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Irving "Bubba" Tyler had been quietly laying the data foundation for business intelligence software tools for years when suddenly the call for action came. In 1999, Quaker Chemicals, Tyler's employer, hit the BI hot button. The $400 million Conshohoken, Pa., maker of custom chemical compounds for the steel-making process was undergoing a massive structural reorganization. To pull it off, Quaker had to be able to spread information to employees around the world quickly, efficiently and accurately.
BI was the change agent of choice.
"Because of our change in focus from geographic to customer segmentation, because we need to manage the business from all over the world, and because people here often wear more than one hat, we had to deliver consistent information," says Tyler, who is CIO. "The only way for us to do that was to standardize using BI."
BI -- that oft-claimed territory encompassing everything from database to query technology -- has finally come of age, and not just for technical reasons. Yes, the number of tools geared toward and priced for the midmarket has increased. The Web-based technology needed to access and distribute the data is mature and readily available. But the real ace in the hole is that the business community is demanding it.
"CIOs are struggling to figure this out, especially since they are being asked to make BI 'happen,' " says Mark Smith, CEO of Ventana Research, a research and consulting firm in San Mateo, Calif. "The first step is to think about the foundation of BI, to look at this thing from a people, process and information perspective so that you understand the business need."
That need was palpable at Quaker Chemicals, which had reorganized itself along business rather than regional lines so it could run more efficiently, develop products quicker and solve problems once instead of multiple times. "We have labs all over the world and we knew that if we looked at global rather than just local needs, we would have a much more efficient research and development operation and transfer of knowledge," says Michael Barry, Quaker's vice president of industrial metalworking and coding. "We're selling our knowledge as much as we are our chemicals, so we had to be able to grab that and use it everywhere."
That meant harnessing and distributing the knowledge being generated by the company's 1,400 employees in 15 countries. Using a data model and data warehouse that he started developing in the mid-1990s, Tyler crafted a BI system based on technology from SAS Institute Inc. It delivers financial, sales, research and other data using a browser-based query tool. Static reports are available as well. And people are using it. In 2003, the system fielded 40,000 queries; in 2004, that number was well over 65,000.
Barry is convinced that without BI and Tyler's combination of business and technology skills, Quaker would never have pulled off its corporate overhaul. "We could not have done this without IT and these systems, and without a team that understood the business," he says.
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