The Information Dashboard
What you actually see on your desktop pales in comparison to the hidden effort—80% of the complexity lies beneath the surface. All of the tasks listed above require planning, organization, coordination, scheduling and solid project management. When comparing proposals or considering a "build vs. buy" decision for deploying a dashboard, it is imperative to ensure that the entire scope of the project is considered.
Florida Rock Institutes Customer Self-Service Dashboards
Founded in 1945, Florida Rock Industries, Inc., is one of the nation’s leading producers of construction aggregates, ready-mixed concrete, concrete block, Portland cement and pre-stressed concrete. The company is also at the forefront of technology in the construction materials industry.
When Florida Rock receives a customer order, it assigns a "ticket" to each request for materials. The ticket acts as the proof of delivery. It is signed by the customer when the shipment is received and scanned into Florida Rock’s electronic document retrieval system. Once the signed ticket enters the system, Florida Rock adds the associated customer order to an invoice. There can be one ticket or a hundred tickets on an invoice, so tying the ticket back to the invoice quickly and efficiently is critical for providing the kind of quality customer service for which Florida Rock is known. The company can field hundreds of calls per week from its more than 8,000 customers looking for information regarding their invoices. The process involved a customer going through a telephone answering service to reach the correct person, who would then query an Oracle database or Florida Rock’s electronic document retrieval system to get to the needed information. This image or copy would then be emailed, faxed or mailed to the customer. Florida Rock also saw the need to make it more efficient both for its customers and for its credit and accounts receivables (AR) departments, who spent several hours a day just supplying lost copies of documents.
Addressing the Challenge
The solution involved a creative way to use the Noetix Dashboard as a customer self-service tool. Instead of having to call for information, customers are able to sign on to a secure system that takes them directly to a custom-tailored Noetix Dashboard. It shows them their AR buckets; allows them to view their most recent 50 open invoices and all the associated tickets, and lets them see receipts or checks that have been posted to their accounts. Finally, it gives them a list of local Florida Rock locations if they need to do more business. Essentially, Florida Rock’s customers are getting a great deal of information about their business in a matter of seconds.
In addition, customers can link directly from their invoices to Florida Rock’s electronic document retrieval system and pull out a PDF with the exact image of the document, or drill down into the tickets that made up that shipment or particular invoice, as well as make a copy of their most current statement.
The Noetix Dashboard provides Florida Rock customers with a self-service tool to facilitate a more efficient business partnership. It is much easier for them to monitor their accounts and ensure their invoices are paid on time, cutting back on overdue payments. "Our customers require that all of the signed tickets be filed," said Dave DeVore, manager, application development, Florida Rock. "If one ticket is misplaced and there is no proof of delivery, payment is withheld on an invoice that could be worth several thousand dollars. The easy-to-use Noetix Dashboard will help shorten the payment cycle by giving customers immediate access to all of the tickets and invoices associated with each account. We want our customers to have control over their businesses and get the information they’re after in a timely manner. Logging into these dashboards is certainly a lot quicker and easier than calling, going through the various levels, and then waiting for a fax or image to come through."
In addition to the customer self-service tool, Florida Rock uses Noetix Dashboard internally. The company’s credit department staff uses a dashboard to get quick customer snapshots and access to associated statements, invoices and tickets without having to go into Oracle ERP. Florida Rock also intends to roll out dashboards to its executives in HR payroll and receivables to monitor business operations from a single, intuitive view.
Noetix provides business intelligence tools that enable more than 1,300 customers worldwide to quickly and cost-effectively access the enterprise application data they need to make important business decisions. Unlike most BI tools that require weeks of extensive manual mapping to be set up and maintained, Noetix uses patented technology to automatically discover and produce metadata based on customers’ specific implementations of Oracle Applications or Siebel CRM. For more information please visit
www.noetix.com.