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Aircraft Brand Engages Longview for Automated, Integrated ERM

Optimized work flow will manage Dassault’s continued growth

Dassault Aviation Main Image.jpg

The Client

Dassault Aviation is a leading aerospace company with a presence in over 90 countries across five continents. It produces the Rafale fighter jet as well as the complete line of Falcons. The company employs a workforce of over 11,000 and has assembly and production plants in both France and the United States, and service facilities around the globe. Since the rollout of the first Falcon 20 in 1963, over 2,500 Falcon jets have been delivered. Dassault offers a range of six business jets from the twin-engine 3,350 nm large-cabin Falcon 2000S to its flagship, the tri-engine 6,450 nm ultra-long range Falcon 8X and the new ultra widebody cabin Falcon 6X.

Key Outcomes:

  • Scalable planning and budgeting that will grow with the company
  • Visibility and control throughout the budgeting process
  • Streamlined, consistent reporting across divisions and offices
  • Automation of previously manual processes prone to errors and delays

The Goal

Dassault sought to move away from balky and labor-intensive Excel-based dashboards. The company needed to automate its reporting process to create easy access, customize, and use views of its performance at a given time and over several different time frames. Being able to capture key business performance measures at any time was necessary not only to optimize operational performance, but also to tie Dassault’s financial details and organization to its production strategy. Manual processes were prone to errors and offered limited functionality for digging into the details and causes of variances between periods and between budgets, forecasts, and reality.

To overcome the tedium, lack of control, difficulty in locating sources of errors, and little insightful information produced by Dassault’ s legacy spreadsheet program, Longview sought to deliver a system that automated as many processes as possible. Longview leveraged Dassault’ s decade of experience and historical data on the central platform to accomplish the goal of enabling the company to make better decisions based on dynamic, responsive, data-informed results and trends.

The Challenge

Creating a positive and intuitive user experience for Dassault’s management team was key to obtaining buy-in and adoption of the new reporting system. Longview proposed tailoring the tool to capture, manipulate, and present data that allowed executives and managers from various departments to visualize a consistent version of the company’s manufacturing performance, operating costs, and key performance measurements. The transformation of historical data, standardization of hierarchies, and a focus to introduce crucial data elements were the first steps ensuring the dashboard communicated the entire story.

Once that was accomplished, the software could take over, slotting data into appropriate categories, compiling, and consolidating figures from across the enterprise. Eliminated manual processes cut out data entry errors and overrides, ensured all data was accounted for and correct, and drastically reduced the amount of administrative resources required to finalize reports and plans.

The Solution

The implementation of Longview Analytics software allowed Dassault to pull together all its planning data from its general ledger, job-costing system, and diverse regional offices into a central database. Longview worked with the company to build several customized dashboards for displaying historical revenue and expenditures as well as models of future performance based either on historical data or hypothetical scenarios based on possible strategy shifts or market forces.

Longview Analytics includes demonstrations and training for Dassault’s managers. They were able to see firsthand and in hands-on learning sessions how the new tool would enable them to complete their reports faster and more accurately. The built-in comment and collaboration tools allows them to share information that make the reports more robust and increase their value in operational decision making. The ability to drill down into each category to examine period-to-period anomalies and trends makes them more efficient. This new transparency also engendered greater trust in the performance numbers and confidence in the allocation of marketing, information technology, and other shared costs among individual projects and offices.

Most importantly, Longview Analytics dashboards ensure optimized workflows that are trackable and viewable in real time. Incorporating email alerts and making the dashboards accessible via mobile and handheld devices empowers Dassault to adjust forecasts, budgets, and goals and to react quickly to market opportunities.

The Result

Dassault managers now have the ability to access critical decision-making information viewable on intuitive dashboards. By distributing single-version realities, the company engages all stakeholders, soliciting comments and facilitating collaboration.

Longview’s capabilities will ensure Dassault can manufacture time-sensitive reports quickly so it can take advantage of identifying trends and needed action to ensure the adherence to the production schedule. Longview’s scalability ensures the system will expand with the company, adding functions as needed and allowing micro-views of business assumptions that may need to be altered.

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