Grifols, a Spanish holding specialised in the pharmaceutical-hospital sector and present in more than 90 countries, has gone for DataCycle Reporting and DataCycle MyVision solutions to integrate them with their Hospital Logistics solutions.

The project requirements consisted of having a standard adapted and parameterized market solution to become a part of the solution supplied by Grifols to its end clients, in other words, it had to be an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) solution that could be integrated as its own product in the Grifols offer.

After studying several alternatives, Grifols decided to purchase the global solution proposed by Apesoft, which included the products from the DataCycle Suite; DataCycle Reporting, as a generator, planner and distributor of reports in HTML, Pdf and Excel format, and DataCycle MyVision, that allows the access via web to reports, that are both pre-generated and executable on demand. It also included an optimization project of the databases and parameterization of the final reports needed.

The technological solution offered by Apesoft was the one that best fitted Grifols needs and requirements, above all for its simplicity of usage, quick start up, low training costs, minimum technological impact for the end user and capacity for generating reports in multiple formats such as Html, Pdf and Excel, amongst other features and advantages. It must also be pointed out that the new solution had to fulfil a basic requirement for Grifols: It needed an agile software mechanism to provide a quick response to all of its clients. In this sense, the project proposed by Apesoft did not include any custom designs, and was completely based on the standard DataCycle suite products, which enabled significant maintenance cost savings. Furthermore, Apesoft’s development and support center is based in Spain, very near to the client, and could therefore respond really quickly to any requirement or request from Grifols.

The start up was planned starting a pilot test in two strategic hospitals given their volume and complexity, one in Barcelona and the other in Madrid. When this first phase of the project was successfully finished, the deployment of the solution started in other hospitals who already have Hospital Logistics solutions, which underlines the excellent integration of the Apesoft solution with the aforementioned Grifols’ solutions.

Grifols distributes all this technology under its own trademark, Global Analyst® Pro, to make it more accessible to the hospital sector and to give it the added value needed to associate it correctly to the Hospital Logistics solutions supplied by the multinational.

Aguas Font Vella y Lanjarón SA , a company belonging to the Danone Group, no. 2 in the world in bottled water, is improving the analysis of the information from its sales force with the DataCycle Reporting solution.

Faced with the change in its Commercial Information System, Font Vella needed to incorporate a new solution to resolve the Reporting needs of the company’s Commercial area. It looked to cover the need with a tool similar to the one they already had, but which provided new functions, helping them to become more autonomous when making any changes, and above all, enabling off-line information analysis.

The autonomy in the administration, design and automation of the generation and distribution of the reports in Excel, the capacity for being able to analyse the information without the need for being connected to any system, together with a very reasonable general solution cost, were the deciding factors when opting for DataCycle Reporting.

Thanks to ApeSoft’s DataCycle Reporting solution, Aguas Font Vella y Lanjarón SA’s sales force, made up of around 100 sales reps in 5 delegations, receives sales reports with different levels of detail, that provide them with sales analyses by client, product and category, and other analytical dimensions. In this way the solution helps to optimize their activity and decision making.

If you would like to receive information on this solution, send us an email to marketing@apesoft.com

EMERGIA Customer Care will improve its reporting and budgeting processes with DataCycle Reporting and DataCycle Planning.

Emergia Customer Care, a Spanish multinational, pioneer in Customer Care Strategic Consultancy and Integral BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) Services for the Spanish speaking worldwide market, has committed itself to the DataCycle Reporting and DataCycle Planning solutions to improve the company’s reporting and budgeting processes.

The introduction of the two solutions has been divided into two phases. In a first phase the reporting project will be tackled, which will consist of the construction of a data warehouse to import and collect the information from the company’s databases and in the design of reports that consult this data. In the second phase the DataCycle Planning solution start-up project will be carried out, the objective of which is to automate the budget preparation and tracking process in Emergia.

With the introduction of these two new solutions, Emergia Customer Care will be able to optimize the company’s reporting, thanks to the automated generation of all types of reports, and strengthen its budgetary process, thanks to the centralization of the budgetary information, via web and Excel as an end user interface, safely in a specific database, allowing for having absolute control on all the process and carrying out periodic checks on it.

About Emergia Customer Care

Emergia with headquarters in Barcelona and Madrid, and multiple Virtual Contact Centers located in Europe and Latin America (Colombia, Chile, Ecuador), has become consolidated as the multinational of reference in delocalization competing with the leading consultancy companies. It promotes a fast response to market and client needs on incorporating new relationship models for its globalised Outsourcing and Customer Service services, and contributing, thanks to the improvement in service levels, to demonstrating its commitment to innovation and differentiation in processes and procedures for its clients, large corporations and entities in multiple sectors. Corporación Financiera Valora has a shareholding in this company.

