Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Supply Chain Provider Saves $227,000 and 15,600 Labor Hours in Less Than a Year
Overview
Country or Region:Peru
Industry:Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Yobel is a leader in third-party supply chain management, providing customers in Latin America and the United States with planning, sourcing, manufacturing, and logistics. Yobel employs 4,500 people.
Business Situation
Yobel wanted to make it easier and less costly to gather, analyze, and respond to customer, partner, and employee feedback on service quality and operational efficiency.
Solution
Upgrading to the 2007 Microsoft® Office system, Yobel automated data collection, analysis, and online reporting with Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007, Microsoft Office Excel® 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 integrated with Microsoft SQL Server®,and the Microsoft .NETFramework.
Benefits
Reduce costs and save time
Gain insight into customer opportunities
Access performance information
Adopt corporate standards / “The 2007 Microsoft Office system isn’t just an outfit of desktop tools; it’s an entire environment that allows us to develop much greater functionality.”
Pedro Pablo Durand,Chief Operational Excellence, Yobel Supply Chain Management
Yobel Supply Chain Management, based in Lima, Peru, provides customers in Latin America and the United States with supply chain planning, sourcing, manufacturing, and logistics. With growing competition and increased demand for innovation in bringing products to market, Yobel began surveying customers, partners, and employees on their operational efficiency and service. But without a structured process for gathering and using feedback, data entry and analysis were slow and ineffective. Yobel deployed the 2007 Microsoft® Office system to standardize and automate the assessment process. Using this integrated system of programs, Yobel can automatically generate survey forms, aggregate and analyze response data, and dynamically display results using charts and performance indicators. Yobel eliminated tedious manual data work and gained valuable insights that customers can view online.
Situation
Yobel Supply Chain Management, based in Lima, Peru, provides supply chain management for some of the world’s leading brands, using advanced systems to integrate and simplify customers’ operations. Established in 1966, Yobel manages inventories, sourcing, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, and warehousing in 12 Latin American countries and the United States. The company employs 4,500 people.
Increased competition in third-party supply chain management and growing customer demand for innovation present two key business challenges for Yobel. To maintain competitiveness, Yobel launched a companywide Operational Excellence initiative to improve customer satisfaction by significantly lowering costs, enhancing customer service, and embracing innovation.
Because Yobel relies heavily on information from the field to make the right decisions for their customers, the initiative centered on customers, suppliers, and employees providing periodic assessments on Yobel service quality and operational efficiency. The key would be to effectively gather and process the feedback.
Pedro Pablo Durand, Chief Operational Excellence, at Yobel Supply Chain Management, explains the initiative goals: “Our mission is to manage knowledge to optimize our customers’ supply chain. Beyond that, we want to strengthen our ability to innovate and our capacity for learning. Last, we want to definitively impact operational excellence by efficiently using knowledge—sharing best practices, encouraging continual improvement, and quickly resolving issues.” To achieve these goals, Yobel required the right technology solution.
Initially, the assessments were paper-based. Customers, suppliers, and employees modified surveys, leading to data inconsistencies and difficulty validating feedback. Further complicating data collection and response tracking, an assessment could arrive as a text file, Microsoft® Office Word document, PDF, e-mail message, or fax. “There was no way to verify if or when a customer submitted feedback,” recalls César Espinosa, Knowledge & Solutions Manager at Yobel Supply Chain Management.
Survey information that did arrive had to be recorded manually, making data entry slow, tedious, error-prone, and highly inconsistent. Teams logged hundreds of hours just inputting surveys. Data consolidation and analysis were also manual, requiring teams to write code and develop custom Web pages. The results were difficult to measure or validate and created long lags between survey arrival and response to feedback.
Yobel had succeeded in collecting a significant amount of data, yet lacked useful business information.
Solution
Yobel began working closely with Microsoft Peru to develop a complete solution for assessment data collection, entry, consolidation, and analysis. The goal for Microsoft Peru was to develop a system that would easily integrate with Yobel’s existing IT infrastructure and be compatible with the diverse technologies of Yobel’s customers.
