Introduction
Kingspan Insulated Panels, part of the Kingspan Group Plc, has established a leading global position in design and manufacture of high quality Insulated Roof, Wall and Façade Systems for the construction industry. King span’s range of insulated panels has been successfully used across the globe on retail, distribution, commercial, industrial, leisure, and hospital and education projects. The performance advantages of Kingspan Insulated Panel Systems are well recognised by property investors, building owners, designers and contractors.
Key Challenges
- Legacy IT system effective as single site manufacturing system but unsuitable for growth or as amulti-site system.
- Enhanced management information key in fast-moving industry.
- Provide a scaleable multi-site,multi-currency, multi-country IT platform to support current business and future growth.
- ‘Big Bang’ implementation with six month timeframe.
Solutions and Services SAP Financials, SD Reporting, Variant Reporting, MM, Production Planning
Key Benefits
- Ease of implementation in any geography.
- Improved quality of management information.
- Excellent levels of end user acceptance.
- No increase in headcount despite aggressive business growth.
Though we heavily rely on historical performance, the figures reported in this report are not historical but are forecasts and projections for the coming fiscal year. The forecasts are updated quarterly. This particular report was updated in the last quarter. In order to maintain comparability over time and across companies and countries, we use an index system. In the case of firm’s assets, we treat the total assets as equalling 100, irrespective of the value of the local currency. All other assets are then calculated as a percent from total assets. In this way, the structure of the firm’s assets can be easily interpreted and compared with international benchmarks.
For liabilities, total liabilities and equity are indexed to equal to 100. For the income statement, total revenue is indexed to equal 100, and all other figures are calculated as a percent of these figures. Ratios are projected using raw financial statistics and, as ratios, are therefore comparable. The source(s) for the various raw statistics include public filings, corporate releases, and various other data sources.
Given a company’s financial structure, the resulting figures are benchmarked across leading competitors. In choosing the leading competitors, Icon Group chooses only those firms with sound financial situations or those not undergoing radical restructuring, or where random volatility, mergers, or bankruptcy affects financial performance. Since the calculation of competitor’s benchmarks proceeds in a similar fashion, but are aggregated across all competitors, one can directly conduct a financial gap analysis. Here, Icon Group graphically reports, for each part of the financial statement, the larger gaps that the firm has vis-à-vis the leading competitors.
A gap need not be a bad sign. Rather, it is simply a substantial difference that might merit further attention or signal a firm’s relative strength or weakness for the coming fiscal year. Again, all figures are projections, so due caution is required
Discuss how Kingspan addressed these expectations in their Internet Strategy for Customer Relationship Management
Kingspan Insulation, a manufacturer of building materials, is using business intelligence (BI) software to increase the productivity of its sales force and improve strategic planning.Kingspan deployed Cognos software more than six years ago after identifying problems with using Excel spreadsheets.
‘People were using Excel to make reports, but the information was collected at different times. The business was making decisions on data not from a single certified source,’ says Peter Smith, business systems manager at Kingspan.
The company decided to build a data warehouse using SQL Server with the BI software. ‘It gave employees the ability to build reports in real time using data generated on a nightly basis, so people were using the same data source for one version of the truth,’ says Smith. ‘Users can get what they want quickly without having to wait in an IT queue, which means they are more productive.’
Smith says BI tools give employees information they need to do their job more effectively. ‘We do not want them tinkering around with data. We want them to have the information they need to concentrate on their job, which is selling,’ he says. Smith also has plans to promote the use of BI in the purchasing department. One of the benefits of BI software is that people can see the advantage of joining up systems to deliver valuable information.
For example, reports on what materials are used in production have helped with traceability issues over the last six months. And with the spiralling cost of transport, information can be made available on the cost of distributing goods.
‘The company can look at that information to help with strategic decisions on whether to manufacture a bulky product locally,’ says Smith. ‘Good business
intelligence around transport costs will help us decide on the location of a production plant and save the business money.’ His department includes an IT systems trainer and a developer who work together to spread best practice on using the software. ‘Each business area will have people writing and creating their own reports and saving them, which means that in two years’ time there will be an enormous amount of work done creating a lot of data,’ says Smith.
He envisages a representative from each business area who controls creation and access. ‘Unless there are some controls, there is a risk of duplication of effort which is not efficient,’ he says. Smith has a vision of how BI tools should be deployed in the future. ‘A lot of people use handheld computers on the road, and we would like reports to be tailored for these devices, so that reports could, for example, be emailed to a salesperson about a customer whom he is going to visit,’ he says.
References
Goymer John BTEC National E-Business Book Published 2004. Harcourt Heinemann.
Kingspan Group Plc: International Competitive Benchmarks and Financial Gap Icon Group International, Inc. Staff – Business & Economics – 2000 – 24 pages.