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Part lV: Building and Managing Systems

You may soon hear more about Honam Petrochemical

analytics for powerful, personalized dashboards based

Corporation. Headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, this company manufactures and sells petrochemical products, such as synthetic resins, synthetic industrial
materials, such as ethylene.glycol and ethylene oxide for making polyester, automobile antifreeze solutions, benzene, propylene, and ethylene. Honam has about 2,200 employees and its 2010 revenues exceeded U.S.
$6.75 million.

on SAP's BusinessObjects business intelligence platform. BusinessObjects software tools can be used for
performance management, planning. reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management, and provide self-service access to data from databases and Excel spreadsheets. SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence is an ad hoc query, reporting, and analysis tool that is used to create queries or use existing reports, format retrieved information, and perform analysis to understand trends and root causes. Once Honam's project team determined the business intelligence tools for the solution, its focus turned to determining which data and reports were required by the company's 200 high-level users of the new system. The information systems team started by asking executives to list existing reports they were already receiving and to assess the usefulness of each. The list was cut to a more manageable size and the executives were asked if there were any additional reports or data from which their organizational groups

Honam's primary market is South Korea, but the company has set its sights on becoming a top-tier chemical company throughout Asia and achieving sales of U.S $10 billion. Honam plans to do this by

strengthening its existing businesses, extending its

overseas business and developing new businesses.

To manage far-flung op-rations in China, Hong Kong, Moscow, and New York City Honam needs reliable reports that are able to accurately measure

management performance and provide useful, accurate information for increasing sales and reducing costs. Honam's existing systems provided managers with reports to guide their business decisions, but in many cases the data in the reports were outdated and "sanitized." Individual managers were processing and manipulating the data to make their departments "look better" to senior management. The report data were also somewhat outdated and presented periodically.
Honam's top management wanted "anytime access" to cuffent daily data to obtain an accurate and unbiased view of what was occurring in the sales office or on the plant floor. It did not wanted to be overloaded with unnecessary data so it could focus on the "watch-up indicators" it considered crucial to the business.

could benefit. These findings were very useful in determining the right set of reports and dashboards for
Honam executives. Once these user requirements were clarified, the information systems team designed a system that could extract data from a SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and present them to executives using the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards software and SAP Crystal Reports, an application for designing and generating reports from a wide range of data sources. A highly intuitive Web-based user interface was created to make the system very accessible. This interface was so simple and well-designed that users required very little training on how to use the system or access data
and reports.
To encourage users to start working with the system,

Executive decision-makers did not want to work with last quarter's numbers. They wanted up-to-theminute reports that they could view quickly on their desktops. They also wanted access via the Web or their mobile devices. Finally, Honam executives wanted
enterprise-wide data that could be accessed and shared easily across various business units and functions to support the company's expansion geographically and by product line.

mernbers

of the information

systems department

These three requirements drove the technology

selection process. Honam's information systems team reviewed a number of different software products and vendors and selected SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards

visited various manufacturing plants where the system was being rolled out and had in-depth discussions with executives about the systems' benefits as well as how to use it. Honam's system went live in January 2011, and

and SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence. The company already had seven years' experience running SAP's ERP system, so this vendor seemed like an
appropriate choice.

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards is a drag-anddrop visualizatian tool designed to create interactive

executives started immediately accessing reports and dashboards on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The system enables them to view key performance information such as manufacturing costs by plant, transportation costs, daily production and inventory rateS, and global product price trends, and the information can be displayed visually in dashboards and management cockpits. Thirty executives tested mobile devices providing "anytime, anywhere"

Chapter 11: Building lnformation Systems and Managing Projects access to the new system. Delivery of the information is personalized and differentiated for highJevel execu-

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tives, middle managers, and front-line employees. It is still too early to assess the long-term business impact of the system, but one benefit was immediate: Executives no longer are limited to "sanitized," stale data in an outdated presentation format. Management discussions and decisions are based on timely, consistent, and accurate company-wide data. Because the

system reduces the time required to collect, process, and track the data, executive decision making takes place more rapidly. Honam's information systems are now ready for global information-sharing as the company expands.
Sources: David Hannon, "searching Beyond Sanitized Data," SAPlnsider PROFILES, July 2011; David Steier, "Visualizing Success: Analytic User Interfaces that Drive Business," Information Management, July/August, 2011; and "Honam Petrochemical Strategy and Financial Highlights from ICIS," www.icis.com, accessed July 21, 2011.

List and describe the information requirements

of Honam's new management system. What problems was the new system designed to solve?
To what extent were "people" problems affecting management decision making at Honam? What were some of the people, organization, and technology issues that had to be addressed by the new system? How did the system's designers make the system more "people-friendly?"
3. What role did end users play

Visit the Dashboard Insight Web site (dastrboardinsight.com) and review the section on "Getting Started

with Dashboards." Explain why digital dashboards are so useful to Honam's management and what "best
practices" for building dashboards Honam followed.

z-

in developing

Honam's new system? How did the project team make sure users were involved? What would have happened to the project if they had not done this?
4. What were the benefits of the new system? How did it change the way Honam ran its business? How successful was this system solution?

Revise and enhance the prototype. The system builder notes all changes the user requests and refines the prototype accordingly. After the prototype has been revised, the cycle returns to Step 3. Steps 3 and 4 are repeated until the user is satisfied.

Step

4:

Prototyping is especially useful in designing an information system's user interface. Because prototyping encourages intense end-user involvement throughout the systems development process, it is more likely to produce systems that fulfill user requirements. However, rapid prototyping may gloss over essential steps in systems development, such

If the completed prototype works reasonably well, management may not see the need to build a polished production system. Some hastily constructed systems do not easily accommodate large quantities of data or a large number of
as thorough testing and documentation. users in a production environment.

END.USER DEVELOPMENT
End-user development allows end users, with little or no formal assistance from technical specialists, to create simple information systems, reducing the time and steps required to produce a finished application. Using fourth-generation languages, graphics languages, and PC software tools, end users can access data, create reports, and develop entire