Henkel - Ecolab

When you sell £50m of cleaning chemicals and solutions in the UK every year, it's easy to lose sight of the one solution that's more important than all the rest.

It's the answer to the question "How, when you are such a major player, do you keep ahead of the field in such a competitive market ?"

The solution clearly has several elements but for Henkel-Ecolab, which is part of the biggest worldwide group of its kind, one of the most significant is the ability to make the best use of the vast quantities of data it holds both on its industrial customers and on its own its operations.

Such data is necessarily detailed when, within the UK alone, the company has eight divisions, each with five departments. To give just one example, operating expenses for each of the 40 departments are split between around 40 categories, making about 1600 subgroups in all.

"We have so much data," says Sarah Manders, the Swindon-based company's finance manager and commercial controller, "that the challenge is to ensure that it is accurate, up-to-date and, most important of all, that we analyse it efficiently."

Recognising the potential Business Information (BI) problem, the company turned to Simpson Associates, consultants who specialise in devising and implementing their BI ReadyMade ® applications for business.

Working with their own application software and Cognos BI software, they are now more than halfway through a project which will complete late in 2001.

"We began working on our financial information and our sales information and we are moving into the distribution field at the moment, " says Manders, "and the early results have been very encouraging."

Henkel-Ecolab, which can trace back its origins to the mid-twentieth century, now has a solid platform for a twentyfirst century BI system.

"The things we can do with our information now are quite extraordinary," says Manders.

"It is so flexible that it enables us to see and analyse our data in a myriad of different ways. We are learning a lot about our customers and our performance that will be very valuable to us going forward."

"It's also given us very accurate information. When we prepare our monthly accounts, for instance, they are accurate to the last penny now. In the past, they were just about right but we couldn't say exactly where the discrepancies lay."

Valuable time has also been saved which the account team has put to good use. They now have the opportunity to write commentaries to senior managers to accompany the accounts, so contributing to better decision making.

On the sales side, the company says it has gone from "almost zero analysis to total flexibility of analysis" in a matter of months.

At first, national account managers and regional managers were sceptical when Manders summoned them to a presentation of the new software.

"We like paper-based information and spreadsheets," they told her. After the presentation, the overwhelming response was "How soon can be have it electronically?"

Henkel-Ecolab now has a standard reporting tool used throughout the company and the ultimate goal is to link everything together to produce sophisticated performance reports on each customer.

"They will show us sales, profit, service levels and our distributors' performance customer-by-customer. It will give us very useful information in negotiating contracts because we can see just how well we have serviced customers and just how profitable they are to us."

Meanwhile, Simpson Associates' Andy Gray, who was at the first meeting to kick off the project, is sticking with it.

"His presence has offered a reassuring sense of continuity," says Manders.

"He is so central to the project, he probably knows more about our business than we do but he's also realistic. He builds the project around us and fits it around our systems. Like any other company, our systems are not perfect but he doesn't insist that we have to change everything. His approach is pragmatic which is what we want."

Summing up the benefits of the still half-completed BI system, she says "It's so flexible, it throws up so many useful points to consider. Basically, it gave us the ability to answer questions we never knew we had."

With a solution like that, the company might yet clean up.