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LUXURY WINE AND SPIRITS IMPORTER Moet Hennessy USA operates in over 50 markets using a performance indicator system that each employee can easily access. BPM Magazine spoke with Laurel Schechter, the company's Cognos business intelligence manager, and Wayne Walsh, director of commercial management, who have one thing to say to finance pros who are considering performance management software: "Invest!"
BPM Magazine: What software does Moet Hennessy use for performance management?
Wayne Walsh: We operate on SAP; that's our global platform. In terms of a lot of the planning work, the finance guys are running Essbase Planning software published by Hyperion. That's where all the planning and consolidation in our head office is done. For performance analytics, we use an internally developed portal called MH Biz, which retrieves data from our Cognos BI system.
Laurel Schechter: That's where all of the reporting comes out of. The data is extracted from SAP and other third-party vendor systems and sent to our data warehouse. We extract it through the enterprise planning module in Cognos, as well as other Cognos products, and then supply reports to the business with that data.
BPM: Can you describe the various kinds of information that you feed into the Cognos system and where they come from?
Walsh: It's pretty much all of the operational volumes: sales, open orders, and what we call "depletions" in the wine and spirits industry. We sell to a distributor and that's our sale, and when the distributor sells to the retailer, or nightclub, or liquor store, that's a depletion for us. That's how we measure the health of our business - by what goes from the distributor to the retailer.
BPM: Is that manually entered into Cognos? Where does that come from?
Walsh: There's a data provider called BDN, Beverage Data Network, which collects information from 99 percent of the distributors in the U.S., so virtually every single distributor in every state, bar maybe five.
Schechter: The distributor sends the information to Beverage Data Network and we get feeds from them every single night for whatever the distributor sends to them. We put that into our data warehouse, and then that data is put into Cognos and married with the data that gets entered in the enterprise-planning...