1. Information Builders enables agile
information solutions with the
WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI)
platform and integration technologies
from iWay Software.
Organization
L.B. Foster manufactures, fabricates, and
distributes products for the nation’s
surface transportation infrastructure.
The Challenge
As L.B. Foster grew, managers had
difficulty accessing, analyzing, and pre-
senting information in a cohesive way.
The Strategy
The company established a self-service
BI environment that can directly access
enterprise applications without a data
warehouse. They also use WebFOCUS
PMF to align operations with strategy.
The Results
The BI team has created hundreds of
WebFOCUS reports and strategic
performance management applications,
saving time, increasing accuracy, and
boosting productivity.
Information Builders Solution
WebFOCUS Self-Service and Managed
Reporting environments including the
Performance Management Framework;
direct access to JD Edwards, Lotus Notes,
and Excel data via native data adapters;
Education and Professional Services.
Snapshot
Customer Profile
L.B. Foster
L.B. Foster Enhances Operations With
BI and Performance Management
Operational BI Complements Lean Manufacturing
L.B. Foster Company is a leading manufacturer, fabricator, and distributor of high-
quality transportation and construction materials. The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based
company supplies the materials necessary to build and maintain infrastructure
for companies in the transportation, construction, utility, energy, recreation, and
agriculture markets.
The company’s diverse software infrastructure, which includes packaged applications
such as a JD Edwards World enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a Sage
SalesLogix CRM system, and more than 200 IBM Lotus Notes applications – made it
difficult to access, analyze, and present information in a cohesive and timely way. As
the manufacturer grew and its pace of business accelerated, this capability became
critical for company managers.
“In many instances, we could get the information we needed, but it took way too
long,” says Bruce Hezlep, manager of business applications at L.B. Foster. “For example,
our production personnel were creating bills of materials by hand for shop floor
operations – an effort that took two to three hours every day. They had to extract data
from JD Edwards, key it into Microsoft Excel, analyze it, print it, and distribute it.”

2. “As a lean manufacturing organization we embrace continuous improvement,” continues Hezlep.
“We are always looking to make things better.”
Hezlep led his organization to purchase business intelligence (BI) and performance management
(PM) technology from Information Builders. L.B. Foster’s BI team has created nearly 400 WebFOCUS
reports and applications – from parameterized production schedules to inventory commitment
reports – as well as devised a performance management framework that complements and
extends its balanced scorecard system.
About 100 users throughout the entire organization, from executives to plant and shop floor
managers, can now instantly retrieve information on their own. By empowering users at all levels
to generate their own reports about everything from inventory and accounting, to sales orders,
L.B. Foster has increased productivity company-wide. For example, production floor paperwork
that used to take three hours a day to compile is now automatically generated by WebFOCUS –
providing both the cohesion and the timeliness the company wanted.
Scrutinizing BI Options
Hezlep says the information management issues that motivated them to acquire a BI platform
stemmed from the fact that, “We had always used JD Edwards for financial reporting.” He explains
further that, “ERP systems are good for rapidly processing transactions, but not very good for
getting information out and delivering it to executive management.”
L.B. Foster had similar issues with Lotus Notes. “Notes does a good job of automating a workflow,
but getting data out of it is tricky,” Hezlep adds.
L.B. Foster evaluated BI technology from Information Builders, Cognos, MicroStrategy, and
Andrews Consulting, a firm that offers software and services for JD Edwards environments. “We
asked all four vendors to demonstrate their products and to duplicate some custom JDE reports,
and, ideally enhance them,” Hezlep recalls. “Information Builders really listened to our needs. They
provided a customized demonstration that allowed us to see how their software would work in
our organization. The other vendors just wanted to demonstrate why their products were better.”
The chosen BI software had to be able to directly access Lotus Notes and JD Edwards data without
requiring L.B. Foster to create a data warehouse. “WebFOCUS could get at any data we needed in
its native format,” Hezlep says. “For example, it understands the JD Edwards data dictionary so you
can access ERP data right away.”
Next they looked at Lotus Notes. “We had been warned that accessing Lotus Notes would be
difficult, but we have built our business around this software and we wanted to make sure that
we could leverage those investments,” Hezlep says. “On day one Information Builders loaded its
software and instantly accessed our Notes data. Today we have reports that can access JD Edwards
and Notes simultaneously.”
Hezlep says the other BI tools were data warehouse-centric and cube-centric. “You have to define
everything up front before you can create reports, which is a big job. We’re not a high-tech firm.
We bend steel for a living. So we wanted some assurance that our BI vendor would be there when
we needed them. Information Builders made it clear that they wanted to partner with us.”
“WebFOCUS could get at
any data we needed in its
native format.”

