How much risk is there in your supply chain?

If you're a manufacturer, how do you assess the risk of key suppliers failing? This Financial Times article from November 2008 tells how a British defense group met with its top 100 suppliers and asked them, point blank, to notify it about any potential financial difficulties – and how a French aerospace and defense company created a "crisis cell" team to monitor its 4,000 suppliers.

A disruption to your supply chain – leading to delayed delivery, reduced product quality, or in a worst case, the entire disruption of sales – could reduce your incoming revenue as much as slowing demand would.

Given the severity of the potential impact of a failed supplier, do you have the right tools at your disposal to help assess risk? If you're a member of a dedicated supply chain analysis team at a larger organization – or a procurement analyst at a smaller organization who's been asked to assess risk – the following reports, available in the Information OnDemand store, might be appropriate for your toolbox.

• Media Sentiment Comparison
  Look for early signs of trouble at suppliers by gauging the sentiment expressed in news stories about them. With this report, you can measure the volume of media coverage and its tone – positive, negative, or neutral – about a company and a broader, related industry. News feeds are supplied by Newstin, a source that covers 150,000 news outlets in 20 languages, and allows you navigate back to the original content.
• Credit Score Highlights
  Keep tabs on which suppliers might be at risk of bankruptcy with this report, which uses up-to-date data from D&B. It shows credit score highlights for up to five companies and allows you to compare overall credit scores, which represent the ability for companies to pay their debt within the next 90 days.
• Company Lead Generator
  Identify alternative suppliers using this model, also based on D&B data – to proactively reduce risk, or to replace a supplier that already shows signs of disruption. Use zip codes and four-digit SIC industry codes to create a list of potential suppliers. Combine it with the report above to ensure that potential suppliers have healthy credit scores.
• Competitive Model
  Use this dashboard to compare the health of two suppliers you may be deciding between – by looking at growth rate, profitability, asset utilization, and liquidity. You can drill into any of these four dimensions and track up to 20 subcategories. The continuously updated data comes from Thomson Reuters and shows the trend for the last 16 quarters.

Because all of these reports are prebuilt, you save the time and hassle of having to collect and update data on a regular basis. If you choose to subscribe to the Information OnDemand service, you can also pay a flat per-user fee, which means that you're protected against increased costs if the amount of research you need to do increases dramatically.

New version of Business Intelligence OnDemand released

Today we announced the newest version of Business Intelligence OnDemand. It's available now, and it has two key innovations:

• Content creation and development environment - it's a hosted environment in which you can build and maintain data warehouse components, reports, and analytics.
• BI OnDemand accelerator for Salesforce.com - it's an automated process that can help you create a data warehouse and deploy BI OnDemand for Salesforce.com faster than before.

You can read the full press release at SAP.com.

Measuring your PR impact and benchmarking against your competition

Once again, we find ourselves in a recession. Naturally, the reaction of any business is to review all expenses and ask business owners to justify the existence of all projects. Public Relation is no exception to this exercise. With a median budget to purchase PR-related products of $45,800 which shoots up to $177,500 for companies with more than 1,000 employees (2006 State of the PR Profession Opinion Survey – PRSA and Bacon’s), the PR department could appear to be a good place to find savings. Hence, PR professionals have to be ready to justify the impact of their actions. However, only 6% of PR budgets are dedicated to measure and evaluate the impact PR strategy which automatically requires solutions to be affordable yet comprehensive and global in nature.

The PR solution offered in Information OnDemand a very good match for this rather urgent need. Priced at only $150 per widget, the solution is based on news provided by Newstin, a news media company that aggregates and codes more than 1 million articles daily that come from more than 150,000 information sources in 10 languages and 14 country editions.
Combined with visually pleasing and intuitive BI technology from SAP Business Objects, the result is a quite compelling solution for companies of all sizes that can deliver tangible results within seconds.


The Information OnDemand PR solution offers 5 widgets. This first widget proposes to track sentiment analysis for a given company over time. After entering the name of a company in a simple search box, the end user is asked to confirm the identification of the company from a simple list which includes all companies mentioned in the press along with the chosen company.
The widget opens up and offers a graph counting all media mentions broken into positive, negative and neutral tone. The default language is English but end users can choose to analyze media coverage from 10 languages including all western European languages as well as Chinese and Arabic.
At the click of a box, the count can become a % box clearly allowing the end user to see the how break down of positive and negative mention evolves over time; last 10 days, last 10 weeks and last 10 months and tie it back to annual PR events.
PR professionals can instantly justify their existence by answering simple questions as how many articles mention a given company, in which terms, and for which topics. The tool can also be used to monitor reputation and damage control in time of crises. Compiling the same information by hand would be hugely time consuming and certainly not as complete unless of course you speak 10 languages.

Another key feature includes a table next to the graph allowing identifying the news sources, the key topics as well as the occurrence of key words in the article. This is a pretty handy tool to get a high level overview of the topics addresses in the media and tie it back to positive, negative and neutral converage.


A second widget allows performing a side by side comparison of 2 companies. In a heart beat, end users can see which company obtains the most coverage in a given language as well as understand which company has the highest positive and negative mix at any given point. This is a pretty critical tools in these time of recessions when companies do not necessary have good news to announce and need to exercise damage control.

In times of recession, the whole industry has bad news to announce so it becomes essential to be able to benchmark your company’s image to the entire industry. This is exactly what a third widget allows end users to perform. After choosing from a comprehensive and granular list of industry, a graph displays the mix of positive and negative coverage side by side allowing the end user to determine if his or her company is fairing above or under par in terms of positive media coverage versus the entire industry. If the recession affects the entire industry, it is always a good idea to appear as the industry leader that will survive.

