McEwan must choose the best proposal to improve CTCC's BI system and operations. Proposal 1 focuses on defining processes, finding department champions, improving reports, and shifting to a collaborative culture. Though not as sustainable as Proposal 2 or easy as Proposal 3, Proposal 1 would solidify operations with current resources while highly increasing user engagement. This lays the groundwork to later implement some aspects of Proposal 2 around long-term integration with the parent company.

1. BI Proposals
By Melody Ucros
January 26, 2018

2. Executive Summary
Caterpillar Tunneling Canada Corporation (CTCC), the latest acquisition and subdivision of US-
based Caterpillar Inc, now faces the challenge to integrate into their parent company. The problem
is that they have an old ERP System that was pilot program from the vendor, a different business
system for analytics in every department, a lack of tech and analytics know-how, and a family-
business operations culture where everything is done in a reactive manner. To top it off, the parent
company is clueless about the IT needs of CTCC, and how to adjust their manufacturing protocols
to the project-based manufacturing process that Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) require.
The integration into the corporate SAP system failed miserably after the first year. Therefore, the
local under-staffed ERP Department had to come up with a solution to ease the custom query
workload coming from managers attempting to retrieve information from the outdated ERP.
They proactively reached out to every department, in order to showcase the functionalities of the
system and solve their immediate needs. This resulted in happy managers in the short-term, but
an un-governed reports folder that had way too many personalized reports with no governance
structure. Helping users understand the system and reports was also challenging, having to rely on
a social media group to share resources with all the users.
The Enterprise Resource and Finance Manager, John McEwan, and the ERP Analyst leading the
initiative, Faith Lang, now had the task of making the BI system the trusted platform of choice for
information distribution in the company.
Defining the overall structure of the system, integrating to the corporate culture, and making sure
the right resources were in place for users, proved to be among the most prominent challenges
moving forward.
Due to the limited local resources and the lack of corporate support, McEwan should focus on
improving the local BI Functionalities and Engagement, instead of trying to integrate to the
corporate culture or just releasing more training material. The managerial actions moving forward
should be focused on creating a collaborative culture and encouraging everyone to learn from
each other and improve the decisions they make on a daily basis.
The actions taken will not solve the problem overnight, but they will definitely contribute to the
bottom line of Improving CTCC’s profit by giving employees the optimal tool for visibility in
operations and decision-making.
CTCC, Challenges and Solution
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3. Introduction
Caterpillar Tunneling Canada Corporation (CTCC), previously called Lovat Inc., was acquired by U.S
based Caterpillar Inc. in 2008. Customers turned to Caterpillar Inc. to help them develop
infrastructure, energy and natural resource assets. These assets acted as support machines in
infrastructure projects where Lovat’s giant machines were hollowing out tunnels for subways,
sewers, high-voltage cable, as well as for mine access. Now, Caterpillar Inc. intended to leverage its
global purchasing organization and experience in large-scale manufacturing processes to improve
and scale the design, manufacturing, refurbishment, and support services of these tunnel boring
machines (TBM´s).
CTCC has always operated as a family-business. This was mainly due to its project-based business
model, which required TBMs to be selected and configured based on specific customer needs.
After 37 years, much of the know-how was undocumented, and the decisions were made based
on either experience or project circumstances. Management of the projects was also
unstructured, which resulted in lack of communication, task tracking and cost control.
This highly contrasted the multinational structure and manufacturing protocols of their new parent
company. In 2005, Caterpillar Inc. embarked on a digital transformation project to implement SAP
across its machines and engines business. In 2010, Caterpillar sent their special taskforce, MACH 1,
to CTCC in order to localize the SAP template, assist in enterprise process adaption, load data and
help CTCC employees adapt to the new system.
CTCC was using a legacy ERP system and a temporary BI Platform to make decisions during their
transition to the parent company’s SAP solution. After more than a year of localization sessions
and data cleansing by local, corporate and external teams, the project was put on hold indefinitely.
Apparently, it wasn’t a matter of adapting the template but rather creating one from scratch. This
proved to be rather complicated, since the needs, data, reports, processes, users, and deadlines
varied greatly between departments.
For example, the sales team urgently needed to run market segmentation analyses to project
sales. The operations team needed to know the project status at any given time, including details
on tasks, components, labor hours, cashflows and resource allocation. The Engineering team
needed to analyze resource loading per engineer, task, or stage in each of their activities. The
Quality Assurance team needed to quantify quality workflow performance and have visibility to
costs attributed to quality issues. The operations team needed to track and predict requirements
and resource loading per project. And lastly, the finance team needed a tool that would allow
them to efficiently consolidate the cost data of the other departments who were all currently
drafting their own version. Each department, as an effort to fulfill their needs, had either adapted
new systems specifically for their unit, relied on raw data extraction, or simply waited until things
went wrong to make the right decisions.
The local IT Team at CTCC, composed of two ERP Analysts and managed by the Resource and
Finance Manager, John McEwan, was now responsible for fulfilling the needs of these departments
with just the ERP and BI Solution at-hand. Faith Lang, the analyst leading the BI initiative, made it
his mission to proactively reach out to all the departments and build the reports they needed. To
help them keep up with the BI platform, he created a group on social media where resources and
questions could be shared.
Lang’s proactiveness in helping departments leverage the BI solutions improved CTCC’s visibility to
their operations. Yet, the way data and reports were structured and managed didn’t allow for it to
be a long-term solution used by all users in the company. CTCC had much bigger technical,
managerial and strategic problems that needed to be addressed in order to find a sustainable
solution to fully integrate their operations and information systems with the parent company.
The Current State of CTCC
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4. ERP Vendor:
CTCC, previous to its acquisition and transition to their first ERP, had been working with a
Microsoft Access database, a Custom Quality Assurance system, and a Custom Business System
with some additional functionalities. When it was time to consolidate all these data and get an ERP
system, some key mistakes were made.
• Partnered with company that was going to use them as a pilot program for custom functions
and to launch into the North American Market (while everything configured for Europe).
• Package was selected by executive members, without consulting people from all business units.
• Team responsible for implementing the ERP system was knowledgeable about operations, but
not necessarily about IT requirements.
• System was buggy, didn’t finish transferring all the data, teams allowed to create silo
applications that depended on ERP System, yet not removed Access to old systems. Confusion!
IT Department:
The IT Department was a support unit under the operations department, and then under the
finance department. This was already a problem when it came to making decisions. After the
acquisition, it became part of the parent company’s Global Information Services Unit. But some
key mistakes were made in this transition:
• No formal assessment was performed on the company’s overall information management made
to determine how the subsidiary could better leverage corporate’s IT Resources.
• Team was now managed by someone from corporate, enforcing corporate procedures and
hindering their ability to respond promptly to their local departments' needs.
• The ERP department was separated from IT because GIS unit was unfamiliar with their systems.
This caused conflicting strategic directions, IT resource management problems, and a lack of
communication between teams.
• ERP department was not properly staffed with the knowledge and personnel to meet all the
demands of CTCC. ERP queries and reports had to be done manually for more than 50 users!
Data Governance:
As a result of the numerous systems that CTCC was using, and the urgency at which the analyst
needed to retrieve information, no one stopped and looked at how the data was being handled
and shared across departments. This issue resulted in queries being stored in user’s machines and
irretrievable for future use. There was no data governance protocols in place.
BI Implementation:
Although Lang did as best as he could within his scope, some essential steps in implementation
were ignored. For example, he could have done better at defining the big-picture needs,
customizing the canned reports, training the staff, creating more documentation, report
management, and asking the manager to hire more people that specialized in Business
Intelligence and Database Integrations.
4
Looking Back
Where Things Went Wrong

