CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

18 March 2009

Implementation Investments

CAF Streamlines Decision Making with Infor PM 10

Infor announced that CAF (Construcción y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles), a company with more than 100 years' experience in the design, manufacture, maintenance and supply of equipment and components for the global railway industry, has deployed Infor PM 10. The performance management application creates a balanced scorecard for managing global projects, streamlining decision making due to faster data acquisition.

Infor PM Application Studio, a component of Infor PM 10, enables data compilation and knowledge sharing by gathering information from different internal sources through Web reports. This information can then be filtered, analysed and distributed throughout the company at any given time. It also enables the creation of flexible reports, facilitates partitioning, and allows access to independent areas of the database.

Aránzazu Romanos, industrial engineer from the department of information and communication systems, CAF, said: "The main advantage from implementing Infor PM technology is that we now have a broader global vision of projects. Before, we relied on manual information gathered from each department, but now our management team has a single point from which to obtain an overall view of operations."

The scorecard project began to take shape in the summer of 2006, in response to a request from CAF's financial department. Until that time, information relating to projects was stored in various sources and the company did not have a single solution for isolating different project indicators (including costs, revenues and developments).

The first stage was to analyse and define the different indicators for projects and the way that each of them was to be itemised. This stage was developed by a team of CAF professionals from the different departments involved (financial, project management and technical division) together with Deloitte consultants.

The second stage involved choosing the technological platform. "We chose Infor PM Application Studio to create the scorecard for various reasons. Value for money was a determining factor, as were Web access, the ease of programming different scorecard views and the straightforward learning process for end users. The fact that the application can be integrated easily with different data sources was also decisive in our choice of Infor," concluded Aránzazu Romanos.

The main advantages for CAF in implementing the scorecard created with Infor PM Application Studio were:

•  Information is no longer processed manually, so data is gathered more quickly.

•  Integration with multiple information sources, as well as a function for separating information from people, producing a global rather than departmental vision of the business.

•  Browsable analysis thanks to multi-dimensional logic and graphics.

•  Streamlined decision making.

For more information on Infor Performance Management solutions: http://www.infor.com/solutions/pm/

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