According to Chris Fitzharris, Director of Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management at DJO Global, “analytic insights are giving us the ability to anticipate, and take advantage of, what’s going to happen in the business – versus our previously being limited to a historical view of what has happened.”
DJO Global operates and distributes in 27 countries – including Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore, the UK, and the United States – and is a $1+ billion provider of medical devices designed to get and keep people moving. Its product lines include rigid and soft orthopaedic bracing, hot and cold therapy, bone growth stimulators, vascular therapy systems and compression garments, therapeutic shoes and inserts, electrical stimulators used for pain management, and physical therapy products.
DJO Global data resides in five separate ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems and had been analyzed by three separate BI tools, including a desktop discovery system. With these systems, DJO Global faced the challenge of pulling data from a variety of disparate sources, ensuring that the data was accurate and up-to-date, and providing the data to decision makers in a timely manner.
“Historically, our process involved extracting data from all these ERP systems, dumping the data into Excel files, working to clean it up and then trying to interpret it, which typically took weeks and became out-of-date quickly; making it difficult to answer fundamental questions in a timely manner,” Fitzharris said.
“Now, with Birst, we have a ‘Ferrari’ for a data analytics engine, which delivers insights much faster and helps us make better business decisions, based on a single source of truth.”
The number of business users utilizing Birst in the company is growing rapidly, according to Fitzharris, because the platform’s self-service capabilities enable them to connect, prepare and relate data in an intuitive fashion, without the need for IT support. And the results have been impressive.
From a sales, operations and supply chain perspective, for example, DJO Global now can get better and faster insights on orders and shipments. This has helped the company improve forecasting and fill rates and better gauge the cost to the business of shipping issues (when products are damaged or returned).
Previously, producing such insights typically took a business analyst 10-12 hours, and reports could only be generated on a quarterly basis, according to Fitzharris. Now, this type of data is updated every day in Birst, which automatically generates analytic dashboards highlighting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Senior executives and sales leaders easily can access these dashboards via custom landing pages in Birst, branded “DJOne,” or via their mobile devices, which gives them a greater degree of confidence that the data is timely and trustworthy. “We leverage Birst not only to help us make better business decisions today, but also to help us determine what type of questions we should be asking about business performance tomorrow.”
Going forward, DJO Global will use the Birst platform to better analyze consumer buying habits and preferences and develop more personalized e-commerce solutions.
Further, the company is looking to embed Birst analytics into its “MotionMD” automation software, which DJO Global provides to 650 healthcare clinics and hospitals to help them optimize productivity, profitability and outcomes. This will provide a value-add to the DJO “MotionMD” software application, which is designed to help customers automate claims management, along with inventory dispensing and physician protocols, and the insurance authorization process (standardizing insurance policies and compliance).
“We are just scratching the surface of the many enterprise capabilities that the Birst platform can provide,” Fitzharris said. “We’ve already realized significant work productivity gains, and we are rapidly identifying other use cases where Birst can add business value.”
