From its humble beginnings in the late 19th century, this steel manufacturing company has evolved into a thriving industrial enterprise with a commitment to delivering top-tier steel products and bolstering local manufacturing. As the company diversified into various sectors, new challenges emerged in managing its analytics architecture.

Revolutionizing with SaaS Anywhere

Seeking a solution, they turned to PMsquare, an IBM business partner, for help. While the organization had worked with another IBM partner before, they found that their analytics were not running smoothly or planned out well. With PMsquare's help, the steel manufacturer was able to stabilize their architecture, seamlessly move to the Google Cloud Platform, and streamline security across all business units. In addition, PMsquare’s SaaS Anywhere offering provided them with a fully managed software-as-a-service experience for their Cognos Analytics environment, including administration and report development. In addition, PMsquare provided the necessary product training and enablement to help the development of skills internally. PMsquare’s ongoing care and maintenance of the environment includes regular health checks, upgrades, patches, and development lifecycle management.

As a result of the partnership, the steel manufacturer can now effectively handle requests for new content development and reporting needs. "I can now fix my own reports, compared to when I first started with Cognos and it was not even connecting to our SAP system," the BI Analytics Manager for the organization says. With PMsquare, they are able to diagnose and fix issues that used to take down Cognos, and the support team can deliver finished products “which allows me to get my higher priority work done."

Embracing Innovation

Overall, analytics has helped this organization review trends around customer behavior and market analysis. They can send out hundreds of reports across the organization and have been able to look at cost reports to forecast margins and complete some financial reports to help sales, operations, and logistics with inventory and delivery of on-time reporting. "The most important would be the consolidated dashboards that live in SAP and have been replicated in Cognos," their spokesperson says.

Unleashing the Power of Data

The steel manufacturer used to experience only 70% uptime, but now sees 99% uptime thanks to PMsquare's support. PMsquare serves as a consistent conduit to IBM support to accelerate resolution of issues. They find that PMsquare has deep technical product knowledge and is always able to get them answers. They particularly like the insights delivered by Thrive, PMsquare’s proprietary monitoring solution, which allows them to better understand user behaviors and the best next actions to be proactive rather than reactive. They also appreciate PMsquare's expertise in leveraging their CogBox solution for development acceleration and added features.

To demonstrate their success since working with PMsquare, the steel manufacturer shared that their sales reps can now run critical customer reports on the road without VPN that helps in their field sales efforts. They are informed of all relevant data before each client meeting to help optimize sales efforts for inventory optimization and sales history. As steel costs fluctuate every 2-3 years, there is a level of accuracy in providing the data and information to the business in a way that they can best understand.

Charting the Course for Success

Looking ahead, this organization has big aspirations. "We would love to become the Amazon of the Steel Industry," the spokesperson says with a chuckle. They want to create an environment that leads to an ease in purchase and a great customer experience. "I see no red flags or issues with working with PMsquare. I would recommend any client work with PMsquare, which is a group of great professionals," they conclude.

Conclusion

This success story is one of transformation and growth, thanks in part to the partnership with PMsquare. By stabilizing their analytics architecture and improving reporting with PMsquare’s SaaS Anywhere offering, the steel manufacturer has been able to streamline operations, optimize sales efforts, forecast margins, better understand customer behavior, and more!

Are you interested in streamlining your operations, greater environment stability, more mature software development lifecycles, the entire software-as-a-service experience? Contact PMsquare today to see how SaaS Anywhere can revolutionize your organization’s data analysis.