Headquartered in Midland, Michigan, Dow Corning is a $6 billion global company focused on the super-versatile silicon atom. As a global leader in silicone-based sealants and adhesives, Dow Corning offers more than 7,000 products, boasts 25,000 worldwide customers, and owns nearly 4,700 active patents. The company has approximately 11,500 employees located in three dozen countries with expertise in 30-plus industries, including aviation, construction, health care, lubrication, semiconductors, and solar.

With so many products in so many industries and countries, excellent business intelligence (BI) is a must-have competency for Dow Corning. Dow Corning is a strong “no-modification” SAP customer. “If SAP makes it, we have it,” notes Jeff Duly, an enterprise architect focused on BI for Dow Corning and project lead for the company’s BI transformation. Back in the mid-nineties, Dow Corning was one of the first four companies to partner with SAP in adopting SAP’s Business Warehouse (BW).

For years, Dow Corning was able to accurately run intelligence reports and better understand what was happening—primarily in hindsight—but in 2009, the company started looking ahead to bigger, tougher questions such as, Why did that happen? What will happen? What should happen? Then, of course, came the key question all smart companies want to address: How can I act on this insight?

To answer these questions, Dow Corning realized that it not only needed BI tools to be pervasive across the company, it needed a full range of employees to put those tools to work every day. While Dow Corning is a unique company in the world of silicon, it shared BI challenges common to many companies: several tools, a heavy reliance on Excel spreadsheets, multiple data sources, understaffed processes requiring too much manual effort, and a struggle to provide data that helps line-of-business managers go beyond intuition to make the tough calls. Plus, some employees felt that BI data was locked in a vault and stopped looking to use it in their daily jobs.

These were all common challenges, but Dow Corning’s approach to tackle them was hardly common at all. Instead of picking an easy department to roll out a new solution for an easy win, Dow Corning went straight to the top with desktop and mobile dashboards for C-level executives.

More to BI than a Strong Engine

“As we analyzed our BI efforts after 10 years, we realized that we had a car with a great engine that was running well,” Duly says. “But if we stepped back, there was no curb appeal. It was hard to get people into the car to take it for a drive. Some analysts liked it with the Excel front end, but many employees did not. I personally couldn’t relate to it inside of Excel. So in October of 2009, we met with SAP and they showed us their whole BusinessObjects toolset and introduced us to Roambi by MeLLmo for mobile.

“At that point we started to see things like BusinessObjects Explorer giving us the ease-of-use, one-click capability where just a click could help you find what you wanted, and that gave us the curb appeal to get more people into the car, so to speak, and drive around to explore the data,” Duly explains. “It might be that they find data off to the side, down some muddy road in places they’re not going to go to in Explorer, but that could teach us something and lead to a new dashboard to keep an eye on a less-traveled but important area. This is one way we envisioned all of our tools and data coming together.”

The BI project team set the bar high: “We had good data, just not good ways of seeing it. We wanted our new tools to be intuitive, require little end-user training to understand, be engaging and interactive, and have the kinds of visualizations that would hold someone’s interest while they were using it—so they would explore the data a little longer and gain further insights because of it,” Duly recalls. “And some people were skeptics, saying, ‘But it’s their job. They should just look at the data in whatever form you provide and keep on looking at it until they figure it out.’ But the reality is, it’s just not that easy.”

Meanwhile, as Duly and his project team where setting these goals, they realized they had been focusing on the lower levels of the organization—analysts. “It dawned on us that our executives didn’t have easy access to information as they needed it—it was always for someone else. So we decided to focus on the top down this time,” Duly says. “I think it’s a little riskier, but it definitely has the opportunity for bigger payoffs. The first two things we did were create an executive dashboard as well as a mobile executive dashboard.”

Prove It

Despite being focused on SAP technology, Dow Corning wanted proof up front that SAP’s latest suite of intelligence tools could deliver.

“We had SAP, Hewlett-Packard, and Roambi come on site in November and December 2009 before we committed to any purchases. We wanted it all proven,” Duly recalls. “So we created an executive dashboard, a mobile executive dashboard using Roambi, and we had the BW Accelerator and Explorer turned on, all in a month and half. Along the way, we kicked the tires of Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence (WebI), the idea of universes, and LiveOffice.

