Service Unit support with CornerStar business intelligence data marts

Crucial Business Intelligence support for services units

Integrating Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay with CornerStar Business Intelligence provided the daily drill-downs and queries.

Problem: Our client knew that the ability to distinguish between profitable and non-profitable products/services offered was crucial to success and competitive advantage. However, their current Business Intelligence structures didn’t provide effective analysis.

Solution: CornerStar consultants installed and modified the CornerStar Sales Mart to include and categorize service information as well as product sales data. This yielded more accurate margin analyses of the client’s service contracts and clearly distinguished profitable services from non-profitable ones.

One of the most sensitive ratios in the client’s service oriented business is the head count of the service personnel who provide customer support (often referred to as Engineering Head Count). CornerStar generated information to help the client manage their engineering capacity to demand. Projected slows in demand provide opportunity for engineer training which results in increased productivity during heavy demand without the need to increase headcount.

In addition, service-oriented reports generated by CornerStar were put in place to provide timely information on:

  • Profitability by customer by service within region.
  • Enticing statistics on “Uptime”, “Mean Time To Repair” and “Mean Time Before Failure” by product and geography.
  • Contract justification by Labor.
  • Parts usage by Engineer.
  • Engineer productivity.
  • Call counts by product by geography.
  • Call costs by product by geography.

Outcome: The client now has the ability to distinguish profitable service areas from non-profitable ones through accurate margin analyses. Better management of the engineering head count has led to increased productivity with the same staff levels. These cost-effective solutions also resulted in:

  • Ability to lower inventory levels—increasing return on assets.
  • Accurate margin analyses on current service contracts.
  • Tighter control over Call Center productivity and service repair costs.
  • Sharp improvement on speed of reporting delivery.
  • Timely profitability analyses by service within region.
  • More accurate control over crucial Services ratios and KPIs.
  • Freeing of analyst and programming manpower.