World Leader in Aerospace Equipment and On-Board Systems use Birst to Strengthen Supply Chain and Scale-Self-ServiceAnalytics
Birst, an Infor company and a leader in Cloud Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics for the Enterprise announced that Zodiac Aerospace, a world leader in aerospace equipment and onboard systems, has deployed Birst’s cloud–based networked business analytics platform to help address order-fulfilment bottlenecks in its supply chain, enable self-service analytics across its business units, and generate reports in minutes instead of weeks.
At Infor’s customer event, Inforum 2017 at the Javits Center, Norman Hussey, Director of Business Analytics at ZodiacAerospace, and Pedro Arellano, Vice President of Product Strategy at Birst, will present “Birst BI & Analytics – The newest addition to Infor” [TECH-104 session], at 3 p.m., Wednesday, July 12, in Room 1E17.
Zodiac Aerospace, headquartered in Plaisir (Paris), France, has about 35,000 employees at more than 100 sites around the globe. With annual revenues of more than 5 billion Euros, the company has grown significantly, through some acquisitions, in recent years. These acquisitions have enabledZodiac Aerospace to strengthen its position as a major participant in the aircraft cabin industry and to become the worldwide leader in commercial aircraft seats.
Zodiac Aerospace is utilising several Infor Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms, which are designed to meet the unique business requirements of manufacturers in the aerospace industry, which helps the company manage the core and supporting processes in its business.
As a result of the company’s organic growth and acquisition activity, it formed several business units operating over multiple ERP systems. Several legacy BI systems were in place, including a central BI platform and enterprise data warehouse. However, this system requires Zodiac Aerospace’s Central IT team to manage this complex process, serving as the central clearinghouse for reporting requests from the business units.
Zodiac Aerospace needed responsiveness to its capability in BI and Analytics that would provide self-service analytics business units across the enterprise – thus reducing the business units’ reliance on central reporting – and enable a faster, more efficient order-fulfilment process. It also wanted a cloud–based solution, which would support development and usage anywhere (regardless of geography) and provided easy sharing of insights.
The company explored using desktop discovery solutions, but those solutions were not able to prepare data for analysis, in an integrated fashion, nor connect/analyse data on an enterprise scale. Consequently, they sometimes produced inconsistent reporting that undermined trust in the decision-making process.
Enter Birst’s networked business analytics platform. With the platform’s patented, Automated Data Refinement (ADR) technology and self-service capabilities, Zodiac Aerospace’s business units can prepare and analyse data quickly, reducing their reliance on Central IT and identifying issues in the customer order process. For example, the Birst solution helped identify customer orders, which, at times, were not synchronised with their customer’s system. This capability reduces the risk of missed shipments, improving on-time delivery.
Birst’s networked business analytics platform provided quick-to-market, added-value content. Business users could generate reports in minutes instead of weeks and boost efficiencies across the entire supply chain. By networking analytic instances (spaces) together, the Birst platform enables Zodiac Aerospace quickly deliver specific content and shorten its time-to-market – and avoid the administrative hassle of people and business units working with data in isolation.
Further, the Birst platform offered a fully integrated, automated analytics data store and integrated data preparation capabilities – along with rapid and reliable connectivity to the Infor M3platform and other systems.
According to Norman Hussey, Director of Business Analytics atZodiac Aerospace, “Birst’s fully contained data store and data warehouse are a great value. Data connectivity is also very powerful and simple, which gives us faster time-to-market.”
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Hussey also noted that the desktop discovery systems, which Zodiac Aerospace evaluated, “needed back-end data preparation done before they could start. Birst has that full process integrated. Most importantly, Birst’s fully integrated stack – in the cloud – enables you to focus on delivering what your organisation needs, without worries about memory, disks, support, and backups.”
Brad Peters, Senior Vice President and General Manager ofBirst, said, “With Birst’s networked business analytics platform, we believe Zodiac Aerospace can continue to achieve greater levels of operational excellence, reduce risks and maintain strong service-level agreements with its customers. Birst creates a network of analytics that connects every part of the organisation through trusted insights.”
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