About Interface

Interface, Inc. designs, produces, and sells modular carpet products for the commercial, institutional, and residential markets primarily in the Americas, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific.  The company was founded in 1973 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

Solution

KPI Partners delivered a complete ERP Analytics solution by implementing Supply Chain / Order Management Analytics and Financial Analytics for JD Edwards.  

Archived data from 2007 onward was imported into a data warehouse from JD Edwards.   Financial Analytics reports and metadata were also migrated from a previous generation analytical application to this new enterprise standard deployment.  

The decision support system has been designed to enable insightful reporting from the financial module of Oracle BI Applications to include general ledger, accounts receivable, and accounts payable.  Additional subject areas were deployed to support other related out-of-the-box (OOTB) dashboards.  

Dashboards were constructed to feature a hierarchical reporting feature for creating reports from finance subject areas.  The analytic application also extends the OOTB data model to include all the data elements necessary for Interface's custom reports.  

• Implementation of Oracle BI Applications – Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics.
• Extended OOTB Sales fact tables to include 25 columns each and a Product dimension.
• Extended the OOTB Inventory daily balance fact tables with approximately 10 columns each.
• Implementation of OOTB Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics for JD Edwards.
• Created custom application elements to facilitate the analysis of Commissions.
• Created custom application elements to facilitate reporting for Customer Service Representatives with custom prompts, filters and columnar formats.
• KPI provided data security through LDAP integration with Interface's Active Directory.  Users can login to the BI application directly OR via single sign on from a master application. 
• Role-based visibility was implmented using Group Names from JD Edwards 9.0 for dashboardd, reports and analysis. 
• Preformance optimization through the use of OBIEE caching
• Customized reports with global exchange rates.
• Enhanced logic for unit of measure (UOM) conversions in Informatica.
• Enhanced data warehousing for accounts receivable and general ledger with the addition of approximately 30 columns.

Challenges

Data Load

Five years of historical lead data had to be loaded into the data warehouse, which impacted the performance.  This type of data load challenge led to the need for strategies such as table partitioning, summary tables, etc.  

Interface Custom ERP Data

Interface has 150 custom tables in JD Edwards.  The engineers on the project were challenged to use more than 20 extract-transform-load (ETL) extensions required to support existing Financial and Supply Chain Analytic reports.

Technology

• JD Edwards 9.0
• IBM DB2
• Oracle BI Applications - Finance Analytics 
• Oracle BI Applications - Supply Chain & Order Management
• Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)
• Informatica