Case Studies

Scorpio

Technical solution

Data warehouse, Reporting suite, PDA integration, disparate systems integration, machinery integration for production control.

About Scorpio

Scorpio are the largest and most diverse Print Support Services Company in the UK, and amongst the largest in Europe having invested approaching £15 million in a diverse range of state of the art equipment, housed in a purpose built 80,000 sq ft factory on a 5.5 acre site on the Leeds ring road.

With the most diverse range of Print Finishing services housed under one roof in the UK, backed up with the latest computerised planning and estimating facilities, and not least a dedicated team of Customer Service Representatives.

The Need

Senior management staff were spending many hours per week consolidating and collating data for the key management reports. As well as this, the integrity and quality of the data could not be guaranteed, simply because the data is often being manually re-input from a variety of other applications.

It was identified that the business would benefit from a single, central, automated source of data for its reporting requirements.

The Solution

3SIXTY proposed a solution that would integrate with all other disparate data information sources within the business. The systems included Planning, Quotations, factor floor machinery equipment, warehouse and transport logistics.

Once integrated, 3SIXTY created a data warehouse to pull and link all the data sources together in one central area. An intuitive, (see screen shot) easy to use report package was then defined, designed and customised completely for the needs of the business. To extract any area of information from the data warehouse regardless of which data source it came from.

To enhance the delivery of the reporting function, 3SIXTY adopted a push technology approach whereby reports, once defined could be automatically delivered with real time reporting to one or more recipients via email or to mobile devices.

3SIXTY was then asked to integrate with their shop floor equipment to manage production monitoring and downtime of the machinery. 3SIXTY pioneered the use of industrial PDA devices to collect, monitor and establish staff sign on related to the machinery being utilised. Enabling reporting to cross analyse on downtime of machinery cost as well as staff costs. This was then filtered back into the reporting data warehouse for management downtime cost reporting.

The Benefits

• Improved accuracy of the data being presented
• Ability to have the reports delivered automatically by email on a scheduled basis
• Release time to senior staff to allow them to concentrate on other duties
• Ability to run reports historically to enable trend analysis
• Single, simple interface to all the corporate data, i.e. a one-stop shop
• New reports designed using an intuitive interface using data from any of the main applications.

www.scorpioltd.co.uk