Istrabenz Plini powers good decision-making with Spotfire

Greater reliability and customer loyalty, improved operations and time savings

Challenge

“Our customers expect reliability,” states CIO Črtomir Ješelnik, “meaning that we need to provide them with products and services when they need them. We were doing a lot of the manual reporting work in ERP systems, spreadsheets, and in custom-made legacy systems, and mistakes were being made based on that very inefficient process. Our reporting was not resulting in customer loyalty. It was not really good enough for long-term customer relationships.

“The risk was that, if we couldn’t automate reporting, eliminate errors, and reduce the time we were spending, customers would leave us because we couldn’t provide the reliability and high level of care they were demanding. It was crucial that our business users were able to create their own reports because the demand for ad hoc analytics is daily or hourly. They have their own requests from the field or from management. They have to be able to provide the information for logistics, sales, production, or finance, so the reporting tool had to be configurable and very flexible.

“Our goal was to find a tool that would automate a lot of this manual work and bring all sorts of data sources together for creating new information that would give employees, at every level, the information they needed to make good business decisions.”

Solution

“The relationship with TIBCO began with the search for a tool that could help us solve our reporting problems,” says Mr. Ješelnik. “This search was not for IT help, it was for help for our business. We needed best business practices on decisionmaking and reporting, meaning visualizations and the value that can be derived from the information contained in them. We wanted to establish a partnership with a provider, not only on an IT level, but also on a business consulting level. We found all this help through the people at TIBCO.”

Benefits

Greater reliability and customer loyalty

“TIBCO Spotfire® definitely improved, and will continue to improve, our customer loyalty,” says Ješelnik. “We could talk a lot about how it’s really good for enterprise reporting, and really good for financial reporting, and how it helped lower our liabilities and everything, but I would like to emphasize its importance for right-time reporting and operations information. This is really important for reliability.

“We measure reliability only once: when customers leave—and this must not happen! And I must say that we don’t lose many customers.

“Predictive analytics is quite important for us, too, because we have to plan for gas demand and getting it right is very important for service reliability. We found very similar projects in the TIBCO network that will help us in these challenges.”

Improved operations

“Spotfire is definitely a tool that helped us in our business transformation from distributor to becoming a multi-utility company,” says Mr. Ješelnik. “It really helped us improve productivity and logistics, because before, we had loads of spreadsheets and programs in SAP. Now, through a right-time visualization, we get the same information in a really shortened timeframe. We also lowered risk through this visualization. The risk in logistics is not filling the right reservoir with gas. Spotfire helped us see the critical levels of our reservoirs and helped identify which reservoirs needed to be filled. If you have the right visualization, you cannot make mistakes; you always fill the right reservoir—and there are thousands of them.”

Time savings, reduced risk, better decisions

“Once a month, employees throughout the company generate 150 reports for internal and external stakeholders,” says Ješelnik. “With Spotfire, we substantially reduced the time needed to make those reports.

“Automated reporting definitely increases the efficiency of people, and it reduces risks because in manual reporting, they make errors. Third, it leads to better decisions because the information gets to the decision-maker quicker.”

Future

“The future is bright. First, we will complete report automatization for efficiency, then we will add users to the system, and then provide new information by combining data sources,” concludes Mr. Ješelnik.