Leading Manufacturer Improves Productivity, Knowledge Access, and Strategy Development Using Business Intelligence Tools

As one of India’s largest manufacturers of consumer appliances, the Appliance Division of Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. understands the value of business intelligence for strategic planning purposes. Having pioneered Godrej & Boyce’s first Balanced Scorecard initiative in 1998, the division has long recognized the benefits of accessing corporate knowledge to drive operational strategy.

Using the Microsoft Office® Business Scorecards Accelerator, the division quickly built a business intelligence solution to meet its needs, facilitating access to corporate data, providing powerful, graphical analytical tools, and offering a collaborative environment to speed the planning process. Ultimately, the solution is helping Godrej & Boyce to increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve the ongoing strategic management process.

1

With growing competition, and in an increasingly mature appliances market, the Appliance Division of Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. places a high value on its sourcing strategy and cost management. To maintain its competitive position in the market, Godrej & Boyce sought tools that could keep up with the division’s agile strategic sourcing and supply chain process. Ultimately, this process helps the company to control material and operational costs and improve working capital management.

One important need for the solution was driven by the desire to speed the processes of data collection and dissemination. Says Pankaj Abhyankar, Godrej & Boyce’s Senior Manager, Quality, “Before [Microsoft® Office]Business Scorecards Accelerator, the workflow pertaining to data collection was not automatic and relied on Excel worksheets being uploaded. The analytics were possible in a limited sense after downloading the data tables and manually drilling down.” With the new solution, information access would have to be automated, requiring minimal time from management resources.

Godrej & Boyce also viewed communication and collaboration around strategy development as critical considerations. The company needed an environment in which integrated business intelligence could be easily shared and collaborated on by distributed teams.

In addition, Godrej & Boyce sought a solution with graphical representations that could easily be constructed and shared, thus reducing time communicating and modeling data. The company needed a solution to facilitate rapid analysis by offering trend charting, the identification of exceptions, and quick drill down capabilities.

Abhyankar adds, “The pain was in analyzing the overall measures and carrying out drill down, creating various graphical displays for analysis and comparison. It was also tedious to develop the visual strategy maps that could integrate the measures with cause-effect chains in the strategic themes. The functionality for each of these requirements took a long time to develop internally on the existing solution platform.”

The Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator offered Godrej & Boyce’s Appliance Division management team a solution that is helping to enhance their intellectual and knowledge productivity by increasing their ability to effectively use and share information. Using familiar technology, the solution builds on existing tools to provide capabilities that improve efficiency, enhance collaboration, and help generate more effective and responsive business strategies.

Core Capabilities

Using the Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator and the expertise of Capgemini, Godrej & Boyce was able to develop a solution that offered:

  • Powerful analytic tools and graphical data displays.
  • Automation of data entry, collection, and updates.
  • Web-based collaboration and instantaneous sharing of data.
  • Fast, accurate mapping of the strategic themes, strategy map, and Balanced Scorecards into the software.
  • A user-friendly front-end that is configurable to individual needs.
  • Drill-downs that enhance the balanced scorecard analysis, reviews, and course corrections and facilitate iterative strategy development and review processes.
  • A structured approach to scorecard and strategy map building in a Web-enabled environment.

Fast Deployment and Solution Adoption

The Appliances Division of Godrej & Boyce implemented the Business Scorecards Accelerator with support from Capgemini and Microsoft. The overall process was extremely fast as the Division’s Sourcing group was very conversant with Balanced Scorecard concepts and terminology. Equally important was the solution’s ease-of-use. “The user-friendly design of the Business Scorecards Accelerator was an important factor,” says Rajesh Ekbote, Capgemini Project Manager for the solution. “The implementation was extremely fast, as the terminology used by the solution was compatible with contemporary understanding of Balanced Scorecards. It mapped extremely well and very easily.”

Implementation time was only three weeks, including one week each for planning, software installation and configuration, and business scorecard mapping and configuration.

“The Capgemini and Microsoft teams that supported and guided the implementation were very knowledgeable and effective. The overall experience was highly satisfying.” adds Salim Badshah, Manager-Systems at Godrej & Boyce.

The Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator offered the Appliance Division of Godrej & Boyce the tools necessary to speed its planning process, automating administrative tasks and offering powerful, graphical tools for strategic analysis and collaboration. In addition, because the solution extends the functionality of existing tools, deployment and adoption are rapid, enabling a realization of the value offered by the Business Scorecards Accelerator in a very short timeframe.