“At the time, all of this was critical because some of the tools weren’t in general availability yet,” Duly notes. “But by the end of our proof of concept, our CIO was ready to present to the executive staff the types of things our new BI foundation could do for us.”

The presentation went over so well that Dow Corning continued to run Roambi mobile dashboards along with Xcelsius dashboards in a quasi-production mode for months while the project team bought the hardware and started assembling the production environment.

“Although we were tempted to do it all at once, we wanted to spend the time to hit this piece by piece, to focus on making sure we put in a solid foundation,” Duly says. The detailed project roadmap is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Dow Corning’s BI project team broke up the project into specific pieces and devoted full attention to each task before moving on to the next

“Our project team would complete a segment then hand it over to a support organization. We didn’t want to just stand it up and be done, so for each piece, we would install it, do proofs of concept, and write the standards and procedures, the best practice guides, and production go-live checklist for each solution,” Duly says, noting that many BI implementations fail if they are turned loose too soon.

Projects in Parallel

It’s important to note, Duly says, that Dow Corning was—and is—busy building a new BI competency center that will help ensure that its BI intelligence efforts are put to maximum use. “We’ve been creating it in parallel, and as the project team we’ve been lucky to be able to just deliver a handful of examples for each of our delivery tools, which has let us quickly explore a lot of paths and choose the most exciting ones to deliver first.”

In addition, Duly’s team has been able to train just subsets of users at a time, which has let them not only fine-tune the BI reports, tools, and dashboards themselves, but also learn the most effective ways to roll out training and solutions to the broader Dow Corning user community when the time is right.

“With WebI, for example, each time you create a universe, it’s a best practice to have a training course on the universe—what the data means, what kinds of questions can be answered from the universe, what kinds can’t be answered, and although the universe makes it easy by flattening technical hurdles to let you focus on the business content, there’s a lot to know,” Duly explains. “So each time you create a universe, you have to train the target audience on the meaning of the data and how to use it.”

Simplify Access Security with Existing Tools

It’s easy enough to implement intelligence tools with new passwords and access controls, but without a bit of forethought and integration, it can turn into a maintenance nightmare.

“SAP Business Warehouse is a good engine for us, so when we implemented our BusinessObjects foundation, we tied it into our BW foundation — not just for the data but for how we manage security, how we manage folder structures, how we manage authorization and who has what capabilities,” Duly explains (Figure 2). “Those are all done through BW in security task groups, so we tied those two environments together.”

Figure 2

Dow Corning’s folder structure, designed to retain security rules

By using the existing BW task group security to grant access to the data and reports, Duly’s team realized those rules could also be used to determine who can be a universe creator, developer, or power user.

Focus on Value

While the BI project team could focus on the coolest reports and tools, it didn’t take long to run into time- and productivity-killing requests as user interest took off. “When your users see these amazing Flash-based dashboards, they all want one, and they ask for certain metrics on a dashboard just because it seems interesting,” Duly says. “The important and hard question to ask them is, ‘It sounds interesting, but what are you going to do with that?’”

For example, one user group wanted a dashboard to display the number of automated customer interactions, which Dow Corning, like most companies, wants to see in an upward swing because automated customer interactions are usually correlated with better profitability and more instant customer response. Still, Duly asked, what are we really going to do with that information? “As a BI project leader,” he notes, “You have to know when and how to tactfully redirect a request from your business users.”

Duly’s team acknowledged that that sort of dashboard could be interesting, but then took the next step by asking a leading question: What if we looked at customers that we aren’t doing automated transactions with and figure out which customers it would make the most sense to offer and encourage automated transactions?

The key takeaway? Ask questions that will help business users gain information they can act on.

Custom Paint

“We try to be a strong no-mod shop,” Duly says, referring to the fact that Dow Corning tries not to make any modifications to its SAP environment. “After having SAP going on 16 years, we probably have less than 100 mods across our systems. When it came to SAP BusinessObjects, we wanted to take the same approach. But in this environment, the way you configure is by changing XML files, so if you change a delivered file, you’re modifying it.”

Because the project was focused on employee adoption, Duly’s team knew it couldn’t risk any speed bumps.

