The Problem

Spirit AeroSystems relied on an off-the-shelf ERP system to manage their business processes. This system lacked the customized analytics and reporting tools needed for Decision makers to distribute their insights on costs and labor usage quickly and accurately. Users tried to work around the system’s limitations by manually building reports in Excel, which was a time-consuming and error-prone process.

With their existing tools falling short, and a lack of internal resources to build a customized system, Spirit needed a technology partner who could work with their unique infrastructure to deliver true business intelligence.

The Solution

Aculocity built a reporting platform on top of Spirit’s existing ERP implementation, the core of which is a web-based, automated report generator. This generator visualizes complex data with ease. It produces multiple types of reports and has a filtering functionality to help zero in on what matters most. The interactive platform streamlines data entry and allows reports to be distributed immediately after being generation generated.

Spirit’s ERP system keeps its data locked down with limited extraction and integration capabilities. Aculocity’s reporting solution needed to adapt to the challenge. Our software engineers developed an approach that let authorized users download a data set from the existing system, then upload it to a custom reporting interface. While security concerns prevented fully automated data integration the extra step allowed us to build in an added level of data validation and filtering. This ensured that data used in the reporting platform was as accurate as possible. Users were able to generate reports on an ad-hoc basis, specifying exactly what data set they wanted to use for a given report.

The Result

With the newly automated reporting platform, Spirit was able to create and distribute their business critical reports within an hour rather than the two day cycle enforced by their existing system. The time savings were so significant that Spirit asked Aculocity to extend the platform’s functionality to include many more report types, making their business even more efficient.