Completed by 2 additional widgets that allow navigating back to the news content, the Information OnDemand PR solution offers all the advantages of a pure SaaS offering. It literally takes 5 minutes for an end user to get a username and password and start working on the PR widgets. There is no software installation, no IT intervention; a simple credit card will work, unless of course you are already an IOD subscriber in which case the PR solution is part of your regular core subscription.

Bertrand Fougnies; Bertrand.fougnies@sap.com

Using Information OnDemand to Guage the Financial Health of Customers, Prospects and Competitors

Current economic conditions are impacting every business however the underlying financial health of individual companies varies dramatically and determines players’ ability to execute and leverage opportunities in this market. Insight into the financial health of customers, prospects, and competitors enables you to prioritize and focus effectively, optimize returns, and enter conversations with valuable background information.

Several Information OnDemand analytics leverage Thomson Reuters' vast trove of financial data to provide direct access to specific financial metrics and for thousands of global companies.

I looked at Icelandic banks with a Canadian one in the Margin and Revenue Comparison model. Looking at this data on a quarterly basis, one notices inflamed and variable revenue, income and margin figures for the Icelandic banks relative to the Canadian one.

When viewed on an annual basis, the contrast between the entities performance is even more dramatic. Complete 2008 data is not yet available but we know where the exponential growth of these Icelandic companies has led.


I also explored companies using the Profitability analytic and the Growth analytic. Unsurprisingly, wildly oscilating margins are displayed for Iceland's Glitnir bank relative to Canada's Royal Bank.


The opportunity to have this type of information available for any company of your choice in advance of conversations with them is clearly useful and, quite possibly, invaluable. Whether researching disparate prospects or looking for pertinent indicators from known stars and dogs within a given sector, this data gives you an edge.

OnDemand for Uncertain Times

The last 2 weeks have been a roller coaster in financial markets. Every business is affected by these changes. Many are taking a look at how to keep costs down and weather this storm. Businesses are investing only in what is most critical. Solutions of uncertain benefit are not considered.

So, what do you do? You may be in the market for a business intelligence solution. It’s already been determined by the business that providing metrics and information is key to the health of the business. However, investment, even in critical areas, may not be possible to the budget level originally given to the project. You may envision having an on-premise BI server but at this time, you can’t afford the upfront costs for hardware, training, consulting costs to install and configure, and the software license fees.

Enter Business Intelligence OnDemand. With a SaaS BI solution, these upfront costs don’t exist. It means you can be securely sharing reports and dashboards with stakeholders in as long as it takes to get signed up. An implementation time is only as long as it takes to build your first critical report or dashboard.

And, if, after a year or two, you want to go to on-premise BI solution, you can do it. You can download your content (e.g. reports and dashboards) and put that content on an internal Business Objects server. No other SaaS BI vendor can offer this flexibility.

How can you use Information OnDemand to Mash-up your Company's Data with Industry Data?

Information OnDemand provides a very compelling solution, but what isn’t evident is one of the most useful features that happens outside of the platform. If you have a Crystal Reports Developer on staff it is easy to create a great report which joins your corporate internal data with industry data from the OnDemand platform.

To do this simply find the report in the Information OnDemand store which you are interested in and subscribe or add it to your InfoManager. Once in your InfoManager download the report to your desktop. You can then open that report in Crystal Reports XI R2 and refresh it. (Note: all parameters have the correct defaults filled in for you except for your OnDemand password.) You can see it is fetching the most current copy of this data. You can now add your internal datasource to this report easily by creating a new connection and simply dropping the data tables into your report.

This feature can be extended even further. Did you know that with every report subscription you have access to the complementary web service for use in our tools? You can access the information for this web service by clicking on the Properties Action of any Report in your InfoManager. For example, you could merge the Revenue by Competitor Report with the Media Coverage Sentiment Analysis Report with your internal data into your own Crystal Report or Xcelsius document.

Who’s Implementing BI Now?

This is the question many CIOs will be asking the heads of their respective business units this year and even more so in the next. Why you ask? SaaS BI or specifically Business Intelligence from Business Objects OnDemand is making it possible for the Business User to implement a BI solution without having to bid for the next open spot on the IT project roster.

A recent customer who is a leader in pain prescription monitoring required a solution that would enable them to effectively monitor whether or not their sales were achieving drug sample rate goals for each territory. As you can imagine, for a prescription monitoring company this information is vital to their business and helps them continue to be a leader in their industry. Their sales organization uses salesforce and imports the drug sample data into their SaaS CRM. The challenge was how to get their sales managers into the habit of monitoring their sample rates on a daily basis to ensure the sample rate goals were being achieved for each territory. At the time their current reporting solution ran too slow to produce this information so sales managers were either monitoring their rates on an infrequent basis or not at all.

Sales Operations was the business unit that quickly put into place a reporting solution that consisted of a sample rate dashboard showing each sales manager’s actual sample rates against their target goal. The key to the dashboard was not just the visibility into the sample rates but that it ran quickly and was live (on-demand) information. The solution comprised of Crystal Reports to design the dashboard report and Business Objects OnDemand application crystalreports.com to process and deliver the report quickly and securely within the salesforce portal.

With the evolution of Business Intelligence OnDemand from Business Objects undertaking a BI project can now be done by a Sales Administrator, Marketing Director, Operations Manager, Finance Administrator and the list goes on. To get more information on how and why that is I encourage you explore our site and turn on BI in your unit.