Jabil isn’t just a manufacturer, they are experts on global supply chain, logistics, automation, product design and engineering solutions. They are also interested and involved in the holistic application of emerging technologies like additive manufacturing, autonomous technologies, and artificial intelligence. They are a technologically motivated enterprise, so it’s no surprise that they would apply this forward-thinking view to their finance reporting as well.

Jabil is a sizable operation with over 260,000 employees across 100 locations in 30 countries. The world’s leading brands rely on Jabil’s unmatched breadth and depth of end-market experience, technical and design capabilities, manufacturing know-how, supply chain insights and global product management expertise. When you add to that the diverse needs of their clients and partners in healthcare, aerospace, telecommunications, and consumer industries, you can see why they would be interested in continuing to enhance financial reporting.

Efficient management of an incredibly complex supply chain

Jabil is a longtime partner and IBM Business Analytics (BA) portfolio user. The portfolio contributes to the efficient management of their incredibly complex supply chain.

Switching to IBM Business Analytics gave Jabil the ability to gather and structure data in a centralized approach for management. The integrated solution plays a role in reporting, analysis, planning and forecasting.

IBM Cognos Controller offers Jabil a simplified automated consolidation process that management can use to steer business performance. The solution shifts time spent away from gathering data and report creation and allows for increased focus on understanding insights and acting on them.

Using IBM’s Business Analytics portfolio, Jabil was able to streamline the financial reporting process. With the ability to “steer the ship” in real time, Jabil can easily bring in new business. Since the solutions are scalable, new customers are efficiently onboarded and integrated into Jabil’s finance reporting.

All of this provides leadership with the ability to see trends across their customer base and physical plants. Leaders can develop effective best practices, working practices and drill down on data to respond effectively, providing Jabil with total business analytics throughout their organization.

Keeping it small, keeping it connected

The first tools Jabil implemented were Cognos Controller and TM1 (now rebranded as Planning Analytics with Watson) as part of an overall finance transformation. They were interested in powerful tools that could handle a variety of use cases outside of management reporting, like tax provisioning, treasury cash forecasting, reporting, and modeling for finance. Cognos Controller and Planning Analytics proved to be durable, scalable, and sufficiently powerful.

In most organizations when an IT team finishes a project, they move on to another project and a support team takes over the finished project. At Jabil, the developers that build a project own it for the duration. From a skills point of view, developers are the ideal support staff to keep applications up and running.

“We can bring in more investments and the IT team can handle it. We’re working in a weeks and months timeframe where others are taking months and years. We can’t even see where the bar used to be.” —Patrick Patterson, Senior Director Finance Digital Transformation, Jabil

Knowledgeable partners drive success

For 15 years, IBM and Jabil have been integrating successful solutions with Cognos. No tool is perfect, and the leaders at Jabil understood that they would need a dedicated partner for the duration. A partner ready to invest in the tool and help with solutions and troubleshooting. IBM has been that partner.

“Data security, accuracy and the ability to adapt to change with speed, puts Cognos Analytics and Planning Analytics ahead of many other solutions.” —Patrick Patterson, Senior Director Finance Digital Transformation, Jabil

To learn more about the IBM Business Analytics portfolio, explore our newly released eBook on the four steps to making better business decisions.

Also check out the Business Analytics Enterprise webpage to learn how your organization can improve business planning and outcomes with data-driven decision making.