CUSTOMERS

General | Ruukki | Kesko | StoraEnso| Nokia

StoraEnso

An automated system to facilitate customer and product portfolio management

Stora Enso (www.storaenso.com) is an integrated paper, packaging and forest products company producing publication and fine papers, packaging boards and wood products, market segments in which the group is a global market leader. Stora Enso sales totaled €14.6 billion in 2006. The group has some 44,000 employees in more than 40 countries on five continents. Stora Enso's shares are listed in Helsinki, Stockholm and New York.

Stora Enso Fine Papers Division requested in 2002 a uniform tool to help manage the profitability of twelve production sites throughout Europe. As the business is capital intensive, special emphasis was to be placed to distinguish the levels of working capital requirements by various products and customers. Being solely operated by finance, not IT personnel, it was important that the system was easy to use, highly accessible and had automated all tasks that did not need human intervention.

Cox’ main responsibility was defining and automating the systems integration, the datamart, the Activity Based Costing (ABC) costing and profitability calculations and the OLAP analysises. The implementation of the extract, transform and load processes was accomplished by building standard user interfaces to manage the flow of data and routines to import the source data into an MS SQL Server database. As the ERP raw data by the paper mills does not provide for this, SQL was also used to transform the source data into format required by the design of the activity based profitability analysis. The data out of the MS SQL database is then fed into Oros, a SAS Institute, Inc. product for Activity Based Costing (ABC) modeling to calculate product and customer specific costs. Having done that, the costs are then fed back to MS SQL Server database to be combined with imported sales data in order to analyze the profitability of various products and customers. Finally, the multidimensional profitability analysis results are fed into Cognos PowerPlay for web based OLAP analysis.

The tasks within this process are all automated. Finance personnel have access to a custom made user interface allowing them to control the whole process from source data to web reports.