By Fernando Martinez-Campos, Senior Consultant
photo by D'Arcy Norman
In my last post I introduced the concept of top-down requirements gathering. In this post I'll discuss our work with a client where we put it into action.
Our client was an electronics home entertainment manufacturer that partnered with distributors to sell their products through both the Internet and brick and mortar stores. Increasing their sales and market share was a top priority. But they had a problem: too many products were returned for repair multiple times. This company established the reduction of product returns as a core corporate improvement metric.
Since Product Quality was now a top priority, BI efforts were enlisted to fulfill this goal. I was involved with a team that analyzed the business process and identified analytic needs that could pinpoint where the quality problems occurred: where they manufacturing process defects, material problems, or labor errors?
We identified each phase of the product life cycle: Sourcing, Purchasing, Manufacturing, Distribution, Sales, and Returns. From each of these phases, we analyzed the related data subject areas in detail, looking for some insight as to where defects were surfacing. Since the Returns area was of prime importance, there was a lot of focus on these types of questions:
- What was being returned (product models)?
- Where was it getting inspected and fixed (repair centers)?
- When was it returned and how long it took to fix (time to repair)?
- Who repaired the item (technical personnel, also what repair station)?
- Why did this problem occur (conclusions that can be reached)?
These were the classical Five W’s that can be used in the analysis process. You can use these questions as a starting point of any BI requirements gathering. It addresses BI Analysis from different perspectives:
- The Business Area being analyzed.
- Inputs and outputs of the process flow.
- Time measurements of the steps in the process.
- People and equipment involved in the process.
These different perspectives ensure that the business problem is addressed in a more complete fashion. From analyzing time, process, people and material measurements, the users will be able to better pinpoint the areas where defects are occurring. A flow oriented model is easy to understand since it follows a product through its lifecycle. It also depicts clear handoff points between manufacturing areas, with inputs, durations and outputs for each step.
Taking the top-down approach and subdividing a business processes into phases is one of the classic approaches of BI requirements gathering, but there are many more techniques that we will explore in subsequent posts!
Fernando Martinez-Campos is a senior consultant with Baseline Consulting and expert in data architecture, data interchange standards, legacy coexistence strategies, and reference architectures templates for infrastructure, applications and databases.
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