5. No one knows if the corporate SAP project is ever going to resume operations. Therefore, John
McEwan, CTCC’s Resource Manager and Head of Finance, now needs to turn the existing BI
solution into the platform of choice for trusted information distribution throughout the company.
What challenges does he face moving forward, considering the decisions that have been made and
how the project has been implemented?
1. Defining the scope, requirements and benefits of the system
2. Consolidating data sources and business systems available to users
3. Gaining more corporate financial and moral support about local IT needs
4. Integrating into the corporate culture, while still being able to meet local needs
5. Having the right resources in place for users to trust and leverage the existing BI System
Regardless of the way he tries to address the challenges mentioned above, it is important to define
a criteria that would allow McEwan to compare action plans objectively and make sure they
impact the bottom line: Improve CTCC’s profit by giving employees the optimal tool for visibility
in operations and decision-making.
The Proposal that achieves the highest punctuation will be the one chosen. Keep in mind that
some criteria weighs more than others! Max Punctuation is 50 points.
5
Moving Forward
Challenges and Decision-Criteria
Criteria Evaluation Details
IT Resources Required In a scale from 1 to 5, with a 5 meaning least
resources required
Deployment Time In a scale from 1 to 5, with a 5 meaning least
deployment time.
Cost of Implementation (2x) In a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 meaning least
expensive. Score will be counted twice,
Improvement of User Engagement (2x) In a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 meaning most
improvement in engagement. Score counted twice!
Corporate Support Needed In a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 meaning least support
needed.
Functional Improvement In a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 meaning most
functional improvement.
Sustainability (2x) In a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 meaning most
sustainable. Score counted twice!

