• By Company

 

Customer Spotlight

China Minmetals Corp.

"BI Solution from Business Objects has helped China Minmetals Corp. in analyzing and managing its data for our import and export business, it provided better visibility and insights to our business operation, and has made significant contributions to the improvement on our business performances."

Mr. Yan Xiaoqing
Deputy GM of IT Department
China Minmetals Corporation

Business Drivers

China Minmetals is the largest trading company for metals and minerals in China. It is mainly engaged in the production and operation of metal, mineral and mechanical-electrical products whilst diversifying its business into banking, real estate, cargo shipment, tendering and investment. Being a huge enterprise group operating across borders, China Minmetals was selected by the State Council as one of the 55 pilot enterprises in China in 1992, and it is one of the seven Authorized Operational Units of National Assets. In 2005, the its total business revenue ranked number 11 among China’s Top 500 companies. China Minmetals Corp. has its own globalized sales network and has established 168 wholly-owned or joint venture companies in 20 provinces across China. Also, it has 44 branches in major countries around the world to serve over 8,000 Chinese and overseas enterprise customers.

Due to the complexity of the reporting format, the tremendous inquiry requirements and the reports quantity over the custom offices, data are not shared among branch companies, data are not in unified format from different systems, and the transactional data provided by the EDI of customs and Ministry of Commerce cannot be processed accurately, and therefore all the data are not usable.

The current "Customs Analytical System" built in 2000 could not satisfy the needs for data analyzing and management. The system lagged behind the requirements of the company's business development. China Minmetals needed to have accurate data timely for its data generated from custom office, EDI, and daily operation. China Minmetals needed a better BI solution to support its decision making and to improve the business performance.

Solutions

Minmetals used Crystal Reports to access and format the data from different sources. It creates reports through various graphical functions based on strict and complex reporting requirements, presenting information in a reliable manner, and sharing it with internal and external users securely. It helped China Minmetals employees to access data they need through network or enterprise application system, turning data into truly valuable operational information.

Individiual departments are quite demanding on inquiries over statistics from custom offices and expect timely dynamic data. The advanced and easy-to-use inquiry and analytical tools from Business Objects enables the use of analytical functions on the single platform. Employees can now access data without complicated training, and users are able to acquire much stronger data functionalities at a lower cost.

All the above products and functions are centrally managed by the BI platform—BusinessObjects XI Release 2. BusinessObjects XI R2 is currently the only BI platform offering complete BI functionalities facilitating China Minmetal to manage data ranging from enterprise reports to complicated applications. By using BusinessObjects XI R2, China Minmetals can easily solve the issues of data integration.

Results

The project was officially started in January 2006 and the 1st-phase was completed in July 2006. The results of Business Objects BI solutions are quite obvious. First, the management of China Minmetal Corp is able to access the data they need in timely manner. It takes only several hours to have the first hand data which used to take two or three days. Second, business data is shared among all users in company wide, which can only be accessed by few people in the past. Authorized users can access to data they need through company’s website, which has led to increased work efficiency. Third, the data visibility and the visibility to business operations are significantly improved.

By comparison of various data and charts, and also the comparison of historical data, management can intuitively find the reasons of good or poor business performances, and able to identify effective solutions for improvement, gaining deep understanding and insights into business.

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Quick Facts

• Industry:
  Manufacturing
• Business Pain:
  Due to the diversity and the complexity of the business, China Minmetals has multiple business systems involving different business segments and processes. Most of the systems have operated for many years with heavy data legacy.
  
  China Minmetals lack of data reflects the real picture of its business operation, and needs a real-time support to decision makers so as to improve operational efficiency and its business performance.
• Why Business Objects:
  Business Objects has many successful references in the world and is now the top brand in BI market. The BI solution of Business Objects has strong functionality and can satisfy the requirements of China Minmental.
  
  Compared with its rivals, Business Objects is now the only BI vendor providing customer support and services in mainland China. The solutions also perform much better than competitors in terms of user experiences whilst its ease-of-use and visualization in data presentation are well recognized by users.
• Business Objects Products and Services:
  BusinessObjects XI, Crystal Reports, Enterprise Query, Reporting, and Analysis