Apollo Fire Detectors Ltd is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of smoke detectors, modules and notification devices.

IBM Business Analytics Solution – IBM Cognos Express

Services – Implementation

The Challenge

“The first area we wanted to improve was our financial reporting. We have to prepare and deliver a number of schedules to our parent company each month, which require consolidation at our company level first. We have a number of companies each with a different ERP system. The European businesses use AX and US and China use MAS and U8. Consolidation was a manual exercise being done in Excel, so it was difficult to maintain consistency and carried a lot of risk.”

The Solution

“Basically we replaced the spreadsheet-based reports with TM1 cubes, using IBM Cognos Express. On the Financial side, the cubes help us to produce our P&L, Balance Sheet and Cashflow both for the individual companies and at the Global Apollo Group level. The data is imported from our source systems and consolidation is instant. As soon as the new values are loaded, their impact is visible immediately at all levels up to the top. Maintenance is much easier and controlled now because the Account and Company structures, and Time Periods, are all held in one place.”

Unlocking Analytics Power

“Although improving financial reporting was important, we quickly realised the real benefit would come through the powerful analytics we now had access to. We replaced our PowerPivot model with TM1 cubes too. Because we wanted to present the information in an eye-catching format, making use of visualisations, we went with the Cognos BI tools to read the cubes. We had a vision of distributing dashboards throughout the business on mobile devices, and the Cognos toolset has allowed us to make that dream a reality.”

The Implementation

“There were some complexities in setting up, like getting the data out of Microsoft Dynamics AX. A lot of the difficulties we encountered were in understanding the relationships within our data, but Aramar helped us with that. They have seen it all before, so once the business rules were understood, they helped us build the structures in the model that would provide a basis of consistent data, and the tools enabled us to turn that data into the rich information we were looking for.”

The Results

“We knew what we wanted but were still unaware of the full potential of IBM Cognos, and the project grew as we discovered what we could do with it. Our team quickly became proficient with the new tools so we started getting results straight away, which meant we were able to engage the business and get people excited. We are really proud of the sales by product and customer reporting we built; its analytics capability is extremely powerful and the visualisations make it look extremely professional and modern. Our use of such cutting-edge technology is another way we stand out from our competitors and our customers are sure to be impressed.

Working with Aramar

“Very good. We like the fact that we can pick and choose what we use Aramar for. We were able to work independently on a lot of the development meaning we could use Aramar for the more challenging parts. In fact, to get to where we are now, we only used fourteen consultancy days.”

Summary Highlights

✅ Instant group-level consolidation
✅ Faster financial reporting with TM1 cubes
✅ Visual analytics across multiple ERPs
✅ Mobile-friendly dashboards
✅ Flexible partnership with Aramar
✅ Foundation for future forecasting