WebFOCUS and iWay Automate User Reporting at Toppan Interamerica

Snapshot

Organization Toppan Interamerica, a division of Toppan Printing, a $16 billion corporation based in Tokyo.

The Challenge Relieve a small IT team of company-wide reporting responsibilities; streamline accounting, sales, and production processes; make current information more readily available to management and end users.

The Strategy Create a self-service reporting system that pulls real-time data from production applications and business processes; eliminate manual data entry into spreadsheets; minimize the printing and distribution of paper-based reports by Web-enabling critical data.

The Results Reports that formerly took two days to generate are now available almost instantly; inventory, financial, and production planning is based on accurate, current data; IT staff has time to focus on critical projects.

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, iWay Software.

If you're reading this article at a desk with a faux-wood top, you may be resting your elbows on an example of Toppan Interamerica's products. The McDonough, Georgia-based company produces a wide variety of precoated papers for the furniture and laminating industries. Leveraging the experience and resources of Toppan Printing, a $16 billion Japanese corporation, Toppan Interamerica excels at reproducing the look of natural materials in its woodgrain patterns.

While Toppan has seen a steady rise in productivity since its parent company was founded more than 100 years ago, key enterprise reporting processes resisted automation until very recently. For example, when IT Manager Jay Verenakis joined the company in the late 1990s, most financial and production reporting was still performed manually. The small IT staff was burdened with a steady stream of report requests, and employees often had to wait two days or more to obtain information about sales, accounting, production, and other key business activities.

Today, Information Builders and iWay Software are bringing Toppan's business intelligence (BI) systems up to the same caliber as its advanced manufacturing processes for decorative paper. Installing a new J.D. Edwards accounting system motivated the upgrade to a world-class BI environment.

"We wanted to enhance our technical infrastructure, particularly as we made the transition from homegrown accounting and sales systems to a large ERP application," says Verenakis, who manages a small IT staff at the company's headquarters in Georgia. "Our IT staff could barely keep up with the reporting demands of our old systems. We needed to make some changes in our reporting environment if we were to adequately support the information management needs of the business going forward."

Working With the Grain

Verenakis and his team examined reporting and integration solutions from Information Builders, Cognos, and other vendors before selecting WebFOCUS and iWay. One of their primary requirements in a reporting environment was native connectivity to DB/400 data on the AS/400 platform. "We didn't want day-old data," Verenakis explains. "Information Builders was the only company that offered a BI solution that could access real-time data from this platform."

iWay's codeless, plug-and-play adapters connect to virtually any information asset, reducing the time, cost, complexity, and skills required to integrate data throughout the enterprise. In conjunction with this flexible back-end infrastructure, WebFOCUS supplies advanced information management and delivery capabilities to turn data into useful reports. "Information Builders offered data access, reporting, scheduling, and information delivery all in one package," Verenakis sums up. "Their software allows us to efficiently deliver information not just to our users, but to our customers as well."

Verenakis and other developers attended training courses in Orlando soon after the Information Builders software was installed. "By the time we got down there for training, we had already become fairly proficient with the software," he admits. "These products are very easy to learn and use."

Working with Jim Wilson, an application developer at Toppan, Verenakis used WebFOCUS Managed Reporting to create a self-service information system that gives executives and managers a personalized, high-level view of business information. The customized reporting environment simplifies the process of running structured reports and performing queries, while dramatically boosting the overall repertoire of standard reports. For example, financial professionals formerly had about 10 accounting reports available; now they have more than 100, and reports that used to take two days to create are now available within an hour.

"Formerly, we were manually writing RPG programs to develop green-bar reports for our users in sales and accounting," Verenakis says. "Now, all that information is available to these people at their desktops through WebFOCUS."

Embossing the User Environment

Toppan depends on the iWay DB2 adapter to provide highly efficient access to DB2 data and systems on the AS/400. Developers use iWay in two essential ways: to provide real-time access to production data on the AS/400 system and to stage data to a reporting database on a Microsoft Windows 2000 server. "Some of our reports don't need real-time data, so there is no need to tax the system more than we have to," says Verenakis. "iWay gives us the option to stage some data to a reporting server and access other data live, depending on the application. It will also allow us to grow. If we add an Oracle database or an Access database, iWay will be able to connect to them as well."

Toppan uses WebFOCUS to automate the collection, calculation, analysis, and presentation of financial information. Quarterly financial statements, AR reports, aging summaries, and general ledger reports are easily accessible through the managed reporting environment that Verenakis and his colleagues have created. "Thanks to WebFOCUS, we have the ability to manage our data as we see fit," he says. "Our IT department is not in the reporting business any more. Information Builders allows users to produce self-service reports on demand."

For example, financial professionals can use the software to create profit and loss reports, generate income statements, review balance sheets, and create variance reports – to name a few activities. Excel PivotTables can be automatically generated and saved from any report, combining advanced reporting with Excel's powerful data-manipulation capabilities. According to Verenakis, this has become a very popular feature. His team used to print green-bar reports and send them to Tokyo, forcing users to manually reenter the data into Excel if they wanted to perform additional analysis. Now, using WebFOCUS, Toppan can automatically generate Excel spreadsheets and send them to Tokyo by e-mail. "When you consider its report generation, scheduling, and information-delivery capabilities, WebFOCUS maximizes our resources and enables us to automate a lot of functions that we used to perform manually," he says.

Having easy access to live data is delivering unexpected benefits as well, particularly as Toppan moves closer and closer to a just-in-time operation driven by customer orders. "All of a sudden we are producing accounting reports that reveal our overdue inventory and finished-goods inventory much sooner than ever before," Verenakis says. "For these aspects of the business, we want information in real time, not based on yesterday's or last week's data."

Because WebFOCUS can pull data from Toppan's enterprise applications, production engineers can access data that was formerly not available. "Shop-floor managers who make decisions about the printing process are able to see timely data and develop strategies based on what our reports say," Verenakis explains. "They can get data on anything from how many meters we printed yesterday to what our efficiencies are coming off an inspection machine."

Creating a Glossy Finish

As Toppan gains more and more experience with business intelligence and Web-based reporting, IT professionals plan to leverage a great deal of new information arising from the J.D. Edwards accounting system. For example, they are gradually adding advanced OLAP capabilities to the Managed Reporting environment. "With only four people in our IT department and three people in accounting, it is very important for us to be efficient," Verenakis says. "We need to put data in our users' hands without having to run the reports for them. WebFOCUS does exactly that."

WebFOCUS Managed Reporting uses role-based security to authorize access to data elements clear down to the field level. Once users have identified themselves, WebFOCUS will automatically tailor the user interface, report content, and functional privileges based on each user's unique identities and skill levels. "We want to use WebFOCUS to mine and analyze that data, and ultimately we plan to use the WebFOCUS Business Intelligence Dashboard as an executive tool for management," Verenakis says.

Part of Managed Reporting, the WebFOCUS Business Intelligence Dashboard allows users to create custom interfaces that display only the reports they want to see, precisely how they want to see them. They can select analytic tools for creating reports, graphs, and bar charts, and take advantage of matrix reporting, ranking, color-coding, drill-down, and font customization.

In summary, WebFOCUS and iWay make it easier to deploy current information to a wide variety of users in a secure, manageable way – with personalized views through Web browsers.

"At the end of the day, if we can get a report out in an hour instead of a day, we reap significant cost savings," Verenakis concludes. "If you can teach employees to generate reports themselves, better still. WebFOCUS saves us a lot of work – not just for our IT department, but for the company as a whole."