Ferguson Case Study - Ironworks Consulting

Ferguson Enterprises

As a coast-to-coast wholesale distributor, Ferguson supplies a variety of plumbing and builder products such as industrial pipe, valves and fittings, heating and cooling equipment, waterworks products, and tool and safety products.

Through their showrooms, trade counters and sales force, they serve a wide array of customers in many different types of businesses and industries.

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Client:	Ferguson Enterprises
Technology:	Windows Server 2003 IIS SQL Server 2000 SQL Server Analysis Services SQL Server Reporting Services Sharepoint Portal Server Business Scorecards Accelerator v1
Industry:	Manufacturing
Service:	Business Intelligence

The Challenge

Like most organizations, Ferguson faces significant data visibility issues. They leverage many independent systems to run the day-today operations. Each of these systems is based on different underlying technology and utilizes their own proprietary reporting solutions. Within the IT organization, specifically, decision makers rely on multiple systems to gauge the overall health of the operation including Help Desk, Call Center, and Asset Management Systems.

In an effort to overcome this problem, Ferguson wanted to develop an operational scorecard within the IT organization to help to bridge the gap across the multiple “silos” of information that are relied upon for analysis and decision making.

The Solution

The goals of this project were to assist Ferguson in driving towards the definition of the operational scorecard and create a pilot environment for the implementation of the Microsoft Business Scorecards Accelerator.

As part of this project, Ferguson defined the key performance indicators and the data sources upon which they rely, i.e., existing Computer Associates® Service Desk and the Alteris® asset management applications that reside on Microsoft SQL Server 2000 platforms. The project included the creation of the Business Scorecards Solutions Accelerator with integration to their existing Share Point Portal Server (SPS) Enterprise Architecture. The solution added Scorecard Web Parts to the Ferguson Share Point Web Part Gallery, and allowed for the creation of audiences for Share Point mapped to the Active Directory Group Accounts to control data access.

The Results

A well developed user interface for viewing data, and trend analysis that is tightly integrated within the existing Sharepoint Portal Server architecture
A simple to use solution that allows for structured reporting as well as ad-hoc data analysis that supported daily, weekly, monthly and date range queries
Knowledge transfer and guidance that allows the Business Scorecards to be extended over time by Ferguson for other business units, e.g., branches

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