Our Client
For Graham Group Ltd. (Graham), maintaining a competitive advantage in its marketplace begins with making well-informed and timely strategic decisions. In understanding how each of the company’s projects contributes to its overall operating profits, Graham is empowered to better understand its activities, markets and how it is being impacted by industry trends. The recent release of an Operating Profit Business Intelligence solution is a great example of how Graham is leveraging technology, its IT/IS group and Quadrus to improve its decision-making capabilities.
The Need
Business Intelligence (BI) is a combination of applications and technologies used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data about an organization’s operations. In Graham’s environment, though Managers have access to enormous amounts of data, they were often challenged to make sense of it in order to validate subjective information. Though they had access to standard reports on operating profit and revenue, Managers seeking to drill down further into key project metrics were forced to run several of these reports and to consolidate the information manually. Given hectic schedules and additional commitments, by the time Managers ran and consolidated all of these reports, they often forgot what they were looking for.
Our Solution
Graham’s CEO engaged the company’s IT/IS group who partnered with Quadrus to design and develop a BI solution. The solution needed to be accessible anytime, anywhere and to provide critical operational metrics with drill-down capabilities available dynamically and in real-time. In a matter of weeks, Graham IT/IS and Quadrus delivered a BI solution that was made available to business users through Graham’s SharePoint portal, or any web browser for that matter. The solution delivers an Operating Profit report based upon real-time data, accurate to the very minute.
The Result
The value of the solution really kicks in when business users interact with the report, drilling down to view the profit, revenue/margin and overhead by project manager, the revenue/margin by project type and complexity, and the overhead by job function. With this critical information, Graham’s leadership teams can better understand and leverage the best practices and efficiencies that make some projects more profitable than others, and to answer pivotal questions including:
- “How is our market shifting?”
- “How are we trending versus the market?”
- “Are we doing what we said we would?”
- “Do more complex jobs generate higher margins as we expected?”
- “As resources come available, where should be put them?”
In providing BI solutions such as this Operating Profit Report which validates anecdotal and tacit information, Graham IT/IS continues to cement a partnership with its leadership teams. Graham’s CEO has sponsored additional BI efforts and the IT/IS group again partnered with Quadrus to deliver another solution to the business which utilized data mining to perform advanced statistical analysis of historical information to predict future organizational margins and profits.