Durand explains, “One of the principal challenges was creating a tool that would serve both internal and external clients. We have presence in practically all of Latin America. Our customers all have their own technology environments, their own configurations, and way of doing things. This can present a huge barrier to knowledge management.”
Yobel addressed that challenge by deploying the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Although the company was already familiar with programs like Microsoft Office Excel® spreadsheet software and Microsoft Office Word for everyday tasks, it began exploring Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007 to solve some of its more difficult challenges. “We used Office Excel for some of our data needs. What we hadn’t done was decide how to replace all the different ways we were receiving input with a single electronic form.”
Automated Data Collection
Yobel implemented the Office InfoPath 2007 information gathering program to automate the creation of critically important assessments. Using parameters established in Office SharePoint Server 2007and Office InfoPath 2007, surveys are now tailored for customers, partners, and employees. The company’s e-mail application automatically sends survey notifications at preselected intervals using InfoPath Forms Services with Windows® Workflow Foundation. Recipients can complete assessments online or via e-mail.
Automated Consolidation and Analysis
Taking automation a step further, Yobel uses the Microsoft Office system to remove the need for manual data entry, consolidation, and analysis. Yobel receives completed surveys and forms in InfoPath XML format, making it easy to process information from different data sources.
Dynamic Views and Data Visualization
After analysis, data is aggregated and displayed using templates in Office Excel 2007, making it easy for employees to prepare reports and data views without special code or custom Web pages. Workers can also use the new data visualization features in Office Excel 2007 to create robust statistics, charts, and performance dashboards, also without writing a line of code. Advanced Conditional Formatting in Office Excel 2007 makes it possible for employees to show key performance indicators through the traffic light icon set, trend icon set, and data bars. The new Microsoft Office Fluent™ user interface in the 2007 Office system makes it easier for team members to produce powerful pivot tables and charts.
The publish functionality in Excel Services and Open XML Formats offers the benefits of easily sharing workbooks in Office SharePoint Server 2007: this centralization means teams view consistent and accurate data, eliminating the confusion that comes from distributing multiple copies of the same spreadsheet. The Operational Excellence management team at Yobel uses Office Excel 2007 to review comprehensive assessment analysis.
Together, analytical features in Office Excel 2007 have made it significantly faster and easier for the company to identify and monitor trends in the data received from customers and be substantially more reactive to issues as they arise.
Real-time Access to Performance Metrics
Using Open XML, Yobel employees can produce Web-based reports for customers and partners to view performance metrics on demand. Web-based access to operational data successfully addresses the challenge of diverse technology configurations, though Yobel did not expect this benefit at the outset. “Initially this was conceived as a simple survey, and then we started to see the tremendous potential of what we could leverage from these tools,” says César Gutiérrez, IT Project Manager in charge of the solution implementation.
Interactive User Training
The entire company completed training on the 2007 Microsoft Office system in a matter of weeks, as employees found the new interface intuitive and user friendly. Yobel also significantly reduced the need for phone support by taking advantage of online resources, such as Interactive Command Reference tools available on the Office Online Web site, to lead users to newly-located menu options. To introduce the new capabilities of Office InfoPath 2007, the Operational Excellence Team and IT staff needed only brief remote training sessions—one-hour teleconferences with each country during which they interacted with teams through the application. Teams tasked with creating forms took part in a two-day training session on how to design surveys using Office InfoPath 2007 and publish them in Office SharePoint Server 2007. “Knowing Microsoft products helped workers quickly learn Office InfoPath 2007,” says Gutiérrez. “Users found our platform robust yet very familiar.”
Fast Deployment, Quick Results
Yobel began to deploy the 2007 Office system in August 2007 and were able to access detailed customer data online within two months. Espinosa reports, “Users can see data right away via Excel Services and Office SharePoint Server 2007. Previously, they’d have to wait to get it in a spreadsheet via e-mail. Now they have remote access—from any country, even from outside the domain.”
Not only was the rollout fast, it also took substantially less time than Yobel anticipated. “As we were already using Office, it not only greatly facilitated the design, methodology, and integration of the solution, it also made the deployment much faster than we had been expecting,” says Néstor Montoya, Infrastructure & Technology Manager.
