Business Intelligence Success Story

Canada’s largest diversified mining, mineral processing and metallurgical company improves tracking of business performance with MBO Dashboard Solution

Teck Coal

Teck is Canada’s largest diversified mining, mineral processing and metallurgical company. The coal division includes six metallurgical coal mines in British Columbia and Alberta and is the world’s second largest exporter of seaborne hard coking coal.

Challenge

Teck Coal is a division of Teck, Canada’s largest diversified mining, mineral processing and metallurgical company. Teck Coal wanted a solution to help them monitor and measure corporate performance of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) identified in an Operations value map. Specifically, they required:

  • Movement from traditional methods of tracking business performance to a more focused and effective solution of Management by Objectives (MBO’s) to indicate how successfully their business is operating
  • Enterprise reporting strategy and better site reporting to reduce hours of manual effort
  • Ability to perform analytics and trend data over time
  • Easy access to data in a consistently meaningful format

Solution

Ideaca worked with Teck Coal to develop a Management by Objectives (MBO) Dashboard Solution based on the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack. The MBO Dashboard consists of a series of PerformancePoint dashboards to surface the KPI’s that make up the Operations value map. The dashboards are tied together to properly display relevant KPI’s based on the role of the individual viewing it and uses Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the gateway to the MBO dashboard. Within SharePoint, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server is used to deliver scorecards and analytics.

The solution was developed using Ideaca’s repeatable Dynamics AX ETL solution which allowed quick development of meaningful SSAS cubes from Teck Coal’s Dynamics AX implementation. In addition, the solution allows for data from disparate data sources, including several custom applications as well as Excel spreadsheets, to be combined and reported on with a minimal manual effort and intervention. The solution has also presented the ability to trend data over time and to actively provide for the root cause analysis of any of the MBO KPI’s that may not be performing to an acceptable level.

The solution has been accepted and adopted by the business users allowing for a change in compensation model based on MBO’s. This represents a massive shift for Teck Coal, one that they have been trying to achieve for years.

Benefits

  • Reduction in manual effort and improved comparison of data for better decision making: This is the first time data from multiple sites can be compared side by side without significant manual effort to combine, conform and present the data. Overall the business units are seeing a monitoring structure that was not previously available, and are receiving timely and complete data without the manual effort that was required in the past
  • Significant time and cost savings as it would have taken considerable effort to restructure existing reports and data to track new MBO KPI’s. PerformancePoint was the ideal tool to track the new method of managing the business that was being implemented, as it allows these KPIs to be surfaced easily and effectively as well as facilitate self serve reporting and ad hoc analysis of data
  • Consolidation of disparate data: The solution has allowed data from disparate data sources including Microsoft Dynamics AX, Custom Application Databases and data stored throughout the enterprise in Excel spreadsheets, to be combined and reported on with a minimal manual effort and intervention

Specific Benefits for End Users:

  • Ability to track how their MBO’s are performing and thus understand whether or not they will achieve their compensation targets
  • Focused and targeted tracking of KPI’s based on role and function
  • Ability to explore and analyze the data that makes up the corporate KPI’s and to track performance over time to identify trends and anomalies in the data
  • Ability to track performance of different sites within one application