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Pushing Data Inside Out |
Florida Rock Industries Inc. is among the companies that are making a first foray into dashboards by building one for external customers.
For the $1-billion Jacksonville, Fla.-based distributor of construction materials such as sand and gravel, it's a fairly regular occurrence when a customer loses a shipping receipt or needs to check an account balance. Regular enough that Florida Rock decided to build a dashboard to save its customers the frustration and its employees hours of time.
With help from Noetix Corp., a Bellevue, Wash.-based BI vendor, Florida Rock built a dashboard that gives 250 of its largest customers a full view of account histories; a PDF shows their purchases, payments and invoices. The company plans to add Global Positioning System technology so customers can follow their shipments of crushed stone as they move across the country.
"The Noetix foundation is built to bring up an internal dashboard quickly and pull from any data source," says Dave DeVore, manager of application development. "There were two things that were missing from the application: a Secure Sockets Layer to put the dashboard outside our firewall and internal document management." With help from Noetix, Florida Rock added those features. "The beauty of this is we're a total Oracle shop, and we can easily link into our eight different databases of information. We can combine them all into that dashboard."
Now, seven months into the project, there's been a noticeable decrease in calls to customer service, DeVore says. "This alleviates the tedious work that our service department deals with. It's saving us probably 40 hours a week of manpower at the home office."
--B.B.
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Anxiety, Expectations and Delivery
As EMS discovered, before you can build a dashboard, you need to agree on the metrics that are most meaningful to those who will be using it. "If I just put cold numbers up, I'm going to get way overloaded," says Neville. "But if I have a tool that allows me to do my job in an exception-based way or a workflow way, I'm not going to get overwhelmed."
At Cubist Pharmaceuticals, a $120-million Lexington, Mass.-based company, choosing metrics for a dashboard project required some grassroots change. It was January 2005, and as part of the annual budget review process, Cubist executives instructed each department to create three metrics by which its success could be measured. Some people pushed back. One division, with a $48-million budget and 42-person team, came back with just one metric, recalls Anthony Murabito, Cubist's vice president of information technology.
And some were anxious about how visible their performance indicators would be. "Senior management had reluctance, thinking, 'This is going to be a hammer, and [Cubist CEO] Mike Bonney is going to beat me up with it,'" Murabito says. The company ultimately brought in consultants who led the various groups through exercises to help determine which metrics would be most useful and assuage concerns. "That was when people went from skeptics to advocates," Murabito says. "The breakthrough didn't happen with leadership. It came from the trenches."
Once the dashboard was up and running, the payoff came quickly. The company was able to use sales and location information in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to send supplies of the company's flagship drug, the antibiotic Cubicin, where they were needed as refugees moved out of New Orleans to surrounding areas.
"We started moving supplies before they were requested. At the end of the day, although we lost business in New Orleans, we made it up in the surrounding areas," Murabito says. The effort has been so successful that Murabito is working to give employees in every department some sort of dashboard by the end of the year.
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