped with timing during different stages and hand-offs between groups.

Using the solution, Toshiba can tie data from its ERP and online analytical processing (OLAP) systems into a data warehouse - delivering a single source of data for both financial and business-side reporting.

"They say invention is 90 percent perspiration and 10 percent inspiration," says Wood. "For us, putting together the data warehouse was the perspiration part. Now, we are benefiting from the inspiration we get from BI."

The solution provides Toshiba executives accurate near real-time measurements of the key performance indicators (KPIs) related to initiatives. Executives can access and mine data to look for exceptions that alert them to risks and opportunities to increase sales or profitability. All this data is dynamic and each division can tailor views of data, filtering out what's not directly relevant to help focus on a particular area - whether that's bookings, inventory levels or cash flow.

The new BI solution helps decision-makers see, for example, if sales of one particular semiconductor are growing more rapidly than expected. If so, it's time to call the customer and get an understanding of projected sales, and to make plans to ensure production tracks demand. If analysis shows that a semiconductor has more potential than a similar model, executives start thinking about opportunities to promote it as an alternative to customers. The new system also provides better insight into predicting business patterns such as the typical demand cycle for a type of product.

In addition to serving executives, the solution delivers information to the business operations teams and even customers. Before implementation, line managers relied heavily on Excel spreadsheets that had been manually updated. Now, staff has insight into what's going on, checking current inventory levels and inventory turns to pinpoint the products for which they should carry the most inventory. Toshiba tracks production against promised ship dates, finds out which inventory is where and responds to customer queries.

Far-Reaching Results
"At Toshiba, we want to make IT stand for innovation technology, so our objective is to look at the entire spectrum, and make each of our processes world class," says Marlow. The new solution helps to transform the business by giving insight into data that impacts product development, inventory levels and delivery schedules.

For instance, like most high tech companies, Toshiba needs to keep a close watch on its cash cycle - the time it takes to get from paying to receiving money for the product.

According to Marlow, "Business Objects delivers the metrics we need to see how we're doing, so we can tweak our business to improve the cash cycle or inventory levels."

Another example of the power of timely information is Toshiba's migration of its sales representatives' balanced scorecard from Excel to Business Objects dashboards. Now, reps get an insight into how well they're doing across a series of variables. This provides management measurement of activity across direct sales and through distribution channels, which helps Toshiba fine-tune pricing and production strategy for optimal profitability. The scorecard information also shows Toshiba reps exactly what they need to do and when they need to do it to reach targets that offer additional rewards.

Going forward, Toshiba needs to take advantage of every opportunity for greater operations efficiency. Already Business Objects is helping Toshiba's staff identify those opportunities by providing an integrated view of the company and systems that reveals relationships across different areas. But Toshiba plans to leverage the solution even further - sharing BI capabilities with customers and suppliers to differentiate itself through closer relationships and greater commitment to mutual success.