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Business requirements
Some of the key drivers for change and development within the Business Intelligence team at Crest Nicholson, included:
- An overarching strategy to move IT systems to the cloud where possible
- A generalised push for more data on demand, and near real time reporting
- An increasing need for mobile data solutions
“Sempre challenged our requirements on this project. By challenging us they made us think in slightly broader terms – this then gave us a richer solution.”
Selecting a new planning solution
It was becoming apparent that Crest’s existing planning tool was not evolving as the business evolved. With a growing demand for information and a user-base with a variety of needs, Crest Nicholson decided to make the change to a new, cloud-based planning tool and sought our assistance to help move them forward.
“Knowing we had to change our planning tool, we started to look at the market to see what technologies were available. Our long-standing relationship with Sempre coupled with their deep understanding of our business, meant they were able to bring a number of technologies to us. They then demonstrated them and helped us through the process of reviewing and understanding what each of them was able to deliver to us,”
Paul said
The solution
Once Crest had selected their new planning tool, Sempre Analytics worked closely with the BI team to ensure a smooth migration process across from the incumbent platform, to their new, cloud-based planning tool. Being able to input data at individual house or plot level, and automatically see this aggregate at all levels of the business (e.g. site,
project, phase, division and right up to group level) was fundamental to the successful adoption of the new planning tool, and the development of Crest’s plot level planning system. A key element of this project was to ensure the new planning tool was successfully integrated with the existing BI environment and systems.
“Sempre provided us with a huge amount of confidence throughout the integration process. They had a deep understanding of the ERP and CRM systems we already had in place and ensured as easy a transition and integration as we could have hoped for,”
said Paul.
“By further integrating our plot level planning system with cash flow, P&L and balance sheets, and combining it with information from our data warehouse, we have been able to produce comprehensive board packs and reports for key business stake holders,”
he added
Management information – the bigger problem
Alongside the adoption of their new planning tool, the BI team also needed to address the growing data needs of the wider organisation. Historically, around 85% of the demands made on the BI team came from the Finance department. Over the previous 12 months, they had seen an increasing appetite for data from HR, Customer Service, Sales & Marketing, and Production.
By using IBM Cognos Data Manager as their main ETL tool, our Cognos experts assisted Crest with the feed of data from various other internal systems, such as Coins (CRM system), Agresso (ERP system) Anaplan and ResourceLink (HR system), into the data warehouse. Working closely with the BI team we also developed feeds into their BI environment from other external sources such as New House Builder Survey data.
By pulling data from both internal and external sources into one central data warehouse, Crest were able to present a single, accurate view of their data, and to easily distribute relevant data to departments within the organisation.
“We’re now considering pushing our planning tool out into other areas of the business, which is something we would never have considered doing with our previous planning application.”
Paul Thurlow
The future
As the appetite for data in the business continues to grow, Crest Nicholson are now turning their attention to new deployments and further use of data throughout the
business. Increased use of dashboarding, visualisations, plot site maps and mobilising
data are all capabilities they intend to explore further.
“The next step for our planning tool is to extend its reach to encompass land valuations, scenario planning and sustainability planning,”
says Paul.
“In addition to this, we want to take advantage of tools we’ve not yet adopted such as SPSS for predictive analytics, for example when assessing our prospects or keeping an eye on our return from marketing spend.”
What they said
“Working with the guys at Sempre has been like working with an extension of the team here at Crest. They are dynamic and work with our ever-changing requirements; never shying away from a challenge.”
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