City Building Group deliver intelligence to staff right across the organisation
"Oracle and Maxima have enabled us to integrate real-time intelligence with our business processes and empower people at all levels to work smarter to meet our corporate objectives and social responsibilities."
Willie Docherty, Managing Director, City Building (Glasgow ) LLP.
City Building (Glasgow) LLP, one of the largest construction firms in Scotland, is transforming its data assets into knowledge with Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (OBIEE+). A limited liability partnership created in 2006 from the former BuildingServices Department of Glasgow City Council, City Building now employs more than 2,200 staff, including 125 people with disabilities.
The company has a strong community development policy and seeks to recruit as many people as possible from disadvantaged social backgrounds. OBIEE+ helps City Building, an expanding business that trains 850 new building and manufacturing apprentices each year, to exploit the benefits of pervasive business intelligence by delivering the right information to the right people.
Oracle's full range of analysis and reporting capabilities help identify and drive new best practices from the bottom up as well as the top down, leveraging the combined skills of all employees to drive profitable growth in a challenging business environment. City Building is confident of generating a return on its investment within 12 months of go-live.
The new Oracle reporting environment replaces several customdeveloped,standalone tools available to a limited number of financial users. Data generated by analysts was exported into spreadsheets and manipulated by each department, resulting in multiple versions of information that were often inaccurate and out of date. City Building needed a comprehensive, unified reporting tool that could deliver intelligence to staff right across the organisation.
"We wanted to give employees hands-on access to information relevant to their daily tasks to enable them to monitor performance and track trends" said Jim Nelson, senior corporate business analyst, City Building (Glasgow).
"Devolving intelligence would provide our people with analytics, proactive alerts, and feedback mechanisms and empower them to measure their own performance against corporate expectations."
Best-of-Breed BI
City Building chose Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus for its comprehensive functionality that ranks alongside that of the top pure-play vendors and works with heterogeneous information sources.
Implemented by Oracle Certified Advantage Partner Maxima, its ease of use and ability to extract data from multiple sources without the need to build a data warehouse enabled staff to begin using it immediately after implementation. Initially rolled out to 100 financial users in City Building's 80 business unit structure, Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus is now being extended across the company by Maxima. Site managers, field-based workers, and third-party contractors will eventually be given wireless access and the company plans to allow clients to view updates on their projects via its secure, selfservice front end.
Embedding Intelligence
City Building has been quick to realise benefits from Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus. Finance teams have streamlined the profit and loss accounting and can analyse data on salaries and staff productivity levels.
Twenty standard management reports created using Oracle Discoverer, the company's ad hoc analysis tool, have been integrated into Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus. Daily dashboards highlighting income versus expenditure, performance against SLA's, and budget updates provide managers with near-real time intelligence on key corporate performance indicators. Executives can drill down to extract information they need on a variety of diverse topics, such as the cost of construction materials, success of new apprentice schemes, or whether City Building is meeting its social inclusion targets.
Front-Line Decision Making
Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus is being extended to manage performance in other parts of the organisation, such as the call center that receives 800,000 calls annually relating to the 500,000 building repairs it carries out. Within two years of go-live some 1,400 staff in all parts of the business will use Oracle's browser-based suite of tools to monitor key metrics, share knowledge seamlessly, and help drive City Building's growth in a challenging commercial environment.
"Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus has given us a unified reporting infrastructure for measuring progress against strategic goals while devolving decision-making to the front line," said Nelson. "Users have been quick to adapt and our key challenge will be to manage their expectations by delivering new functionality fast enough."
Why Maxima?
City Building chose Maxima for its proven success record in delivering business intelligence implementations combined with flexibility and commitment to meeting customer needs. "We trusted Maxima's expertise and knowledge of our business to design and implement a business-critical solution that could deliver benefits from the outset and help us increase competitive advantage in the longer term," said Nelson. "Maxima's consultants delivered against our expectations and we are confident that their expertise will continue to ensure we leverage maximum value from our investment."
Implementation Process
The first phase of the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus project was implemented and rolled out within six months, delivering quick wins to City Building's business. "Maxima worked around us and our complex requirements," said Nelson. "They understood our vision, created a roadmap for roll-out, and delivered a results-focused implementation that enabled us to generate benefits almost immediately."
"Maxima's Oracle expertise and knowledge of our business helped ensure a trouble-free go live," added Murphy. "Their close partnership with Oracle gave us direct access to Oracle's product development teams."
City Building (Glasgow) LLP is one of Scotland's largest construction companies, employing over 2,200 skilled employees and providing construction and maintenance solutions to commercial and public sector organisations across the country. The company has a unique social ethos, providing training and employment to a diverse range of people from the communities it serves.
Maxima is a reliable, profitable and growing business solutions and IT managed services company with a 25-year pedigree,more than 400 staff and 1,000+ customers. From ERP implementations and support, through to 24x7 management of IT and network infrastructure, our clients depend on Maxima for their business-critical support. They trust us to deliver high quality solutions and services that provide them with the stability, flexibility and agility they need for continued business success.