CLIENT

C. & G. Carandini S.A. is a company founded in 1919 with years of experience in the industrial and technical illumination sector. Since 2000, it has belonged to the Acuity Brands industrial group with headquarters in Atlanta which employs more than 15,000 workers all over the world. Carandini’s influence market is mainly based on the sale of illumination solutions in the Spanish, Portuguese and French markets.

SITUATION

Carandini has information in two non-linked databases. On the one hand, a SQL Server with its own CRM management system, customized for managing the commercial area. On the other hand, it has its own AS-400 and ERP for the operating and financial management.

The objective was to exploit the information of the two platforms to keep all the departments informed.

The main challenges faced were:

• they had too much information fed into the system and this gave them little visibility of the business;
• the database queries were complicated and they had difficulties maintaining the information,
• they lost a lot of time formatting and preparing reports in Excel format,
• there were a lot of departments totally unaware about their management

SOLUTION

To resolve the entire reporting problem, they started a tool assessment process. Out of all the tools, they assessed, for example, Crystal Reports or Hyperion; they found that most of them involved a lot of parameterization making the tool unfeasible for Carandini. Furthermore, another barrier for making this decision had to do with the price, which in some cases entailed a too pricey investment.

According to Sergi Muñoz, Carandini’s Director of Controlling, the key reasons that lead them to chose the DataCycle Reporting solution were ( in order of importance):

• Having the user interface in Excel considerably minimizes the training costs for all the users, only having to focus on the training of a very small group (designers and administrator). Furthermore, the fact that the user interface is in Excel also greatly minimizes the technological impact when implementing a new tool in the company and contributes to the acceptance of the new system.
• Easy parameterization
• Price
• Immediate implementation
• Results straight away

In its implementation, the DataCycle Reporting solution has been taken to the majority of the organization’s departments: Commercial, Finance, Operations, Controlling and IT. Amongst all the reports that have been automated, the following can be highlighted: order input and output, warnings on critical orders, order portfolio status, sales statistics for the commercial area, budget control reports or effects portfolio control reports, amongst many others.

DataCycle Reporting provided them for example with these improvements:

Account Management: When an invoice has exceeded the due date, the system sends, automatically, a report that alerts the rep that the client has not paid it yet. Before there was only proof in the Finance Dept., and now the reps can help the Finance Dept. to reclaim payments from their clients and they are aware of a fact that they did not know before, and furthermore can help them in negotiations.

BENEFITS

Thanks to DataCycle Reporting, Carandini has achieved significant time savings by generating the reporting, automatic information introduction by department and by employee and a total alignment in the objective control needs and priorities between departments.

In short, these are some of the benefits the solution has provided the company with:

Savings in communication times, thanks to the distribution of automated reports that the users directly receive in their electronic mail.

It improves the time for responding to any problem, with the automated distribution of reports and alerts that alert the users of deviations and unexpected events.

Unification of information criteria. Before, there could be different results from the same information. Now DataCycle Reporting integrates the data from all the systems in Excel templates in an automated way ensuring that the information the users receive is homogeneous.

The island of “privileged” information have been broken, thanks to the capacity for spreading the information en masse and everybody is informed of the management of their area, whilst before only a small group of persons had the information.

Increase in the quality of information entered in the system.

CONCLUSIONS

According to Sergi Muñoz, Carandini Director of Controlling: “The improvement in the management has been so significant that we consider not receiving information for more than three days a very critical situation”

Sometimes we hear in our consultancy actions that it is not a good moment to start certain projects for a Company as they are undergoing changes: (1) New Board of Directors, (2) Strategic changes, (3) Recent merger, (4) Changes in systems, ...and this is true for many types of projects, except for the Balance Scorecard project.

With a few exceptions, building and finishing a Balance Scorecard during processes of change is a good decision. We can find the reason for this in the current definition of what a Balance Scorecard is and what it is used for:

A Balance Scorecard:

1. Is a management tool

2. It is integrated with strategic planning, with the decision processes and performance analysis of a company.

3. It is used to monitor the execution of strategic and operating plans

4. Through the tracking of key objectives, projects and indicators

The Balance Scorecard contemplates several perspectives of the plan to be carried out: (1) Financial, (2) Market and clients (3) Internal business processes (4), their competences and knowledge (5) Our current business culture (6) Our information systems, (7) The projects necessary for activating the change, (8) The results expected from this change, (9) The partial intermediate objectives during the change.

Therefore, A Balance Scorecard is a tool for executing the change and measuring its progress. We only have to define that the plans the Balance Scorecard manages be precisely the change plans. The definition process of an Balance Scorecard requires following a very methodical and logical structure, where the important key points are set and very healthy discussions are held on the details of the execution, in other words a theoretical plan will be converted into practicable plan for the Company’s present reality.