Griffin Industries: A Practical Approach to Modernizing

Challenge
After committing to a new AS/400 platform, Griffin industries needed to salvage what it could from its fully-customized legacy applications. It decided to replace the system with a JBA system, but the new software packaged needed customizations, and Mark Schurr wanted to make the reports even better.

Solution
Griffin went in search of a business intelligence solution that could integrate with their JBA system. With the mrc-Productivity Series they found a tool that would allow them to not only customize applications, but build robust reports, and an Executive Information System among other things.

Value
Griffin not only uses mrc-Productivity Series to customize their JBA system, but they quickly realized mrc can mimic the look and feel of any other vendor application desired.

Griffin Industries:
A Practical Approach to Modernizing

Challenge

It is said that one man's trash is another man's treasure. For Kentucky-based Griffin Industries, this statement is more than a cliche. It's the heart and soul of the company's business.

Griffin is the largest independent renderer in the country. Renderers collect the waste products created by food processing companies and then recycle them for other uses. For instance, restaurant byproducts, like the used cooking oil from McDonald's deep fryers, can be collected, reprocessed and rendered into environmentally friendly fertilizers, animal feeds and ingredients for cosmetics.

According to Mark Faulhaber, Griffin's Director of Information Services (IS), rendering is one of the oldest businesses there is. "It goes back to biblical times when people would take the hides, fat and bone of animals and make candles and soaps. What Griffin brings to the business is a new management philosophy that includes growth and automating the operation to the fullest extent that makes economic sense." And with over 1,000 employees in dozens of facilities throughout the United States, automation is no small task.

Not surprisingly, Information Technology has become a major aspect of the company's growth strategy. So, when they outgrew their aging Wang system, they retained an outside consulting firm to help them search for a new platform. "They were looking at the usual things - scalability, reliability. Moreover, they wanted something that was self-managing, one that didn't require a full operator." The recommendation: AS/400.

Once committed to the new platform, Griffin was confronted with an entirely new type of recycling challenge: what to do with their legacy Wang system. "It had more than ten years of custom programming in it. Every system in there was custom designed for us and custom maintained. It was an untenable situation." They ultimately replaced it with JBA's ERP system.

Faulhaber, who comes from a mainframe and PC background, says that once the new JBA software was ready for production, it still had to be made accessible. "Our users see their systems as being whatever reports they used to get out of the old WANG. Until they can see that kind of report with the same or better quality of data on it, they're not happy with the new software."

While the JBA software provides a report writing feature, it could not match the volume or variety of needs that Griffin's users had for custom decision-support information. "We were in the throws of implementation and we still had a very large backlog of unmet needs for specialized reporting. We didn't want to manually write the RPG code or modify the JBA reports because then we end up with hundreds of programs that have to be reviewed, verified and retrofitted."

In addition to traditional reports and queries, Faulhaber says he wanted to provide his business managers new and better ways of analyzing their data. "We were also looking for an executive information system type of software. Something that we could put on other executives' desks so they can graphically see the data. It was important that they be able to get a picture of the business as represented by the new AS/400 system."

Griffin undertook a search for a Business Intelligence (BI) tool that could deliver the types of AS/400 data their users needed, when they needed it. Moreover, Faulhaber says that they wanted to ensure that their new tool was optimized for the AS/400 environment. "We were looking for something that would have minimal impact on the AS/400 while still providing live access to the AS/400 information." For this reason, they did not want a full-blown data warehousing tool. "We didn't want to do a complete copy of everything off the AS/400 onto a big server and let people access that. We didn't want to get involved with data cleansing and keeping up two systems."

Solution

After reading the trade publications, looking at vendor Web sites, viewing demos and talking to sales reps, Griffin came upon mrc-Productivity Series by Lombard-Illinois-based michaels, ross & cole. The thin-client BI tool suite provided a menu-driven interface that MIS and nontechnical users could master quickly to develop many of the applications needed, from simple queries, reports and downloads to Executive Information Systems (EIS), maintenance applications and summary files.

But Faulhaber, who is not an RPG programmer, wouldn't be satisfied with marketing claims or canned demos - he wanted proof. "mrc came out with a working prototype of the first couple screens that we were interested in for an EIS we wanted to build. Based on the strength of what we saw, we decided to contract with mrc to provide a person for a week to build a profit & loss (P & L) reporting system with us. We were able to build it in just a week."

Faulhaber says mrc's willingness to do the proof of concept clinched the deal. "We looked at another product that promised to do that sort of thing, but for a variety of reasons it failed. We tried a number of other solutions that just never seemed to get critical mass. It was a hard luck story. So, they did the proof of concept - getting a usable delivery up front before we even wrote the check - because we couldn't afford to fail."

"Drillback"

This mrc-Productivity Series "Drillback" application provides instant access to live AS/400 detail data directly from a spreadsheet. Clicking on a data cell launches the appropriate AS/400 application containing the relevant data.

The mrc-built EIS system leveraged client/server technology to automate a previously manual decision support process. "We've been in business for fifty years. So, for instance, the managers know that if there's a spike up in costs, sales, margins, etc., they've got a problem.

"Previously, business managers were provided with monthly financial spreadsheet reports produced by the accounting department. If they wanted to do a comparison of this month to last month or to a series of months, they would have to go to their desks and pull out those months' hard copy reports and do a comparison."

