Case studies

Renson is a Belgian manufacturing company internationally active and committed to “Creating healthy spaces”. With a central focus on R&D and innovation within this market, Renson has a broad range of product categories including ventilation systems, sun blinds & a variety of outdoor solutions.

NHV decided in 2019 to switch their accounting software to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

“Often companies have a tough time to get the right Business insightsafter a Microsoft Dynamics NAV/Business Central ERP implementation.”Exclusive, modern outdoor furniture: this is the field of distinction of Belgian design house Tribù. In the early nineties, Tribù was a pioneer of the philosophy that the terrace and garden should be extensions of the house.

Staying relevant to its readers is key to Roularta’s competitive strategy, but its existing technologies didn’t offer the flexibility and speed demanded by the data analytics platform it planned. The company worked with Microsoft partner element61 and Microsoft FastTrack for Azure, executing with a swath of Microsoft Azure solutions to build a highly secure, fast data analytics platform in just a few months.

In a push to reduce the number of folders sent and to determine the target audiences efficiently, element61 ran a project to induce and leverage machine learning: more specifically, a clustering algorithm to continuously help us divide customers into different target groups.

The key objective of this project was the replacement of the existing CPM solution. The new CPM solution had to run in the cloud, for reasons of flexibility and accessibility.

A former, old Data Warehouse solution existed but was too strongly SAP focused and based on SAP BW. Instead of upgrading an obsolete technology platform, Carmeuse decided to replace it by a newer modern architecture that addresses all the short comings in the old setup.

Organization De Lijn is the publicly-owned company responsible for the preparation, planning and execution of all public transport in Flanders by bus or tram. It employs approximately 7.000 employees.

OrganizationMeat&More is a fast-growing company in the food industry specialising in meat and ready-to-eat products. Meat&More works end-to-end and is active from production to retail-sales. They have two commercial channels:

Persoonsvolgende Financiering (PVF) Met de komst van de Persoonsvolgende Financiering (PVF) wordt een nieuwe manier gehanteerd om subsidies in de gehandicaptenzorg toe te kennen.

The Customer   Fedrus International is an independent Belgian group, active in the distribution of roof and façade materials for the European market.

The goal of the IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) application was to facilitate and support the Annual Operating Plan process with limited data entry.

Tot voor kort stond het Finance departement van Napoleon Games nergens: de boekhouding was een cash boekhouding, zonder maandelijkse afsluiting, zonder consolidatie, intercompany afstemming, …

Toen Waterland Private Equity besliste om in Napoleon Games te investeren, trof de participatiemaatschappij bij de afdeling finance voornamelijk braakliggend terrein aan. Een investeerder als Waterland houdt niet van een blinde gok, maar stuurt bij voorkeur aan de hand van objectieve KPI’s. CFO Griet Vandenheede kreeg de opdracht finance grondig te hervormen en te professionaliseren.

Atlas Copco develops solutions that create value for customers in more than 180 countries. Atlas Copco’s expertise is in compressors, vacuum solutions, construction.

Aminolabs is the supplier of many internationally renowned companies in sports and health nutrition. With their combination of innovative concepts and a flexible yet high-quality production they produce private label products that are convincing. Consumers around the world enjoy the products that are developed and produced at their facility in Hasselt, Belgium. 

ISK Biosciences Europe brings several new agricultural products to serve a growing, global market. These agricultural products can be roughly divided in 3 product categories:

This specific project dealt with replacing De Lijn's existing Planning & Budgeting process in MS Excel by a fully automated and workflow-based solution. Following a thorough software selection process, element61 helped De Lijn select Cognos Planning as the key component to the solution. In a matter of a few months, the entire budgeting (begroting) cycle of De Lijn was implemented in this solution, enabling them to better follow up the budget process.

element61 has been involved in the Tessenderlo Group BI program since 2007. After the definition of a Business Intelligence Roadmap, a new SAP Business Warehouse 7 deployment was executed. The current SAP Business Warehouse includes data from multiple SAP source systems and covers functional areas.

The fast growth of Thomas Cook in Belgium over the recent years has lead to an increased demand in better predictability of its performance and better managing of its costs. In order to enable reliable financial reporting and spending more time on analyzing results versus assembling them, Thomas Cook is automating its budgeting and reporting process with Cognos Planning. element61 is responsible for the requirements gathering, application design and implementation.

