Intentia Encourages Best Practices with New 'Opportunity Analyzer'

by Alex Woodie

If public companies invested in technology today the way they did during the dot-com boom, their shareholders would have fits. Unfortunately, predicting how you can get the biggest bang for your capital expenditure can be a hit and miss affair. Last month Intentia, the Swedish ERP software developer, launched new software called the Opportunity Analyzer, whose purpose is to put some structure behind the decisions senior business managers must make regarding investments for improving their business processes.

Opportunity Analyzer, a component of Intentia's Enterprise Performance Management suite, works with Movex, the company's ERP product that runs on OS/400 and other J2EE applications, or with other enterprise applications. Intentia's goal with the product is to guide users to the most profitable use of their resources through a combination of industry-specific key performance indicators and "best practices" methodologies.

The KPIs and best practices methodologies in Opportunity Analyzer are based on the Supply-Chain Council's Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model for supply-chain-oriented business processes. For the other processes, Intentia tapped its own knowledge, as well as that of other industry bodies.

Opportunity Analyzer has built-in practical knowledge and a level of detail that shows out how each improved process contributes to the company's overall strategic objective, says Ulf Casten Carlberg, Intentia's Enterprise Performance Management director. "Opportunity Analyzer connects operational metrics with the financial effects by aligning strategic business objectives with detailed strategic initiatives such as growing market share and achieving improvements in working capital, margins, and cost efficiency."

Companies in Intentia's industry strongholds--food and beverage, fashion, distribution and wholesale, service, and complex manufacturing--will specific functionality in Opportunity Analyzer suite to them. In addition to identifying which best practices will yield the best return on investment for specific business processes, Opportunity Analyzer can help users by identifying Movex components that enable these best practices.

Opportunity Analyzer was developed in 2003 and 2004 by a team of Intentia's most experienced business consultants, industry specialists, and software developers, the company says. The software has already been put to use at three Intentia customers, including MODUL Service, a division of IKEA Group, in early 2004, as well as Berchet, a French toy manufacturer, and a ball bearing wholesaler in New Zealand.

At MODUL Service, in Sweden, Opportunity Analyzer was used to identify business processes that could be improved upon as the organization prepared for its migration from Movex Version 10 to the Java version of Movex. Intentia says the software showed MODUL Service that specific improvements--such as dropping the average delivery lead time from seven to two days and improving delivery performance from 85 to 99 percent--were within reach.

Intentia is positioning Opportunity Analyzer to take on SAP's Strategic Enterprise Management software. "The guiding principle when building Opportunity Analyzer has been 'simple for the many and complex for the few,' " according to a company sales brochure; whereas Strategic Enterprise Management is "complicated, and in many respects overkill," for Intentia's target market.