People's Education Press
"BusinessObjects Edge is a telescope and microscope for decision makers in managing enterprises."
Mr. Jiao Min
director of IT Center, People’s Education Press
Challenge
Publication companies：Thirst for business intelligence
When talking of the challenges faced by the People's Education Press in BI, the director of its IT center Mr. Jiao Min expressed straightforward, "Let us do a mathematics sum. In case the financial department wants to calculate the number of articles published by editing sections, they must know the total number of articles published as well as the number of articles published respectively by each editing office.
Such a simple report will involve up to 30 reports and even so, the info is not complete since the financial department has to collect statistics of the present status of nearly 4,000 kinds of books published by 30 editing offices, whether they have been sold and the account receivables. In short, a total number of reports will be calculated after considering all kinds of situation including horizontal and vertical combinations. You can imagine how many reports will be involved in such a simple comprehensive analytic reporting and how difficult it is."
In fact, it is not a virtual reporting, but a report used by financial staff of the People’s Education Press in calculating the annual bonus. The data of annual bonus will be generated by December 31 of each year and if the Chinese New Year of the coming year falls on the end of January, this means the finance department must come up with precise data for calculating bonus within 20 days after the reporting of each department is available after January 10. Without an online analytics in real time, this is almost a task that can never be accomplished.
Regarding the information management system of the Press, the summary of Mr. Jiao was quite simple, that was “complex”. The reason for that was because this info system is managing all the subsidiaries and shareholding company of the Press, connecting with several companies who are independent from each other in finance. Thus, such an info system will not just have to meet the company-level auditing requirements of the Press, but also functioning to realize the accounting work of each subsidiary.
The operational scale of the People’s Education Press is accounting for half of the country’s primary and secondary school text book market with a business size exceeding 10 billion yuan and a margin of about 400 million yuan. Although the profit level remains the same in recent years, the marginal income per book has decreased due to strong market competition. This means the Press must have to develop its business even further each year, which consequently posing huge pressure over the Press’ info management system.
Nevertheless, Mr. Jiao appeared to be quite confident in face of these difficulties, because at the beginning of establishing IT infrastructure, the Press chose small computers as the hardware platform, realizing unified administration through ERP among the direct subsidiaries and shareholding companies. Since the system was put into operation in 1997, it has accumulated volume data between 4-10 years, offering valuable data resources for the company’s management in assisting decision making and business analysis.
Given such a good foundation of IT infrastructure, the People’s Education Press still encountered many troubles in inquiry and analysis.
In order to adapt to the steady business development over the past few years, the info management system of the Press has been upgraded each year, but still could not satisfy the changing demand due to the absence of consistent planning and multi-dimensional dynamic analysis although it could provide certain reporting and inquiry and analytical functions. Moreover, the statistics reports needed by the decision making leaders were usually finished by SQL programs, which made it very difficult for maintenance; the information center could hardly carry on with the current reporting system and provisional accomplishments. When there is any new reporting requirement, the info center has to develop solutions on almost a zero basis, resulting in much longer development cycle and the changing reports and inquiry needed by actual business had to depend on the technicians of the info center and cooperative software vendors. There was no online analysis for info inquiries. Therefore, it requires to have a powerful reporting statistics inquiry and online analysis to help solve these issues.
This issue becomes more serious when the cost management of each department is put under a contracting system. Since the cost of each editing office has been fixed at the beginning of each year, the chief of each office is very much concerned over the use of its budget, but they cannot make real-time inquiry. Meantime, the monitoring of each office’s administrative expenses is also having problems in that although there are application software to conduct supervision on those fees of each editing office, after aggregation of these monitoring data, the approval is needed for expenditure data while realizing the real-time drilling of these data. For example, if we want to get confirmation on the expenditure figures of printing machines, the application program must be able to tell user that the printer of one editing office generates certain amount of costs within certain period of time.
Approach
Turning fast-response and continuous diagnosis into realities
The information system is a concrete illustration of management systems and therefore, specific management system will generate relevant information requirements accordingly. The info center of Mr. Jiao and Business Objects experts made a careful study of the IT architecture in the People’s Education Press.
Mr. Jiao pointed out that we had very clear application requirements, that is first, we need to have powerful data integration capability that can respond to new reporting needs at any time; secondly, to realize multi-dimensional and dynamic analytics so as to enable decision makers and departmental leaders to conduct decision making and management; thirdly, to support customers of different levels to create their self-defined charts. In addition, the new system should also have the functions of real-time update and inquiry which will help address all our issues.
At this moment, the deployment of BI system has become a must-have approach for the People’s Education Press to drive its informatization program. The next question is the Press is a fast-growing company that can hardly spend several months or one year to implement a large BI solution. "After making comparisons of several software vendors and taking full considerations of the system’s visualization, operability and development ease, we finally decided to choose the BusinessObjects Edge," Mr. Jiao recalled. Speaking of the features of BusinessObjects Edge, Mr. Jiao summarized, "It is a product launched by Business Objects for growing companies that complies with the scale of these companies and their needs on management and innovation. The BusinessObjects Edge is an outstanding solution with moderate scale and good application performances, and it is very easy to deploy with better flexibility and affordability than its peers."
