Unit4 - Individual Project

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COLGATE-PALMOLIVE KEEPS MANAGERS SMILING WITHEXECUTIVE DASHBOARDS

Colgate-Palmolive Company is the second largest

consumer products company in the world whose

products are marketed in over 200 countries and

territories. The company had 38,600 employees

worldwide and $16.734 billion in annual revenue

in 2011. Colgate has been keeping people smiling

and clean around the world, with more than three-

quarters of its sales in recent years coming from out-

side the United States. Colgate’s brands in oral prod-

ucts, soap, and pet food, are global names, including

Colgate, Palmolive, Mennen, Softsoap, Irish Spring,

Protex, Sorriso, Kolynos, Elmex, Tom's of Maine,

Ajax, Axion, Fabuloso, Soupline, and Suavitel, as well

as Hill's Science Diet and Hill's Prescription Diet.

The secret to continued growth and stability for

the past two decades has been Colgate’s ability to

move its brands off shore to Latin America, Europe

and Asia. In the past, Colgate divided the world into

geographic regions: Latin American, Europe, Asia, and North America. Each region had its own infor-

mation systems. As long as the regions did not need

to share resources or information this patchwork

system worked, more or less. This all changed as

global operations became more integrated and senior

management needed to oversee and coordinate these

operations more closely.

Colgate had been a global SAP user since the early

1990s, but it was running five separate ERP sys-

tems to serve its different geographic regions. Over

a period of time, disparities in the data developed

between different geographic regions and between

the data used at the corporate level and the data used

by an individual region or business unit. The data

were constantly changing. For example, every time a

sales report was run, it showed different numbers for

orders and shipments. Colgate wanted more usable

data to drive business decisions and all of its managers and business units worldwide to use the same

version of the data.

Colgate chose to solve this problem by creating a

single global data repository using SAP NetWeaver

Business Warehouse, SAP’s analytical, reporting and

data warehousing solution. Colgate’s regional ERP

systems feed their data to the warehouse, where

the data are standardized and formatted for enter-

prise-wide reporting and analysis. This eliminates differences in data across the enterprise. One of the outputs of the warehouse for senior

managers is a daily HTML table showing a series of

financial and operational metrics for the day com-

pared to the previous month and quarter. The data

the executives see is exactly the same as what their

peers in all Colgate regions and business units see.

However, the data were not being used by enough

employees in their decision making to have an

impact on business benefits. Colgate’s power users

had no trouble using the reporting and analytical

tools provided by the warehouse, and they were

satisfied with the matrix reports from the system.

Colgate’s senior managers and other casual users, on

the other hand, did not feel comfortable running ad

hoc reports or drilling down into the layers of data

to answer questions the data brought to light. They

did not have much time to spend developing reports,

and the standard reports produced for them by the

warehouse lacked navigation and drill down capabilities. Tables had no color coding so users could only

interpret the data by scrutinizing the numbers on the

table.

Eventually Colgate’s senior managers and other

casual users began requesting deeper access to the

warehouse data in a more timely and user-friendly

format. They wanted reports that were easier to

run and where the data could be interpreted faster.

Senior management requested customizable, real-

time dashboards that could be more easily used to

drive performance improvement.

Colgate’s information systems specialists then

implemented SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator to

speed up data loads and improve user perception and

adoption and SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence

to build customized reports. SAP BusinessObjects

Web Intelligence provides a powerful, intuitive

interface that enables business analysts and non-

technical business professionals to ask spontaneousquestions about their data. Casual business users can

use simple drag-and-drop techniques to access data

sources and create interactive reports that drill, slice

and format information based on their needs. Tools

for cutting edge visualization allow end users to view

two- and three-dimensional charts and hone in on

specific areas of focus.

Colgate started using SAP’s BusinessObjects

tools to build user-friendly dashboards, and quicklyquestions about their data. Casual business users can