Overview

Miller Industries was founded in 1990. Since its inception, the company has provided innovative high-quality towing and recovery equipment worldwide. Listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Miller Industries has a total of four manufacturing facilities in the United States, one in England, and one in France.

Miller Industries markets its products under the well-known brands of Century®, Holmes®, Chevron®, Vulcan®, Boniface®, and Jig®. As the World's leader, Miller Industries provides a complete line of quality equipment including carriers up to 30 feet in length with deck capabilities of up to 40,000 lb and towing recovery units with boom capacities of 75 tons. Products are sold and serviced through the largest distribution network in the industry.

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

Succession planning is critical for the future growth of Miller Industries. Through the adoption of modern business software, Miller Industries expects every employee to better understand the business and grow up the ladder. However, with each software go-live, Miller realized that there was an adoption issue based on IT feedback.

The Solution

Miller Industries discovered the cause of low adoption was due to poor training attendance. Now, with each software rollout, Infor Birst is being used to track the amount of time employees spend on training and use of the software. Adoption rate has been phenomenal, each employee knows that they are being measured and management has easy access to that data.

An Infor Birst customer for almost 3yrs, Miller utilizes Infor Birst to solve business problems. With a top down approach whereby the executive team heavily relies on Birst dashboards to better understand what is driving the business to strategize and collaborate with the rest of the organization. This trickle-down approach has motivated other business units to implement analytic dashboards to measure employees and improve the business. There are approx. 20 self-service dashboards being utilized across the organization, every employee knows how data and analytics are being used to measure them and the company as a whole.

The results

• First go-live of four Birst dashboards done in under 90 days
• A simple dashboard can be created in a few hours, to more complex dashboards in a matter of days
• Business questions answered in 5 minutes instead of 5 days with previous excel driven reporting

Metrics

• 50% reduction in past due accounts receivables with real time visibility into invoicing and collections
• 80% reduction in time to create annual budget revenue
• 80% reduction in IT reporting requests

The Technology

Infor Birst, market leading cloud BI and analytics platform, is designed to provide the right balance of IT governance and end user self-service. Birst integrated with Infor’s business applications, and Infor data lake (component of Infor OS, cloud technology platform) delivers a single version of truth for reporting and analytics.

Disruptive Factor

President and Co-CEO Will Miller realized that after solving a time consuming and error prone Excel budgeting process with Infor Birst, he could apply the same technology to identify the top 15 distributors by revenue for the year. This information was critical to Miller to keep top suppliers happy and loyal by recognizing them during the holidays and annual Presidents Club. Through automated reporting with Infor Birst, Miller has been given back 7 days of his time during each holiday season.

Prior to Infor Birst, Will would spend on average seven days right before Christmas to identify the top 15 distributors to send holiday gifts. This involved multiple spreadsheets and calculations, with multiple reviews to check for errors. These results were married with another report on outstanding orders to determine who should be in the top 15. A final check was done at the first of the year and to confirm Presidents Club awards. With Infor Birst, the dashboard reports top 15 distributors in real time. Will can check the top 15 distributors at any point in time without worrying about errors. And Marketing has access to the same dashboard to send out holiday gifts

Shining Moment

Infor’s announcement of the Infor Data Lake at Inforum several years ago really resonated with the Miller executive team. It was very clear that Infor and Miller had an aligned vision of technology and eliminating data silos through a single data lake repository. Data silos had been an ongoing issue at Miller, forcing the executive team to use Excel driven processes for reporting and analysis.