Benefits
Using the 2007 Microsoft Office system and integrating Office InfoPath 2007, Office Excel 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, Yobel has reported a cost savings of U.S.$227,000 and eliminated more than 15,600 labor hours in less than a year. The solution has decreased the costs of collecting data externally, and almost doubled productivity around data collection and analysis. “Hours spent on data entry were practically reduced to zero,” says Espinosa.
The company has also increased visibility for managers to gain insight into their customers’ businesses, identify areas for improvement, and enhance decision making. Making operational data available to customers via Web browser adds tremendous value to the company’s service offering, enhancing its image and strengthening its competitive advantage in a challenging industry. “The project has clearly exceeded expectations,” says Durand. “Quickly, and with a very attractive cost-benefit ratio, we have attained what seemed very far away and intangible.”
With the success of this solution, Yobel is already looking into other business applications such as personnel evaluation and recruiting. Yobel is also exploring other features in the 2007 Office system, such as Document Information Panels, user interface elements that allow users to edit document metadata from within applications such as Office Word 2007, Office Excel 2007, and the Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007 presentation graphics program. Yobel is also testing Microsoft Office Groove® 2007 software to provide offline support and extend collaboration across borders. “All our next technology initiatives will be based on the Microsoft Business ProductivityInfrastructure Optimization Model,which providesa structured roadmap that ensuresthe success of our value proposition,” says Montoya.
Reduce Costs and Save Time
Automating the assessment process saves significant time and expense for Yobel. The 2007 Microsoft Office system enables workers to eliminate 4,700 hours dedicated to data entry annually. The time needed to analyze data in spreadsheets has decreased by 50 percent, a savings of nearly 8,000 labor hours a year. In addition to decreasing costs associated with the company’s external data collection, the solution has increased data collection and analysis productivity by 100 percent, saving Yobel more than 3,100 hours annually.
Gain Insight into Customer Operations
Yobel managers in particular have gained from having real-time insight into customers’ supply chains. It is now simple to generate reports on key performance indicators and respond to customer, partner, and employee input with relevant, timely action plans. The data visualization features in Office Excel 2007 have helped not only to identify opportunities for improvement, but also to build trust and strengthen relationships by enhancing decision making and providing customers with transparency into their operations.
Access Performance Information Online
For Yobel customers, the key benefits of the Microsoft Office system are clearly tied to the new availability of accurate, time-sensitive operational performance information. “Customers went from faxing us a spreadsheet to sending us a Web-based form and then seeing results and analysis online; that adds real value,” says Espinosa.
Customers benefit from having on-demand availability of performance information that helps them make better business decisions. “We are not giving our customers data, we are converting data into insights through dashboards, metrics, and key performance indicators—a simple model of red, green, and yellow—that will help them see the improvement of our services and their operations,” says Montoya. “That strengthens our competitive position.”
Adopt Corporate Standards, Enhance Corporate Image
Deploying the 2007 Microsoft Office system has enabled Yobel to embrace innovation for its customers, reduce operational costs associated with assessing process efficiency, and increase customer satisfaction with accurate, timely information. Customers, partners, and employees who have used Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007, Excel 2007, or SharePoint Server 2007 as part of the new assessment process have lauded Yobel for their innovative use of technology to advance business goals. “There have definitely been cost savings,” says Durand. “But having knowledge generates strategic and competitive advantages. That’s a tremendous value for our company.”
There have been unexpected rewards as well. Durand explains, “The other major benefit is bringing people within the company together through knowledge management. A key challenge that we face is establishing corporate standards. With this solution, we are achieving just that: sharing an approach to our work and a way to standardize operations. This aligns our people, whether they are at headquarters in Peru or anywhere else in Latin America.” Yobel has operations in Puerto Rico, Argentina, México, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic.
Yobel will continue to grow and evolve, with the 2007 Microsoft Office system ready to meet their needs. “The 2007 Microsoft Office system isn’t just an outfit of desktop tools; it’s an entire environment that allows us to develop much greater functionality,” concludes Durand.
Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.
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