Inergex Helps Gibraltar Industries Jumpstart Its Business Intelligence Initiative

Client: Gibraltar Industries
Client Location: United States
Client Industry: Manufacturing

Client Profile
Gibraltar Industries is a leading manufacturer, processor, and distributor of products for the building, industrial, and vehicular markets. Gibraltar serves a large number of customers in a variety of industries in all 50 states and throughout the world. It has approximately 2,700 employees and operates 59 facilities in 26 states, Canada, England, Germany and Poland.

Business Situation & Challenge
The business model that Gibraltar Industries was using to collect and consume data offered many challenges. Seventy separate facilities, many of which are individually operated, used numerous disparate systems and technologies. The company lacked—and greatly needed—a consolidated view of this data. Gibraltar is required to provide details about its business, including job forecasting, due to its status as a public company. The company needed a strong mechanism to tie and compare forecasts to actuals as time evolved. It also needed a consolidated view of inventory levels and sales for several of its “big box” retailer customers, like Home Depot and Lowe’s. If Gibraltar could analyze Point of Sale (POS) data in a timely manner, it could quickly recommend products and manage inventory levels. In order to keep a competitive edge in the industry, Gibraltar had a critical need for a robust Business Intelligence (BI) reporting system.

Several years ago, Gibraltar Industries selected Cognos 8 BI as its toolset. However, it quickly became apparent that Gibraltar needed to grow a BI competency center with a two-pronged plan: allocate internal resources to the cause, and partner with a company with a proven track record and experience in delivering these types of projects.

Solution
Inergex’s BI team worked closely with Gibraltar’s IT group to design a best-in-breed data warehouse that would be used to store consolidated sales and budget data. Gibraltar now uses Cognos Data Manager to load source system ERP data into the new data warehouse daily. Customer data is consolidated utilizing D&B numbers. In addition, weekly Home Depot and Lowe’s POS (EDI) files are processed into the data warehouse. Forecasting is critically important, so Gibraltar put in place a new forecasting and budgeting process that uses Excel 2007 on the front-end for data gathering. The spreadsheets are put into a centralized spot periodically. Cognos Data Manager pulls new spreadsheets from this central location and loads them into the data warehouse. The data warehouse is the central hub that delivers data out to end users through various Cognos 8 report delivery mechanisms. Some of the highlights are:

• Daily Operations President’s Report – This is a dashboard-type report that contains information including orders, shipments, and backlog for both actuals and forecasts. The report allows views of various time periods, such as current day, month-to-date, quarter-to-date, and year-to-date, and allows comparisons between these time periods year-over-year as well as budget versus actual.
• Base Weekly Report Set – This weekly set of reports are automatically pushed out to key personnel each week via email in both PDF and Excel formats. Each individual gets access only to his/her own data.
• POS Slow Mover / Quick Mover Report – This POS report highlights which products are turning over quickly at “big box” retailers like Home Depot and Lowe’s, as well as which products are more stagnant. It helps Gibraltar to be more proactive and better assist retailers with product inventory levels and future orders.

Project Results & Benefits
The highly successful project has delivered some core functionality that is critically important for running an efficient business. “We were able to develop score cards to help measure customer service levels (fill rates, on-time ratings, etc.),” said Group IT Director Brad Bradley. “These are proving extremely useful in light of recent initiatives by our larger retail customers to levy fines for non-compliance with their service standards.”

Inergex has become a valued partner to Gibraltar and actively participates in several other activities, including:

• Strategic Planning Sessions with the CIO
• End-user Training
• System Enhancements
• Cognos Upgrade Discussions

For more information about Gibraltar Industries, visit www.gibraltar1.com

CS_Inergex_Gibraltar_H_F.pdf