Key Benefits
  • More efficient strategy development process
  • Reduced iterative prototyping time for scorecard development
  • Fast, powerful analysis and reporting
  • Rapid implementation of solution
  • Quick user adoption of familiar tools

More Efficient Strategy Development Process

The solution helped Godrej & Boyce speed up the early stages of its annual strategy formulation process. The automation of data collection helped to dramatically reduce the time required to access information the company needed to develop its performance goals and strategy. Abhyankar says, “The [Microsoft Office] Visio® [Professional 2003] linkages and the established scorecard functionalities turned out to be extremely powerful in developing strategy maps and Balanced Scorecards for the fiscal year 2004/2005.”

Reduced Iterative Prototyping Time for Scorecard Development

Godrej & Boyce reports that, when using the Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator, the time taken to build the strategy maps in the early stage of development is reduced considerably. The team can rapidly visualize the multiple strategic options and themes, compare them, and then build a consensus in a collaborative environment. This functionality helps Godrej & Boyce to dramatically shorten the iterative strategy development cycles that were very time-consuming with its prior solution.

Fast, Powerful Analysis and Reporting

Godrej & Boyce has found that the analysis tools and graphical reporting capabilities have enabled the sourcing team to collaboratively analyze, manipulate, and view information more efficiently and effectively.

According to Ramesh Subramanian, Director, Capgemini, “The solution has helped the managers at Godrej & Boyce enhance their knowledge productivity. The analytical drill-down and powerful graphic display capabilities help them to quickly access information needed to develop effective strategies. The shared platform is also helping the company to collaborate on strategy in a way not possible before.”

Rapid Adoption with Familiar Tools

“Another plus point is that the Business Scorecards Accelerator is very user friendly,” says Abhyankar. “Most of us are used to Excel and PivotTable® [dynamic views]. The power and richness of the Microsoft Business Intelligenceplatform is combined with the simplicity and familiarity of tools like Office. The adaptation by the larger group down the hierarchy is very easy. This makes the strategy communication and deployment very easy, seamless, and fast.”

Business Value

As the Appliance Division of Godrej & Boyce faces an increasingly competitive market for consumer appliances, the group is primed to reap the rewards of its innovation and leadership in strategic sourcing and supply chain management. After a brief implementation and adoption process, the company stands to see significant improvements to the bottom line, including increased productivity, material cost savings, and a more agile strategy development process with immediate insight into business performance metrics that will help drive future success.

Business Value
Description / Change
Increase in productivity within the first year / 30-40%
Improvement in material resource productivity / 20%

30 to 40 Percent Increase in Productivity

Using the Business Scorecards Accelerator, Godrej & Boyce expects significant gains in efficiency and effectiveness across the organization. “Clearly we see a benefit in improved productivity in our knowledge workers,” says Mr. G Sunder Raman, Vice President, Godrej & Boyce, “The ratio of time our people spend focusing on strategic to non-strategic work is greatly improved. With the solution, we expect a 30 to 40 percent productivity improvement in a year’s time.”

“With Strategy Map, Scorecard, and analytical drill-down seamlessly integrated, the classic Balanced Scorecard approach evolves and matures into a powerful strategic management weapon. Besides enhanced productivity, the process at the end develops a very robust strategy.”

20 Percent Improvement in Material Resources Productivity

Ultimately the solution is expected to help the company significantly control material costs, which has a direct affect on the ability to maintain competitive pricing. Godrej & Boyce projects that the company will achieve more than 20 percent improvement in supply chain inventory management, cost productivity, and obsolescence control.

Improved Strategy Development and Faster Response to Market Changes

Ultimately, the ability to speed Godrej & Boyce’s strategy development process is expected to improve the overall strategic output and help the company respond more quickly to changing market dynamics. The solution’s collaboration and productivity enhancement capabilities help speed the evaluation of past strategies and the iterative process of developing and evaluating new ones. Because less time is spent identifying issues and problems, focused teams can more quickly begin developing innovative options as solutions.

Raman adds, “In addition to improvements in productivity, the strategy developed at the end of the process is significantly superior. The Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator seamlessly weaves the strategic objectives, themes, and initiatives, and integrates these with ‘measurements’ and dynamic multilevel execution reviews. The improved quality of the strategic output will obviously make a significant impact on the bottom line.”

New Business Opportunities

As the company continues to use the solution throughout the organization, Godrej & Boyce expects that improved business insight will help identify new business opportunities. Says Abhyankar: “There should also prove to be value in the solution’s impact to management of go-to-market planning. I expect the analytic capabilities to help us successfully find and develop new opportunities.”

1

The Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator is a Web-based offering that enables employees at all levels of the organization to simplify the measurement and management of key performance metrics (KPIs) and business strategies. By simplifying the creation and management corporate and departmental scorecards, organizations gain real-time visibility into business operations resulting in timely decisions aimed at reducing costs and improving business performance.

For more information about the Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator, go to:

1