Faulhaber remembers that if more questions arose thereafter, getting the answers became increasingly cumbersome."If those comparisons required more information, they'd have to call accounting and request a special report showing the details behind the spreadsheet. Then, based on their conversation, accounting would have to figure out which accounts were involved, and run reports that showed the individual invoices or journal vouchers. Or the executive might call down to the plant to find out what was going on. If the plant manager didn't have the information, he would have to look through his paper work to figure it out."

mrc-Productivity Series enabled Griffin to attack this efficiency problem with the help of a "Drillback" program that links the monthly spreadsheet reports directly to the corresponding live, detail data on the AS/400. "The first half of the system - the back office half that nobody sees - consolidates the relevant AS/400 data, extracts it and downloads it directly into a spreadsheet via a CSV file. So when users log on in the morning they see a Windows short cut to an Excel spreadsheet called "Monthly P & L." They double click on that to bring up the spreadsheet. It has tabs for each region. The top row shows the clients. The left margin shows the various cost items with subtotals and other analysis information."

Users launch mrc-Productivity Series reports from their desktop by clicking an icon. For optimum customization, runtime selection criterion can be added before the AS/400 data is downloaded.

Value

In and of itself, the information on the spreadsheet is as ordinary as it gets. But, says Faulhaber, once they AS/400-enabled the spreadsheet with mrc-Productivity Series, it gave managers a more efficient way to analyze data. "If you're interested in detail behind "Cost of Sales" for a plant, for instance, you click once on that cell, go up to the "Menu" drop-down window and click on "Drilldown." The system automatically goes out to the AS/400, launches the appropriate AS/400 application, and opens a new screen containing the cost of goods sold information."

The application doesn't stop there. "Then you can drilldown yet another time to look at individual account balances, and from there, into the accounts themselves to see the individual transactions."

Beyond making AS/400 data available to users right from Excel, Faulhaber also used mrc-Productivity Series to build easy-to-use Executive Information Systems (EIS) for graphical access to decision-support data. "We now have the ability to look at year-to-date and historical data in the form of bar charts. One, for example, shows fleet expenses for a given plant last year, with this year's expenses in another chart superimposed over the first."

Faulhaber says the new application provided the other users the type of data they had hoped for. "They liked it. Their first reaction was, 'What is this?' When we went through it they said, 'Oh, this is neat. We want this and this and this, too.' The tool gives us a growing type of capability."

Indeed, in addition to happier users, Faulhaber reports that the Drillback application is netting other valuable benefits. "It saves the accountants time in creating and distributing the reports in the first place. It saves the executive from having to find reports and sift through them because they're right there on the desktop. And it gives us the historical trend analysis that we never had before. In sum, the system gives us access to the information in a convenient and understandable method."

Overcoming PC Limitations

These days, it's popular to extol the virtues of PC-based Local Area Networks (LAN's) and Wide Area Networks (WAN's). But, as Faulhaber recently discovered, they are not always the best answer. "Another user came to me asking if I could help her set up a spreadsheet on a WAN that all plants could access and share. It would house an array of information on the trucking companies they all do business with like the type of equipment they use, contact information, the regions served, etc. When I asked why they wanted a spreadsheet, he said it had to be set up quickly but IS had a big backlog, so a spreadsheet was the only thing they all knew how to use."

Although Faulhaber could have delivered what the users requested, he knew a PC-based spreadsheet solution was not ideal. "Say two people wanted to work on the spreadsheet at the same time - you in Florida, me in Kentucky. If I got in first, I win. You'd get a message saying the file's in use by another user. Would you like to continue in 'read only' mode?" If you didn't read the message and just clicked on "Yes," when you go to save you'd have to save it to your PC, because it won't let you save it to the WAN."

Indeed, Faulhaber says the awkward file-sharing conventions of Excel can make true enterprise-strength sharing of data very difficult. "If you can't get into the document, you're sitting there wondering, 'Who's using it, when will they be done with it, and when can I get into it? You'll also wonder if the data might have changed during the time you used it."

Value

Faulhaber knew that because the enterprise data his users needed was residing on the AS/400, an AS/400-based maintenance application was the more appropriate solution. Never having built one before, this would be an ideal test of mrc-Productivity Series's end user-friendliness. "I sat down and spent a little time with the users, talking about what they needed. They drew up some screens and reports. About four hours later I turned over a database with maintenance screens that allowed them to do their own input along with each plant. And while the application was different then their original expectation, they got a working program without an extended wait. And it wasn't subject to the kind of problems you can have with Excel."

Griffin uses mrc-Productivity Series to customize their JBA system. mrc applications can mimic the look and feel of any vendor application desired.

Faulhaber also delivered two reports with the application enabling the users to access the information from the maintenance database.

Significantly, the IS staff added the reports and maintenance application into a standard JBA screen the users were already familiar with. By doing this, they wouldn't be subjected to the delay and frustration of having to learn a new environment. "We took those reports and that database maintenance application and added them into a utilities screen in JBA where people work with other fleet information."

Faulhaber explains why having the ability to "retrofit" his JBA system with custom applications and reports built by mrc-Productivity Series was very important."In an ideal world, you wouldn't want to change any of the JBA functionality, but simply write queries and reports around the 'edges' that provide the needed customized information. Then we would be able to take our upgrades from JBA as they come out, drop them in, and recompile our mrc applications. mrc-Productivity Series helps us write the programs that users want. It lets us work with them and show them a working prototype quickly. You need to be responsive and to strike while the need is still felt."