Masco Contractor Services (MCS), a division of Masco Corporation (Taylor, Michigan), recently worked with the COINS Business Intelligence Team to launch a set of dashboards supported by an Accounts Receivable data mart*. The project goals included streamlining aggregation of aged receivables data for MCS’s many divisions; releasing staff time for more in-depth business analysis; and improving the timeliness of collection activities.

The task of marrying the data from MCS’s different systems, massaging it to show information at the Vice President, regional, divisional, and national account levels, and adding commentary takes one business analyst from 2 to 3 weeks to complete each month – time that could be better spent actually analysing the data. The amount of time spent processing the data also delays dealing with collections issues.

Based on MCS’s requirements, the COINS Business Intelligence Team provided a data mart that automatically extracts the aged receivables data on a daily basis and presents it on a variety of dashboards. Deborah Michaud, Business Analyst III in MCS’s Daytona office, describes the impressive speed to delivery: ‘We gave Yan Llamas and John Orloff over twenty huge spreadsheets that we prepare each month. Just two weeks later, they delivered a solution that handled at least 90% of our requirements.’

Each extract provides a snapshot of A/R status for that day. Dashboards slice and dice the information according to user role (such as Vice President, Credit Manager, Regional Manager) and type of access point (customer, extract date). Data visualisation tools such as maps, graphs, and a ‘traffic light’ system display data and highlight trends and concepts in ways that would not be dramatic or clear on tabular forms. Users can drill down from the division to the customer, link to invoices, and easily look at that customer a week, a month, a year back. At any point, they can export data to Excel.

According to Deborah, ‘The data mart should be a huge time saver for our financial staff and business analysts. It reduces a complex, time consuming process to an automatic nightly extract. Now we can actually analyse data and stay on top of things, instead of just preparing Excel documents. Now that we have seen how quickly and professionally our data can be presented in this data mart, we’ve begun presenting it to other business analysts and credit managers as a new tool to pull data together in the format they need.’

‘We expect to see a measurable improvement in collections timeliness as a result of our new data mart,’ Deborah concluded.