GF AgieCharmilles, a provider of machines and automated solutions for the tool and mould making industry, has chosen BOARD as its corporate tool for a worldwide Business Intelligence project to support its sales and order processes. The main objective of the project is to create a new, group-wide system for analysing and reporting sales and order intake, integrating data from 20 affiliates and various ERP environments, including SAP.
The solution, which is already being rolled out across Europe, will be extended worldwide in the coming months and will provide GF AgieCharmilles with a single global view of orders, turnover and profitability trends based on different analysis dimensions, including machine type, customer, region and market segment served. BOARD will centralise information and automate workflow enabling various manual activities to be eliminated.
"Our choice," explained Mauro Fontana, GF AgieCharmilles Group CFO, "was mainly guided by the tool's flexibility and versatility. BOARD not only gives us the analysis and reporting capabilities needed at this stage of the project, but also enables us to use the work done as a basis for fulfilling our future requirements in terms of budgeting, forecasting and planning of sales data. All of this in a single, integrated and user-friendly environment, with undoubted benefits both from the point of view of the unambiguous and reliable information it provides, and as regards costs linked to the maintenance of the applications and their adaptation to changing business needs."
Yves Thiery, GF AgieCharmilles Group Controller added: "We evaluated the tool by testing a proof of concept in one of the group's companies operating in Switzerland, which enabled us to gain a thorough understanding of the product. Getting to know it and using it in practice was really what convinced us. BOARD confirmed all our expectations both in terms of the creation of an advanced analysis, simulation and planning environment, and in terms of data integration and standardisation capability."