6. Proposal 1: To Improve Local BI Functionality and Engagement Long-Term
• Set up individual and group meetings with all department leaders to define the business process
from start to finish. Then, define each data point collected or needed at each stage. Once this is
defined, define in which system it is currently going how it is being used to improve operations,
make decisions, and increase profit. Going through this exercise all together, would allow them
to see how their IT decisions help or break the overall business process.
• Find tech evangelist within each department that understand the system, and give them some
type of ownership regarding the way the department uses the BI solution.
• Offer department workshops that showcase the BI system’s functionalities tailored to their
needs, and best practices when handling the reports.
• Review Report Templates to be more tailored to user needs and easily retrievable. Ideally, you
he would have data on who uses these reports and get maybe create a focus group specifically
for helping define the requirements for these reports and actions that can be taken to either
consolidate or improve them.
• Ask corporate to assign an ERP Rep within the GIS unit in charge of ensuring that communication
and requests from the local team can be properly channeled (temporarily at least).
• Keep using the social media channel to share and distribute information
• Focus the culture on collaboration and learning to improve what we do
Proposal 2: To Make Integration with Corporate Easier in the Long-Term
• Do a formal assessment on the company’s overall information management to determine how
the subsidiary could better leverage corporate’s IT Resources.
• Hire external consultant to advice on data integration and optimizing the current structure, in
order to make it easier to integrate to SAP and create a custom template in the future
• Offer department workshops that showcase the BI system’s functionalities tailored to their
needs, and best practices when handling the reports.
• Create a transition team composed of technical and operations people, that can define the
business processes accurately and can help the consultant with drafting the SAP template and
the ERP Department with reviewing the BI Platform tools for users.
• Separate the Finance Department from the ERP Department
• Hire technical people that can help with the querying, creation, and consolidation of reports.
• Assign a local manager to the IT Department at CTCC to ensure availability and transparency, or
simply ask the GIS unit manager to spend some weeks at the local offices to understand needs
• Create more formal documentation on BI system functionalities, and management protocols
that must be implemented by each department before a certain deadline
• Focus the culture on scalability and becoming the best at what they do
Proposal 3: To Just Fulfill the Current BI Demands Short-Term
• Hire technical people that can help with the querying, creation, and consolidation of reports.
• Create more video tutorials tailored for each department’s needs, and share with users online
• Find tech evangelist within each department that understand the system, and give them some
type of ownership regarding the way the department uses the BI solution.
• Focus the culture on getting things done
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Proposals
Possible Solutions

7. Criteria P1 P2 P3
IT Resources Required 5 3 5
Deployment Time 4 2 5
Cost of Implementation (2x) 4 2 5
Improvement of User Engagement (2x) 5 4 2
Corporate Support Needed 5 1 5
Functional Improvement 3 5 1
Sustainability (2x) 3 5 1
TOTAL 41 33 32
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Conclusion
Decision and Reasoning
After careful evaluation of the possible solutions, McEwan should choose proposal number 1.
This proposal would allow them to solidify their internal operations with the resources they
currently have, while simultaneously increasing user engagement the most efficiently. It is not as
sustainable as proposal 2, nor as easy as proposal 3, but these actions will serve as a stepping
stone, to then transition and implement some of the LT actions suggested in proposal 2.
More training alone won’t motivate employees to use the BI system, but engaging them in the
process and shifting to a more collaborative culture would. For example, through the tech
evangelists and the focus groups helping improve the reports, we might be able to encourage
more use of the analytic tools and a sense that their needs are being heard.
Implementing this BI system was a good step to ease the load of the analyst and improve
visibility to operations in a more consolidated way. Also, once they encourage more users to
adapt the system, corporate can still work on the implementation of the new SAP system and
then just integrate the new ERP with the BI solution in-place, without having to re-train
employees on using a new tool.
In order to fix the current reporting structure, we could look at the metadata and see which data
objects and reports are being used the most, by who, for what and how often. By doing so, we
might be able to eliminate some of the one-time requests, or find similar reports that could be
consolidated into more comprehensive ones. This will take some time to do, yet it is an essential
step to ensure sustainability and improve the user experience with the BI System.