BusinessObjects Edge is facilitating the Press in realizing fast responses to new reporting requirements. According to Business Objects experts, the BusinessObjects Edge integrate application data from dozens even hundreds of sources into database, covering company’s major business areas through this database. In the meantime, it also provides users with a visual interface that can be used for ad hoc reports, inquiry and analysis with business users being able to access and analyze company data, changing formats according to their needs without relying any more on IT. Moreover, the real-time data can also be used in Microsoft environment---people using the familiar tools like Office and SharePoint to access their company data. When there is any change on backend info, the data stored in the Office or SharePoint will also be updated immediately. Thus, even the requirement for provisional reporting can be satisfied shortly, which is more economic than programming.
The functions of BusinessObjects Edge are not limited to the simple reporting and inquiry, but can extend to analysis, dashboard and other in-depth applications. Mr. Jiao stressed that "This is very important. From the perspective of corporate resource management, we believe that only through continuous diagnosis can we realize continuous improvement. The operation of BusinessObjects Edge can provide these diagnosis that will offer incentives to departments and staff----increasing employees’ efficiency through info offerings while providing performance info of each department and individuals." It is true as what Mr. Jiao said that BusinessObjects Edge can turn the continuous diagnosis of company’s management into reality. With the visual intelligent interface, the management can easily get into dashboards, switching over the analysis of each department’s key data in a multi-dimensional manner and quickly gain insight into company’s internal performance. More importantly, the Metadata semantics offered by Business Objects enable the whole process realize "self-analysis application". In addition, the BusinessObjects Edge offers an open business intelligence platform that will bring about perfect integration of company’s original application, platform and database by means of coding tech at bottom layer. This guarantees the continuity of various works in the company.
After comparison and making trial development, the People’s Education Press finally decided to deploy BusinessObjects Edge Standard suite onto each specific PC server that incorporate windows server 2003 operating system and SQL Server 2005 database. The technical roadmap of system development is to turn the DB2/400 database distributed on multiple servers into SQL Server database every day, establishing some new SQL database (reports) based on the actual requirements of reporting and inquiry. These integrated databases (reports) will become the data source of BusinessObjects Edge operations. The IT staff from the info tech center and ERP vendor jointly create semantic layers for multi-dimensional analytics, doing the maintenance of reports and design as well as provide interactive inquiry and multi-dimensional analytics reports for the decision-making leaders; these leaders at different levels can then produce the self-defined reports by themselves.
Results
From a “Fireman” to a supervisor of performance management
After the implementation of the solution, the effects come up immediately. To realize precise business analysis and inquiry, leaders at various levels put forward some personalized analytic and inquiry requirements over the info system. The solution of BusinessObjects Edge can be implemented by doing some minor modification work. As the basic chart for analytics changes, you do not need to do it from the start, but just changing the chart for analytics. What made Mr. Jiao and his colleagues happy was that in the past, they had to design an individual program for a special inquiry that could be used only once. Now the small amount of modification work they did could be integrated by categories. Hence, when one knowledge base is built after another, there will be less special inquiries. And as for inquiry over costs of each department, the realization of real-time analytics can help it display in real time no matter how deep you drill down on the data.
What is good is that the BusinessObjects Edge system did not simply become a “fireman”, instead it became a supervisor of performance management. Mr. Jiao explained that "It seems easy to do a company-wide communication, but it is very difficult to get started. When you go to another department and ask for data, they may be busy with their work and unwilling to make inquiries for you. If you go to ask the leaders of certain departments, they may do the inquiry for you, but since it is not their obligation, the inquiry quality is in question mark. But after the deployment of BusinessObjects Edge, the data in the system is open and any person can make inquiries as far as he gets the required authorization."
In fact, the BusinessObjects Edge platform is not only a guarantee of performance management, but also a dutiful supervisor. "The data in computer will not make mistakes by itself, but when a user inputs data into the system, there might be mistakes. It will be more difficult to correct it when people detect it in the final settlement," Mr. Jiao Min introduced, "Since the BusinessObjects Edge platform has powerful business analysis function, we can easily find abnormal data and correct it in time through drilling tools."
At present, the People’s Education Press has utilized the BusinessObjects Edge system to establish a uniform corporate-level BI platform with leaders at various levels to be able to make self-defined reports by themselves. In addition, it also helps realize the preliminary design and development of performance assessment system. The reports that were available to decision-making management each month before the implementation are now able to offer inquiry of all basic data collected one day before and it has the online interactive analytical function. "It is not encouraged to give up the implementation of BI systems simple due to the weak management basis in state-owned companies," Mr. Jiao emphasized, "Actually, the BusinessObjects Edge solution is more suitable for state-owned enterprises because its implementation process is just a progressing course of intensive management."
About the People's Education Press
The People’s Education Press is subordinated to the Ministry of Education of PRC, being a large publication company engaged in the research, compiling, editing, publishing and circulating fundamental education materials as well as all kinds of teaching books and educational books. Apart from publishing primary and secondary school teaching materials, all kinds of teaching books and educational books, it is also developing fast in the publication and distribution of electronic AV and multimedia products, trading of copyrights, import & export of books, construction of people’s education network and web publications.
Quick Facts
- Industry:
Publishing - Business Pains:
The original system could hardly respond to new reporting needs without centralized planning.
The original system lacked multi-dimensional dynamic analytics.
The statistics analysis reports needed by decision makers were mostly done by SQL programs with difficulty in maintenance. - Why choose Business Objects?
Business Objects has definite leading position on the BI market.
Business Objects can provide required BI solutions in accord with company scale and requirements in management and innovations, realizing data integration and drives the company's performance management. - Business Objects Products and Services:
BusinessObjects Edge Series