“We had trouble getting the information we needed to make simple, day-to-day business decisions,” says Jim Cleary, vice president of information technology at Sermatech, “and that had to change.”
For more than 60 years, Pennsylvania-based Sermatech has been a leading provider of protective coatings that shield aircraft engine parts and oil pipeline components from heat, corrosion and friction. Although Sermatech has the technology to prevent airplane engines from faltering mid-air, effectively managing and using its own information was beyond the company’s reach. The prime culprit—growth—had produced six facilities in North America and plants in the United Kingdom, Germany and Asia.
“We were essentially operating nine discrete businesses,” Cleary says. “Each facility had its own database, Enterprise Resource Planning system and payroll solution. At times, it seemed as if the only things tying us together were [Microsoft®] Excel spreadsheets.”
This was business as usual for Sermatech until 2005, when the company was acquired by Arsenal Capital Partners, a venture capital firm. As Arsenal executives worked to understand and incorporate their latest acquisition, some issues were discovered. Among them: Sermatech occasionally competed against itself. A few customers learned they could call different Sermatech plants and get different price quotes.
“We needed to get a handle on our business,” says Cleary. “That meant getting a handle on our information.”
Indeed, enterprises everywhere are feeling the pressure from the exponential growth of information. More than ever, corporate data is driving businesses, dramatically changing company behavior and surfacing as a prime competitive differentiator. As Sermatech learned, having the best product or service does not ensure maximum revenue, even when there is no competition.
“HP had the best solution, hands down. Hardware, software, data retrieval, integration with other systems, creation and flexibility of a common dashboard…everything,” says Cleary. “They also brought a lot of experience to the table. HP helped us with systems assembly, data cleansing and modeling, even management reporting.”
Cleary is referring to the HP information management strategy and portfolio of products, services and solutions. These solutions let companies like Sermatech deliver the right information to the right person at the right time to make better decisions and improve operational business intelligence.
Sermatech employs the Neoview warehouse and HP business intelligence services to integrate, standardize and use its information to make better strategic and operational choices. Reporting tools from MicroStrategy, a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software, are also part of the implementation, further enhancing the capabilities of the solution.
The benefits of the company’s Neoview system soon will extend beyond Sermatech, Cleary adds. Because Arsenal is a venture capital firm with numerous entities, Sermatech is planning to parcel its additional Neoview capacity for use by its sister companies.
“With a virtual private network connection, our sister companies can utilize our Neoview system with their own data and schema,” Cleary says. “They get advanced business intelligence capabilities, we make use of our extra capacity and Arsenal reaps economies of scale.”
“Our Neoview system is much more than a data repository,” Cleary says. “It has brought together our ERP, financial and payroll systems. It has delivered business modeling tools for reporting and historical trending. And it has helped our operations, finance and sales people get on the same page.”
Cleary predicts the new enterprise data warehouse and business intelligence strategy, in conjunction with other initiatives, will help double Sermatech’s revenue in the next three years.
“Real-time data enhances everything: sales, financials, business operations and workforce productivity. It allows us to operate our business more efficiently and make fast, decisive, informed adjustments,” he says. “With HP’s help, we’ve transitioned from a[MicroSoft] Excel company to a real-time, business-intelligent company.” And simple, day-to-day business decisions are once again simple.
