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. A data mart is a focused collection or subset of operational data, usually oriented to a specific business purpose. 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 analyzing 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 20 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 cut 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 visualization 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 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 analyze 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.

About Masco Contractor Services
MCS is a group of independent companies, which are subsidiaries of Masco Corporation (NYSE: MAS). Masco, a Fortune 500 company, is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of home improvement and building products and a leading provider of services that include installation of insulation and other building products. MCS companies are leading installers of residential building products including insulation, fireplaces, gutters, shelving and more. With locations in most major metropolitan cities and 50 distribution sites in the United States, MCS companies combine top-grade building products with superior installation services.

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