Redmond and IFG quickly found that help with IBM Business Partner ActionKPI and its Integrated Profitability Solution, powered by IBM® Planning Analytics technology. The new software allows IFG to centralize all of its balance sheet, income statement and cashflow reporting data, helping to simplify forecasting efforts.
“As I see it,” notes Lance Tylor, Chief Executive Officer at ActionKPI, “Planning Analytics is the next step of evolution from Excel, and I personally think it’s one of the best products on the market. And we’ve been able to take that base and make it more functional.”
With the Integrated Profitability Solution in place, IFG staff can now maintain a rolling 24-month forecast that is constantly updated with product, pricing, sales and inventory data. At the same time, mill supervisors can generate daily forecasts to better prioritize cut schedules and balance workloads throughout the given week or month.
“The ActionKPI team linked up everything within IPS,” explains Redmond. “So now we can look at revenue to date. We can look at the sales composition, the sales volumes/MBF [1,000 board feet] by mill. We can drill down to customers. We can look at the log deliveries and what the prices are and break out the different components of those log deliveries. We can even look at the production data live and match that against our forecasts.”
To help simplify the licensing surrounding the underlying Planning Analytics software, ActionKPI delivers its Integrated Profitability Solution under an IBM Embedded Solution Agreement. And the IBM technology, in turn, provides the heart of the solution, handling the complex analysis and calculations used to build forecasts. Of course, ActionKPI has enhanced the software to drive further value.
“IPS is more of a framework than just a product,” explains Tylor. “There are process changes. There are pre-built data integrations. There are methodologies that we deploy around change management and adoption. Then we wrap support service around it—a portal, a help desk—so we can help resolve any challenges with the models that have been developed. It’s a total package.”