Customer Profile

Invacare Corporation

Invacare Corporation (NYSE: IVC), headquartered in Elyria, Ohio, is the global leader in the manufacture and distribution of innovative home and long-term care medical products that promote recovery and active lifestyles. The company has 6,200 associates and markets its products in 80 countries around the world.

Problem:
Invacare began a corporate-wide re-invention in 2006.  Principle to that was a new IT initiative called the Invacare Business Management System (known internally as iBiz), which brought to light the need for a modern business intelligence (BI) system.  In particular, Invacare management wanted the ability to conduct invoice line item detail, in order to drill down into the details of things such as sales orders.  To date, they had only been able to view the business' financial data at a very high level.

"When I came on board, the company was starved for information," said David Mewes, CIO of Invacare.  "We weren't able to obtain timely information with spreadsheets being downloaded from the transactional system.  We decided we needed a good old-fashioned data warehouse, or a repository, which fit the newer model of business intelligence."

As the economy began a global downturn, Invacare management commenced a search for a BI tool to meet their needs and help them remain competitive in the marketplace.  Initially, the company was focused on obtaining financial data from Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), with the end goal of having the tool connect information from a series of databases worldwide.


One of the winning aspects of Noetix is that it's very easy to use. Users breeze through training and really like the tool's intuitive drill-down capabilities.
David Mewes
CIO
Invacare Corporation

Solution:
Invacare's IT department conducted analysis with several major BI tools and decided on Noetix Analytics because the company had a strong competency around Oracle—it was also more affordable and flexible than the other available options.  In addition, Noetix Analytics had the ability to conform to most of Invacare's non-standard product hierarchies.

As part of Invacare's iBiz initiative, the Noetix implementation took six to eight months, much longer than usual due to the intense testing hurdles to which the IT team subjected the product.  Code writers within the IT team set up the tables in such a way that different end users - sales teams, engineering teams, and product teams - could use the tool to do their own drill-downs without IT assistance.
 
Today, 100 end users are accessing financial reports through Noetix Analytics linked with Cognos 10 Business Intelligence, and more users are trained daily.  Mewes, who hails from the automotive industry, says this is absolutely revolutionary for the medical products field, which has historically not used cutting edge technology to conduct this type of business.
 
"The medical device industry is not as mature as other supply chain-type industries, so when we're doing things like capturing profitability on each line item detail, and we're able to itemize different components and see the profitability of each specific component - we're being very innovative," said Mewes.  "This industry doesn't use a lot of IT tools and we're finding Noetix Analytics to be very much a game-changer for Invacare."

Result:
Profitability is more important than ever in the medical devices industry due to government financial reimbursement and the ways competitive costs are scrutinized.  The financial analytic reporting that Invacare has been able to conduct around its profitability has radically changed the company's business outlook.  For example, the sales team was able to recognize that the customer information it was using, including sales figures, was not always accurate.

"For us, the key aspect is that we're now able to understand what profitability looks like at Invacare," said Mewes.  "And we now have a plethora of profitability reports that are really helping the business make better decisions."

Invacare is in the process of implementing Noetix Analytics as its global management reporting tool, positioning it as the data repository for all of the company's transactional systems, including Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, and MFG/PRO.

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