Case Studies: Manufacturing

Each day, Allied Bakeries produces and delivers around 2 million products, including bread and rolls, to 12,500 stores across the United Kingdom and Ireland. To handle such high volumes, managers need access to detailed business data. However, manual processes across the customer services area were making it hard for them to track efficiency. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Edenbrook, Allied Bakeries deployed a solution based on Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005. Features such as Report Builder give managers the tools they need to design and produce meaningful reports quickly. In addition, automated reports are delivered every day, dramatically reducing manual processes for users. Because these detailed analyses expose any problems, decision makers can act quickly. As a result, within weeks of deployment, order efficiency improved by up to half a per cent.

Energizer Holdings, based in St. Louis, Missouri, is a leading manufacturer of batteries, flashlights, and wet-shave products. The global company has made a significant investment in Microsoft® Office software for its 6,800 knowledge workers, who also use dozens of specialized line-of-business (LOB) applications to do their jobs. Energizer is installing Microsoft Office Professional 2007 on its desktop computers so that users can better access LOB data from within the familiar Microsoft Office system. Using 2007 Microsoft Office programs, Energizer employees will be better able to access the data they need with less application-switching, and to improve productivity by eliminating time-consuming process steps. The IT staff will be able to eliminate tedious data integration work and focus on creating new business capabilities.

With customers around the globe and 62 manufacturing plants, Italcementi is a major producer of cement. The company faced a significant challenge: how to give its chemists and engineers fast, efficient access to production data for monitoring quality control. To help its technical staff work more effectively, Italcementi worked with two Microsoft® Certified Partners to deploy Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005. With SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services and SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, Italcementi’s quality-control staff has easier access to information, which in turn helps the company’s quality-control staff make faster, better-informed decisions that affect the overall quality of Italcementi’s product line.

3M is a diversified technology company with a yearly revenue of nearly U.S.$23 billion. In 2004–2005, the company’s Medical Division was not achieving its new product launch goals. Lack of a standard, simple format for communicating project status was creating project delays. To solve this problem, the division turned to an intuitive project scorecard solution, which it created with an integration of the Microsoft® Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution and Microsoft Office Visio® Professional 2003 drawing and diagramming software. The EPM solution maintains project information and Office Visio pulls the data into color-coded project scorecards that are easy to understand and share. Since using the integrated solution, the division has doubled its milestone attainment, improved business insight, simplified communications, and saved significant time on project status tasks.

Because racing teams in the Formula One (F1) World Championship know that fractions of a second can make the difference between winning and losing, they spend a lot of time and resources maximising the performance of their cars. Following a tender by the FIA—the governing body of F1—McLaren Electronic Systems worked with Microsoft to develop a standardised electronic control unit (ECU) for use by all F1 racing teams for the start of the 2008 racing season. Now, with the ECU, the governing body of F1 can realise its goals—helping teams reduce costs, widen competition along the grid, prevent illegal driver aids, and boost car efficiency. For teams, the new ECUs ensure that engineers gain an integrated view of car data to make smarter decisions faster. The teams can use the data to maximise performance on race day and drive development at the factory.

To comply with a U.S. federal directive to prove that its pricing for lumber was fair, Weyerhaeuser Company needed a way to quickly gather and analyze information from various technology systems. The company’s Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000–based solution worked well, but its processing speed left little time for the company to comply with the government’s tight timelines. Weyerhaeuser upgraded to SQL Server 2005, tuned existing processes, and now is able to complete data processing 50 percent faster. The performance improvements allow more time for analyzing the data, which is important to Weyerhaeuser because delivering accurate, defendable data is critical for compliance. The upgraded solution also takes advantage of integration between SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 for streamlined development, which saves steps every time Weyerhaeuser wants to change or add to its solution.