Hillman Group, Avnet, and Quaker Chemical: Process Transformation through Business Intelligence Deployments ‘im Honerkamp, CIO of Hillman Grou ‘much beteer than what came before, Ble, had to ask one of Honerkamp's ris Honerkamp, whose company is a $ 2 Hilmen Groups new BI system, curious busines executives can q ‘instant answers about such critical questions as the number of sytem in realtime. There's just one problem: The new system hasn't made yet—only beer informed, ‘That's generally the problem with BI, the umbrella term used to analyze an organization's raw data (eg. sales transa ‘Most CIOs stil think of ie Tent eay to take B to the nex level; it requires a change ‘rganizations from the CEO down. Information is powes, vital to this new vision of BI because ex veryone involved in the process must have full ac able to change the ways that they work, jhe other major impediment to using BI to transform bus Iunderstand their business processes well enough to determine be careful about the processes they choose. If the process dove nev hare the process across the company, ‘their particular part of the process ‘proud of his new business intelligence (BI) eystem. Why not? I's Jn the bad old days, executives looking forsale information, programmers to make a manual database query to pull the nerat He company’s legacy systems. The lag time made the charts “ele de asad they came our,” ac 380 million manufacturer and distributor of engraving techni hardware, such as keys and signs. Supporting Decision Making 623 for exam- bers from uery the system themselves and get ‘unfilled customer orders, which is tracked by the the business better—at least not that refers to a varity of software applications tions) and extract useful insights from them, to share it Yer sharing is cess to information to be siness processes is that most companies don't how to improve them. Companies also need to irect impact on revenue, or the busi. the entire BI effort could dis sintegrate. Compa- how information and data allthis before they start a BI project—if they hope toimprove how people do their jobs. “The new, greater scope ofthese BI projec gives CIOs a strong justifcaion for working with the business to study processes and det termine how these tools andthe insights they provid ‘Companies that use BI to uncover Hawed by rusiness processes are in a much better fe can support and improve them. Position to successfully com~ se BI merely co monitor what's happening. Indeed, CIOs who don't use Bio transform business operations put their companies at rolled out the system to 2,000 salespeople 80 that they could actively ineorporat to-day workflows and interactions with