Panorama Business Intelligence

Want to know how a prominent recycled paper and packaging company cut reporting time in half and lowered inventory by 20 percent? Then read on!

In 2005, the business intelligence department at Cascades Tissue Group (a division of Quebec-based Cascades) was looking for a more dynamic BI solution for reporting and analysis, one that could potentially reduce inventory levels, more easily develop custom reports and improve efficiency and profitability in certain areas. Since that year, Panorama NovaView has done just that for the manufacturer. About 70 inventory, sales and supply chain/production managers and customer service reps leverage NovaView for a more connected and educational analysis experience.

Starting with a Cognos application and moving to an Excel add-on app for browsing OLAP cubes from SQL, the group needed to add functionality for end users—allowing them to create and modify reports without specialized analytical skills. With NovaView, training only took a few hours, and reports only take half as much time to create or tweak.

Sales and inventory staffers can perform custom analysis by creating their own Excel or PDF reports via NovaView’s web-based platform if standard reports don’t offer enough information. “The software is like using a pivot table in Excel,” said Jocelyn Laberge, a veteran in Cascades’ BI department. “You just drag and drop fields into the grid and right-click to make selections.”

NovaView offers Cascades visibility, replacing the department’s silo-by-silo operations with a comprehensive, comparable view of data like inventory and backorder levels and warehouse capacity—facilitating collaboration that helped lower inventory by as much as 20 percent. The increased efficiency offered by a shipping pattern cube developed in SQL and connected to NovaView optimizes the delivery activities and cuts shipping costs of product and raw material carriers.

An overall equipment efficiency (OEE) initiative for improving overall activity is heavily based on data collected by Novaview, and the company is getting more accurate numbers on profitability. Overall, Cascades is working to improve efficiency across all aspects of their business with the help of NovaView and succeeding.