It’s not always easy for average folks on the street to see how an industrial manufacturer like Kennametal Inc. is influencing their daily lives. But though you might not realize it, this Pennsylvania-based company’s products are hard at work all around you.
Kennametal is a leading manufacturer of wear-resistant solutions such as high-performance metallic coatings, cutting bits, and solid carbide drills. Customers across virtually every industry use these products for specific applications like hardfacing the landing gear of commercial airliners or putting the bite into the snowplow blades that clear our highways.
Kennametal helps drive productivity in the world’s most demanding work environments – aerospace, earthworks, energy, and the machine tool industry to name a few. “And with the complex nature of our business, we produce large volumes of information,” says Scott Duddy, senior corporate accounting analyst at Kennametal. The company currently has about 10 terabytes of enterprise data, and this figure continues to grow around 30% year over year. “Our leaders need to analyze this information at a very detailed level,” adds Duddy. This analysis is critical to managing the business more proactively and gaining a broader understanding of a very diverse customer base.
For Kennametal, the key to quickly unlocking the enormous business value of this data was to upgrade its information environment based on the SAP HANA platform and using the SAP HANA Operational Reporting rapid-deployment solution. Implementation of the rapid-deployment solution took only six weeks to complete and the total project lasted just 15 weeks from kickoff to go-live.
To date, Kennametal has focused on three key reporting tracks: finance, pricing, and inventory. And today it is analyzing data in these process areas with far less wear and tear on both business users and the IT organization. Now, for example, Kennametal can perform faster analysis of its price realization and overall price planning. And there is more control in the hands of business users. These experts can create complex pricing reports within a couple of days that once required the involvement of IT and took up to eight months to develop.
Kennametal has big plans for the future, too. Looking forward, it wants to use predictive analysis to explore important customer satisfaction issues like ensuring on-time delivery. The expected results are improved customer retention and even better service levels for the people who have to perform some of the toughest jobs on the planet.
For more about the Kennametal story, check out this recently published Business Transformation Study.
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