CTG Transforms Manufacturing Conglomerate with Cloud BI Solution

American Leather Inc., manufactures a large range of premium leather furniture such as sofas, sectionals, chairs, recliners, beds, and related accessories and serves customers throughout the United States. Founded by a group of enthusiastic engineers in 1990, the then small team has now grown to 600 employees, based out of Dallas, Texas, and is housed in a state-of-the-art 350,000-square-foot factory. They are also the proud founding members of the Sustainable Furniture Council.

The Challenge and Opportunity

Each entity used different toolchains across ERP, CRM, Finance, and HCM, making data consolidation and reporting at the Holding Entity level highly manual and inefficient.  Additionally, every entity used a different set of metrics to monitor their performance. Data consolidation, reporting, and metric tracking were done using Spreadsheets and shared either via Email or Shared Drives.

American Leather (AL) could not compare the operational efficiency of all its subsidiaries due to inconsistent KPI naming and tracking. They sought a robust Business Intelligence (BI) platform  to track the performance of all their companies across Operations, Sales, Finance, and Human Resources. 

The Solution and Results

CTG implemented Impower BI for intelligent reporting and CTG Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to extract data from legacy systems. Data from diverse sources like Oracle, AS400, QuickBooks, and SaaS platforms were standardized and stored in Azure Storage for processing by the Data warehouse. CTG RPA Platform interfaced with systems to fill the void of missing APIs or the need to use OCR / AI-based approaches to extract data from complex systems. Azure Data Factory's capability to process large and unorganized data from various heterogeneous systems was used to integrate, transform, and load data extracted, either with CTG RPA or directly from target systems, into the Data warehouse.

CTG's Impower BI platform: 

• Provided modern charts, graphical widgets, and pre-defined reports to help users get Financial, Operational, Sales, and HR insights.
• Enabled dynamic reporting with filters for daily, weekly, monthly, YTD, and multi-year views of multi-entity KPIs, and financial reporting of cash flows, trial balances, inventory, balance sheets, order booking, sales reports and more.
• Included a dynamic report builder for users to pick and compare KPIs using multi-dimensional reports, pivots, dynamic charts, and graphs with export options like Spreadsheets and PDFs for external analysis and sharing.
• Offered dashboards for real-time KPI comparison against historical data enabling the business to monitor and compare performance on a real-time basis with past performance data.

CTG's Robotic Process Automation:

• CTG's RPA Bots extracted data from sources lacking databases or APIs with zero errors.
• Platform supports both attended and unattended automation for standard business processes and tasks.
• Artificial intelligence and additional cognitive capabilities allows adding reasoning capabilities to the project.

Impower BI ensured security and data insights with system parameter management, multi-factor authentication, and administrator controls. CTG's quality processes covered techniques such as Source System Loop Back Verification, Multi-level Data Transformation Verification, Past & Present Legacy System Report Verification, Data Certification & Statistics Collection. Beta and production environments enabled incremental verification and release of metrics and reports.