3. Hezlep also evaluated all of the BI tools from a future-proofing standpoint. “What applications
might we acquire in the next three to five years?” he asked himself. “If they run on an SQL Server
database, an Oracle database, or hundreds of others, I know that WebFOCUS can get the data. This
was a big selling point for our executives.”
Another big part of the evaluation involved WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework
(PMF), a turnkey performance management system that complements and extends an already
existing balanced scorecard system. PMF encourages a culture of visibility, accountability, and
enhancement that reinforces L.B. Foster’s lean manufacturing philosophy. It helps managers
set strategies, communicate plans throughout the organization, define metrics, and involve all
stakeholders in monitoring and measurement from an intuitive, browser-based environment.
Extending BI Throughout the Enterprise
L.B. Foster’s first BI project entailed creating enterprise reports for the “three Bs” – daily bookings,
billings, and backlogs. Working with Information Builders Professional Services, the BI team created
parameterized reports with drill-down capabilities, bringing a whole new realm of utility to the
three B reports.
“Our previous reports were fixed, with no parameterization,” Hezlep explains. “You had to
continually make special requests, and if it wasn’t right you had to go back to accounting and
request something different. Information Builders’ concept of self-service, parameterized reports
was revolutionary for us.”
Users gradually adopted the new WebFOCUS reports throughout the company. The turning point
came when Hezlep demonstrated some of the new reports at a national operations meeting. “I
showed people how they could get all this information on their own without requesting a custom
report,” he says. “After that, the floodgates opened.”
The BI team soon found themselves developing parameterized production schedules, AP inquiry
reports, inventory balance reports, inventory commitment reports, cash forecasting reports, credit
analysis reports, sales order reports, and freight cost reports, to name a few.
“We use Information
Builders’ software to
define measurements and
give people goals to strive
for. These products help
ensure that the correct
information is available
when people need it, in a
form that lets them take
action.”
WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework (PMF)
WebFOCUS PMF encourages a culture of visibility, accountability, and enhancement
that reinforces L.B. Foster’s lean manufacturing philosophy. It helps managers set
strategies, communicate plans throughout the organization, define metrics, and
involve all stakeholders in monitoring and measurement from an intuitive, browser-
based environment.

4. The BI team created another high-impact WebFOCUS application for the Safety Department.
Formerly, L.B. Foster’s manager of safety and health had to manually compile information about
accidents, lost work, disability, and other metrics in Excel spreadsheets. The information found its
way into an executive report 45 days later. Now he can run a WebFOCUS safety report whenever
he wants to track the Days Away, Restrictions and Transfer (DART) rate. Whenever there is an
accident or other lost-time incident, the Safety Department can broadcast the details to other
facilities to help people avoid similar incidents. This practice has inspired healthy competition to
improve safety records and programs at each plant.
Better Performance Management
Lean manufacturing involves scrutinizing business processes to remove waste and eliminate
unnecessary effort – not just in the production lines, but also throughout the organization. L.B.
Foster frequently stages lean manufacturing events where a cross-functional team can examine
a process and ask questions such as, “Why are we billing so much in the last week of the month?”
Using WebFOCUS to analyze enterprise data through parameterized reports makes it easier to
answer these types of questions. In this case, by drilling down they can quickly determine which
sales offices are billing late and analyze the root cause of the problem.
L.B. Foster’s lean effort is driven by metrics from balanced scorecards, helping managers to
measure their progress and improve corporate performance. Now they publish the results
through a WebFOCUS dashboard that uses a visual metaphor of red, yellow, and green stoplights
as key thresholds are met or exceeded. In addition, they use WebFOCUS PMF to reveal metric
relationships and align operational activities with corporate strategy.
Hezlep explains. “Think of a strategy map like a waterfall, a cascading series of events that depicts
how all of the metrics are related. Financial growth metrics might be directly impacted by how
you deal with customers and how you modify internal processes. PMF does a nice job of putting
all this together so you can analyze and display trends. It helps you measure where you are and
compare that to where you thought you were going to be.”
For example, management might set a goal to increase sales by five percent and to increase
earnings before depreciation, taxes, and amortization (EBDTA) by two percent. PMF makes it easy
to define these targets and thresholds, and then alerts them based on actual results. “If this metric
is one standard deviation from where we want it to be, turn it yellow,” Hezlep suggests. “If it is two
standard deviations, turn it red. WebFOCUS lets you do this to an extent, but PMF makes it much
easier to create a complete strategic planning and management system.”
As Hezlep helps integrate seven new business units in the wake of a recent acquisition, he believes
WebFOCUS and PMF will help IT make additional improvements in the future.
“We use Information Builders’ software to define measurements and give people goals to strive
for,” Hezlep concludes. “These products ensure that the correct information is available when
people need it, in a form that lets them take action. We’ve done stuff with these tools that I
couldn’t have imagined five years ago.”
Find Out More
To find out how our solutions
can help your company
succeed, talk to an Information
Builders representative today.
Contact your local Information
Builders office, visit us at
informationbuilders.com,
or in the U.S. and Canada,
call (800) 969-4636.
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