“We wanted Single Sign-On to help make it feel like one solution,” Duly says. To de-clutter the user experience, they removed any button in any dashboard or reporting tool that wasn’t needed. “We also branded InfoView and Explorer and our dashboards with our own Insight logo, which is kind of our brand about what we’re doing, bringing insight to our employees,” Duly explains.

“To get that done, though, our Basis guys were giving me a little heck because we’re a no-modification shop, and now I’m asking for customizations where, every time we put a patch on, we have to have the buttons removed and replace the branding logo. The question you have to ask is, ‘If you really want to make it easy to use, are you willing to make the mods?’"

Duly notes that word on the street is that some of Dow Corning’s current modifications will be customizable through built-in screens in future releases, and if that’s the case, fantastic. Still, Duly notes, “I don’t want anyone to tell me the reason they didn’t do something was because it was too hard to understand or they had to remember another user name and password.”

7 Lessons Learned

1. Don’t let your executives be the ones to find problems with the data on your dashboards. “Now that our executives are using real-time information that we’ve made so easy for them to use, it’s very embarrassing when your CEO points out a data problem,” Duly notes. “Make sure you do the testing and validation up front, even if you’re just showing off an interface. Of course, it’s good that problems can be found so easily, but whose eyes do you want to find them?”

2. Don’t skimp on training. “You’ve just made a large investment in a platform, so make sure you know how to use it,” Duly recommends. “You need people focused on training because tools are less than half of the story—it’s the data, the universes, how to apply universes to your daily life that’s most important when it comes to training,” adding that you need someone to help explain, for example, when to turn to a dashboard and when to use a Crystal Report.

3. Don’t be afraid to promote your success. “With BI, if you deliver good examples, your users will sell it for you—and that’s the best way to pave the way forward,” Duly says.

4. Keep your public folders pure. “Keeping your BI platform’s data pure should be the number one priority because if the information is bad, user confidence will be lost in everything,” Duly warns. “Find your balance between self-service reporting and a single version of the truth. On our scale of self-service vs. quality of data, we’re really heavy on the quality of data side. Our power users can use Explorer and that’s very self-service centric—we create the InfoSpace for them, but they can run through it however they want.”

5. Keep it simple, inviting, engaging, and visually appealing. In fact, effective design is so important, Dow Corning is considering hiring a user interface expert to ensure superior ease of use. “If your users don’t put their new tools to work, all the other investment is worthless,” Duly notes.

6. Don’t reinvent the wheel on mobility. “By using Roambi, we’ve been able to create mobile dashboards with little effort. Roambi builds the UI design by taking your existing WebI, Crystal, and Excel reports, and without any programming whatsoever, gives us the mobile experience,” Duly explains. “And it’s tied back into our BusinessObjects Enterprise foundation with all of the security. So we were able to take what looks like a really large step forward into mobility without hiring mobile programmers.”

7. Get help to grease the wheels. “There’s a lot of technology that you have to bring into your environment, and a lot of these BI solutions have existed before SAP acquired them, so I didn’t want a bunch of meetings arguing about naming standards or folder structures,” Duly says. “So we brought in some expertise just to give us best practices in those areas so we could focus on the innovation, not the mundane.”

Eye on the Horizon

With BI projects, a common pitfall is losing momentum by taking too many sidetracks or shortcuts that inevitably lead to dead ends. “I had to play this role of making sure we stayed true to our original vision: BI for the masses. There are many decisions, and sometimes there’s the easy road and the hard road, and you need to be able to keep driving when you have to take the hard road, like making sure we stuck to our simple design principles,” Duly explains.

“For our executives, we had to ask, ‘What will they do on their own before they just hand it off to an admin person to wrestle with instead?’" Duly says. “We want them to be engaged and actively using the tools, so what was the breaking point? Two clicks? Three? Any more than three and they won’t do it, so that was always the yardstick,” he adds, noting that ease-of-use consideration is critical to the success of these kinds of tools today.

“You have to think like iPhone apps—no one gets iPhone training. If you have to go get a training manual to use an iPhone app, it won’t get purchased. And with our BI apps, we just want people to be able to use them, because using them is the most important thing.”