Plug into intelligence

Briggs & Stratton's Grant Felsing on how to support executive decision making with advanced analytics by Alison Bolen

As the world's largest manufacturer of air-cooled gasoline engines, Briggs & Stratton powers lawn equipment, pressure washers and generators for thousands of original equipment manufacturers around the world – including Campbell Hausfeld, John Deere, Craftsman and Toro. But when it comes to powering advanced data warehousing and state-of-the-art business intelligence, Briggs & Stratton turns to SAS.

According to Grant Felsing, the company's decision support manager, SAS takes data from dozens of operational sources throughout the company and uses that information to tell a story. With SAS, Felsing's team has created a series of business intelligence applications that include:

• An executive management system that presents high-level business intelligence in a scorecard format. Executives select and modify reports, so they can compare current results to those from a year ago or quickly recognize when an unusual or unexpected event has occurred.
• A decision support application that provides a range of metrics for major product lines. Sales managers use this system to understand how well their products are selling around the country. Manufacturing supervisors use the information to optimize production levels based on customer inventory and demand. Supply chain managers compare inventory levels with sales and shipment levels to align their goals with company expectations.
• A quality improvement application that monitors quality trends, facilities operations and failure rates for each Briggs & Stratton engine series. This sophisticated solution automatically flags potential areas of concern and sends e-mails to notify managers and executives when problems may be emerging.

sascom: Let's start with a description of how SAS fits into your IT infrastructure.

Felsing: Even though we have disparate pieces of software that actually operate the business, including SAP R/3 and Oracle, SAS has really stepped up to the plate for us to make our system complete. We use SAS exclusively for our business intelligence endeavors.

sascom: Can you clarify what you mean when you say SAS steps up to the plate for Briggs & Stratton?

Felsing: In that statement, I was talking about the help from SAS that goes beyond our use of the software and the training. SAS partnered with us for a solution that includes best practices, reasonable options to consider and a complete setup of the operating environment. The SAS team knew that SAS was just one piece of the larger puzzle, and they helped with the entire platform every step of the way – not just with the SAS installation. The SAS consulting team provided extraordinary assistance, and members still call sometimes to check in with me or to give me the latest updates. It’s this kind of frontline support from SAS that has developed into a long and very positive relationship with my company over the years.

sascom: Many companies find it difficult to justify SAS in an SAP environment. Tell us about your use of SAP at Briggs and how SAS fits into the picture?

Felsing: SAP provides one of the better transactional backbones out there, but business intelligence and information delivery require agility – something that a fixed operational system is incapable of delivering. SAP is designed around operational support and a fixed operational environment. SAS is one of the most agile and flexible platforms for business intelligence. SAS and SAP both provide value to what they do best. The two in combination, taking advantage of the strengths of each, is truly the best value proposition for Briggs & Stratton.

sascom: What insights can you provide for developing a BI strategy in a manufacturing environment that is driven by an SAP ERP environment?

Felsing: Business intelligence is the discipline of combining operational data with business rules to produce strategic information. The key to that environment is having the agility to allow the development of those rules to correctly tell the story. Providing this agility is where SAP fails and SAS shines.

sascom: Tell us how SAS analyzes your field service data, warranty claims receipts and maintenance information to monitor product quality and reliability.

Felsing: We use current and historical warranty data to monitor and identify failure patterns. SAS helps us identify those patterns and keep track of them. For example, we can track the changes or trends of a particular issue over the last two to three months by monitoring the slope of change, which indicates the escalation of a potential problem. When the program detects a significant change, an alert is generated. Our product engineering managers receive the alert, so they can investigate further and take action quickly. SAS helps us be more preventative in our approach and helps us come up with the right fixes. Most importantly, SAS lets us recognize and address problems long before they would be found at the plant level. In fact, we've had this system in place for around 18 months, and we have already seen significant positive results. Even our executive vice president has recognized the success of our system, and he's not one to give out praise lightly.

sascom: Can you describe some of those early results in more detail?

Felsing: Early-warning alerts can help managers address potential concerns before they affect thousands of customers. In fact, our manufacturing team has already used this application to identify and address a million-dollar quality issue. Identifying that one problem at such an early stage in production may have saved us more than $1 million alone, and that's just the tactical savings. Without SAS, our managers wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint the problem for at least four more months.

sascom: What other benefits have you seen, beyond the tactical savings?

Felsing: Finding problems early not only helps the bottom line, but it helps you with your entire customer satisfaction level. And there really isn't anything more important to our company. The strategic benefits of this application – including fewer warranty claims and enhanced customer satisfaction – can be even more important than the immediate financial gains.

sascom: What plans do you have for SAS in the future?

Felsing: We're planning to upgrade our SAS warranty analysis solution to include purchase data from our service dealer network, specifically for particular replacement parts. By monitoring dealer purchasing patterns, we can see variations, find out why a change took place, determine what time the problem took place and consider other factors. This will help us recognize field issues long before warranty claims are submitted and, again, it will help alert managers about potentially significant issues well before they escalate to a dramatic level.

sascom: What are your plans for SAS®9?

Felsing: We are looking forward to using SAS®9 and delivering the new business intelligence capabilities to all of our users across the company. I'm really excited about the SAS Information Delivery Portal. To bring everything together on the desktop so seamlessly will be a very big deal to us. Also, SAS Web Report Studio will allow users previously unfamiliar with SAS to write and execute their own SAS reports. And finally, the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office within SAS®9 will allow our Microsoft junkies to use SAS wizards with Excel as the front end. It gives them the strength and power of SAS from within their familiar Microsoft applications.

sascom: In conclusion, how would you summarize the benefits you’ve received from SAS?

Felsing: SAS helps my team focus its energy on business intelligence as opposed to operational reporting. SAS allows us to extract and mine data, intelligently store it, and freeze unique business rules on top of the data, so we can provide the intelligence that makes our executives' eyes light up.