Zodiac Aerospace, headquartered in Plaisir (Paris), France, has about 35,000 employees at more than 100 sites around the globe. With annual revenues of more than 5 billion Euros, the company has grown significantly, through a number of acquisitions, in recent years. These acquisitions have enabled Zodiac Aerospace to strengthen its position as a major participant in the aircraft cabin industry and to become the worldwide leader in commercial aircraft seats.
Zodiac Aerospace is utilizing several Infor Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms, which are designed to meet the unique business requirements of manufacturers in the aerospace industry, which helps the company manage the core and supporting processes in its business.
As a result of the company’s organic growth and acquisition activity, it formed several business units operating over multiple ERP systems. Several legacy BI systems were in place, including a central BI platform and enterprise data warehouse. However, this system requires Zodiac Aerospace’s Central IT team to manage this complex process, serving as the central clearinghouse for reporting requests from the business units.
Zodiac Aerospace needed responsiveness to its capability in BI and Analytics that would provide self-service analytics to business units across the enterprise – thus reducing the business units’ reliance on central reporting – and enable a faster, more efficient order-fulfilment process. It also wanted a cloud-based solution, which would support development and usage anywhere (regardless of geography) and provide easy sharing of insights.
The company explored using desktop discovery solutions, but those solutions were not able to prepare data for analysis, in an integrated fashion, nor connect/analyze data on an enterprise scale. Consequently, they sometimes produced inconsistent reporting that undermined trust in the decision-making process.
Enter Birst’s networked business analytics platform. With the platform’s patented, Automated Data Refinement (ADR) technology and self-service capabilities, Zodiac Aerospace’s business units are able to prepare and analyze data quickly, reducing their reliance on Central IT and identifying issues in the customer order process. For example, the Birst solution helped identify customer orders, which, at times, were not synchronized with their customer’s system. This capability reduces the risk of missed shipments, improving on-time delivery.
Birst’s networked business analytics platform provided quick-to-market, added-value content. Business users could generate reports in minutes instead of weeks and boost efficiencies across the entire supply chain. By networking analytic instances (spaces) together, the Birst platform enables Zodiac Aerospace to quickly deliver specific content and shorten its time-to-market – and avoid the administrative hassle of people and business units working with data in isolation.
Further, the Birst platform offered a fully integrated, automated analytics data store and integrated data preparation capabilities – along with rapid and reliable connectivity to the Infor M3 platform and other systems.
According to Norman Hussey, Director of Business Analytics at Zodiac Aerospace, “Birst’s fully contained data store and data warehouse is a great value. Data connectivity is also very powerful and simple, which gives us faster time-to-market.”
Hussey also noted that the desktop discovery systems, which Zodiac Aerospace evaluated, “needed back-end data preparation done before they could start. Birst has that full process integrated. Most importantly, Birst’s fully integrated stack – in the cloud – enables you to focus on delivering what your organization needs, without worries about memory, disks, support, and backups.”
Brad Peters, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Birst, said, “With Birst’s networked business analytics platform, we believe Zodiac Aerospace can continue to achieve greater levels of operational excellence, reduce risks and maintain strong service-level agreements with its customers. Birst creates a network of analytics that connects every part of the organization through trusted insights.”
