When Volvo Car Corporation split off from Ford in 2010, it needed to develop its own stand-alone IT environment in some areas. At the same time, the company wanted to improve its business intelligence (BI) capabilities and operational efficiency. So Volvo decided to prototype a Microsoft data management solution that simplifies its IT environment, provides graphical self-service reporting capabilities, and improves collaboration.
Business Needs
By the time that Zhejiang Geely Holding Group completed its acquisition of Volvo Car Corporation in 2010, the IT environment at Volvo had become complex, difficult to manage, and expensive. Over the years, a variety of data management and business intelligence products had been deployed. Volvo wanted to reduce the number of these products to make the overall system easier to manage and to reduce licensing and other costs. “All the products out there have been purchased by some department at some time in history, and we’re trying to consolidate and simplify our BI infrastructure,” says a Volvo IT architect.
Volvo also wanted to improve its business intelligence capabilities to achieve greater insights into such things as assembly and product development costs and to help employees produce reports more quickly and easily. “With the old systems, users had to sample their own data from various sources, integrate the data, and produce the reports—and that cost a lot of time,” says a senior business analyst for business demand and strategy at Volvo.
In addition, Volvo needed reports that are easier to understand so that Volvo analysts and managers could build more persuasive and effective business cases for their proposals. “Everything here comes down to, ’Show me a business case,’” the IT architect says.
To ensure timeliness and accuracy and to foster collaboration, Volvo sought to improve data management. The company has relied on IT personnel to generate many data reports, which can be slow and inefficient. Also, there is no central location for storing reports, so information often is distributed by sending a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or other attachment in an email message. “They’re doing excerpts from the mainframe database into an Excel spreadsheet and emailing them around,” says the IT architect. That means distribution is limited, and the information can be hard to find.