Climber BI Improving data reporting for Babcock and the British Army

THE CHALLENGE

Babcock International Group is a leading provider of critical, complex engineering services which focuses on three highly regulated markets: Defence, emergency services and civil nuclear.

In January 2015 it won a major 10-year contract with the British Army to maintain its vehicles and manage the supply chain of materials. Included in its winning bid was the commitment to set up a Hub that would provide central data analytics capability.

The Hub would deliver data insights to the army and enable the internal operations of Babcock Land Defence Limited to exploit available data to ensure a smooth and effective operation.

THE APPROACH

Babcock Land Defence Limited approached Acutus Consulting (now part of Climber UK) to support the implementation of the Hub by providing Business Intelligence expertise from project management to full dashboard development. This would enable it to develop its business intelligence capabilities across supply chain, asset maintenance and fleet management.

Initially our team used the ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) process within Qlik to build a data warehouse and full reporting suite using Baan data provided by the British Army. This provided engaging and insightful reports that enabled Babcock Land Defence Limited to track army vehicles anywhere in the world, monitor the performance and progress of vehicle repairs and more importantly report on their performance against a set of agreed contractual KPIs on a monthly basis.

In 2014 Babcock International Group decided to implement a new SAP ERP system across the entire Group. It also planned to move from a Qlik data warehouse to the Microsoft stack using SQL and SSIS. This was so data could be used beyond Qlik around the Group.

Because we had already helped Babcock Land Defence Limited to develop its data capabilities, we became responsible for the reporting stream and were enlisted to support the rebuild of the Qlik estate, now using SAP ERP data for Supply Chain, Asset Maintenance, Fleet Management and Finance, stored within the new SQL data warehouse that we also built.

However, Babcock Land Defence Limited continued to use Qlik for its own reporting, as Qlik’s Associative Engine helped revolutionise how it managed vehicle maintenance, from ensuring parts were available to assigning the correct staff who had the appropriate skills and training to undertake specific tasks.

As the business moved to a new SAP solution, the data structure changed, and we immediately adapted our reporting. We worked with the SAP Program team and Subject Matter Experts from the business to understand where data was, and how it could be accessed, to rebuild the reporting suite.

We maintained the visualisations we had previously built in Qlik so Babcock could continue to receive the benefits of Qlik’s Associative Engine.

“The team managed a pool of BI resources that have been used to deliver analysis and detailed BI requirements, dashboards and reports. All of the team are competent individuals, focused and results driven.”

Adrian Palmer, SAP Program Manager

THE RESULT

Babcock Land Defence Limited and the British Army now have a clear view of the state of their vehicles in repair. They can track whether there are any resource shortages and/or delays with parts getting to repair work centres. The reporting solution helps Babcock to manage its business effectively, and successfully meet the contractual KPIs it has with the Army.