The Corporate USG People Data Warehouse is based on multitude data sources (back- and front-office). The decision support system is used by virtually all management levels in the organization in order to get a complementary overview of the performance of the USG Group. USG country management can retrieve financial and operational details on their country performance.

Echo relied on element61 to play a key role in the definition and execution of their Performance Management strategy. element61's activities started with jointly defining a Performance Management roadmap, that formed the basis for the implementation of both a BI and CPM solution. This project was executed in very close collaboration with the Echo team and has received substantial industry recognition with the BI Vision Award and the Best Finance Team Award.

The objectives of SAP BPC at Deceuninck were to integrate the financial consolidation and the monthly management.

Through the years, Jetair has been building a large data warehouse containing all their operational data to focus on the operational performance of the company. The next step was integrating all the financial data and building a companywide Planning solution to come to a complete closed-loop Performance Management environment. Hence a Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting-project was started.

Biobest was experiencing difficulties and decided to seek the assistance of element61 to address their BI needs.

Reynders Labels was looking for a BI solution to replace their inadequate Excel reporting solution. element61 built a Microsoft SQL Server based BI solution for them, in a Software-as-a-Service ("Cloud") architecture. The scope of the project was to provide a reporting and analysis environment focusing on the production data of their printing presses.

Securitas Belgium started to build out its enterprise-wide BI architecture in 2010, together with element61. In view of the complexity of the (mostly custom developed) operational systems, it used to be a major challenge for Securitas to provide correct, user-friendly and performant reporting and analysis to its information workers.

Over recent years, De Lijn has deployed a large scaled data warehouse environment, currently serving over 300 users. The Business Intelligence environment on top of the data warehouse is used for reporting & analysis on subject areas like personnel behavior (driver productivity, employee sickness behavior, overtime worked, employee scheduling), ticketing information (both for operational and marketing purposes), vehicle operations (GPS data, driven kilometers, maintenance, fuel consumption, vehicle cost per vehicle age), financial data (budgets versus actual, subsidies from the government, money going to subcontracting…) and vehicle road accidents.

element61 has delivered a comprehensive BI project on behalf of Vandeputte Safety. The main challenge in this project was to extract data from an SAP ECC 6.0 ERP system, without using the intermediate SAP Business Warehouse layer, using a Microsoft SSIS solution. This project has been very successfully, delivered in time and on budget, serving a business audience of 100+ end users.

In 2011, OCMW Brugge started with a new data warehouse. The focus of the first iteration was HR reporting & analysis based on data from the operational HR & personnel application InfoHos. The application contains personnel information like contracts, work place, work regime, activity center, absence & illness and a payroll engine. All the information is extracted and transformed to the data warehouse, where the information is enriched with budget information and transformed into FTE-based calculations, given varying working regimes. Several types of reports are created on top of the data warehouse.

As their business expands and grows beyond their traditional services of auction, through the addition of value-added services such as development of new fruit species, fruit storage, packaging etcetera, Veiling Haspengouw requirements for reliable and timely management information also grew. They quickly discovered that their existing reporting solutions, mainly Excel-based, had significant shortcomings, and therefore they decided to look for a more stable and automated solution.

The business users of TUI Jetair were experiencing the limits of their legacy BI environment. Therefore, following an in-depth BI Roadmap by element61, it was decided to start the construction of a completely new, fully integrated, corporate BI environment. This ambitious BI program was subdivided into a number of prioritized iterations.

The financial department of Euronav was looking for a solution to manage its financial consolidation and reporting needs. The current software tool (Sigma) was not sufficient to consolidate the data and have the consolidated contribution for each Vessel. The Vessel dimension is now an integral part of the consolidation, allowing Euronav to have the contribution for each of their Vessels in the consolidated result of the Group.

After a successful project on personnel planning, KUL wanted to expand its investment in BPC by turning massive spreadsheets for budgeting purposes in a streamlined business process. After an intensive 10-day hands-on workshop period of defining requirements and creating the blueprint, an internal team of 4 persons and 3 external consultants delivered a best-in class budgeting application for the University, including forecasting possibilities.

After a successful Management Reporting project on SAP BPC, Magotteaux was transforming its BEGAAP consolidation, which was done using the software Echo (a DOS-based consolidation software), towards IFRS. The company wanted to use SAP BPC not solely for Management reporting, but aimed to integrate the MMR with the IFRS consolidation in SAP BPC. Where in the past the consolidation software gave the user the feeling of a black-box solution, SAP BPC added much more transparency to the consolidation of the financial statements.

element61 was selected by Woonhaven Antwerpen to implement the first project(s) in their comprehensive BI program. This iteration consisted in building up the foundation of their BI architecture and delivering the first 2 subject areas for data warehouse and reporting, namely "werkbonnen" (work orders) and "leegstand" (vacancy). This project was implemented from A - Z using Microsoft SQL Server 2012 technology.

This case study describes the work achieved by element61 together with and at Sita Remediation to set-up a complete Business Intelligence & Management Reporting environment.

element61 has been involved -following a BA roadmap- in assisting iMinds with building a data warehouse (based on timeXtender/SQL Server 2012) -and delivering associated Performance Dashboards- that brings together the different business domains including CRM, Finance, Project Monitoring, Human Resources and Publications.

Weber Stephen wanted to rebuild its BI environment due to the change in the European organisation structure that was planned to take place in 2014 and 2015. element61 was selected to execute this project in close collaboration with the Weber Stephen team. The project delivered a new data warehouse platform which consolidated data ensuring the "one version of the truth", streamlined reporting processes throughout Europe and more visibility on the process of loading data.

This project -executed by element61 for and with Omega Pharma corporate- set-up a central Business Analytics & reporting environment. During the project multiple new modules and new analysis domains were added and rolled out to multiple European countries.

The BI program at Isabel consist of a number of main project iterations. The first two increments concerned mainly the actual platform usage & the expected product usage by customers, next to delivering a detailed insight on the customers of Isabel in terms of various segmentations based on a complexity of business rules within a challenging context. For obvious reasons the BI program and corresponding roadmap is reviewed and thereby re-defined on a frequent basis.

The Brussels Airlines budgeting and forecasting process involved loading many different data packages into SAP-BW/IP and running a series of lengthy calculation and allocation cycles, consuming up to half a day for the cycles to end. The budgeting process also relied heavily on Microsoft Excel to fill in the gaps. The outcome was then copied to a reporting cube. The entire process was remodeled and optimized in Anaplan following a detailed business and technical blueprint of the new budgeting process.

Given the nature of its business, MSF Supply is an organization that has to deal with a lot of data. In order to optimize some of its business processes and to better serve the operational units that work in the field, MSF Supply is looking to improve its reporting and analysis capability. In order to achieve this, MSF Supply has defined a comprehensive and enterprise-wide BI initiative that includes the construction of a data warehouse, next to setting up a best-practice reporting and analysis environment.

The Customer StepStone is one of the most powerful and successful online job board site operators in Europe. Founded in Norway in 1996, they grew to over 1.100 people in 21 countries, providing tailored services, tools and processes to more than 49.000 customers. Their network accounts for more than 37 million webvisits and 310.000 job positions per month. In 2009, Axel Springer became their major stakeholder. Axel Springer is a multimedia company reknown -between others- for the newspapers Bild and Die Welt.

Mensura have based their BI architecture on the MS BI platform, including the available 3rd party extensions and improvements Targit and TimeXtender. TimeXtender is used as a data warehouse automation tool to speed up the ETL development process, whereas Targit is implemented as a user-friendly front-end – an alternative to MS Excel - on top of MS Analysis Server cubes. Mensura have selected element61 as the partner of choice for support them in all of these technologies.

This challenging project consisted in setting up in a very short timeframe and with a limited budget, the BI environment to support the new reporting regulations as of 2016 (part of the new Operational Plan). For speed of development, ESF had chosen TimeXtender as the ETL development tool and MS SQL Server 2012 for the data warehouse and the BI front end.

PwC Belgium was looking to support a closed loop planning process with a suitable tool. The current planning process involves a lot of collaborators (partners) from the company, each of them having responsibility over a business unit. With a widely spread variety of MS Excel files, this process became unmanageable and was not suited for what-if scenario’s or quick simulation possibilities. With Anaplan, the whole offline MS Excel process previously in place was replaced by a two-model based (Budget and Long Term Plan) application in the Cloud.

The goal of the Corporate DWH project on behalf of the Finance organization is to build the foundation for all future BI and CPM initiatives. The DWH will function as a central hub between all the relevant applications, such as Cognos BI, TM1 and Controller. The DWH is fed by an automated system of interface files that are sourced directly from the different ERP systems in the 100+ subsidiaries.

“Combining financial historical  data from Microsoft Dynamics NAV and new Business Central data into one common BI reporting environment”