Business
Entrepreneurial vision and strategic marketing decisions have turned Köenig+Neurath, a family business founded in 1925 in Karben near Frankfurt/Main, into one of the top selling brands for office furniture in Germany. The constant focus on a nationwide network of over 300 authorized trading partners guarantees the highest possible proximity to customers and markets. An outstanding logistics system ensures the smooth flow of materials of over 30,000 single items per day and provides great flexibility in the manufacturing process. With a combined production site of more than 120,000 square meters in their manufacturing facilities in Karben, Kassel, Weissensee and Saarwellingen, Köenig+Neurath produces about 2,500 units of office furniture daily.

The previous situation
K+N was using an Excel-based planning system for each individual profit center, consolidating them in a very complex financial or balance sheet planning process. Budget figures were reported to the controlling department, where number-based reports, containing few graphical elements, were prepared. In addition to Excel various modules of SAP R/3, such as VIS, SD, CO were used to gather information for processing and presentation use.

BOARD solution
A step towards unification of the corporate planning of Köenig+ Neurath AG should have been done by a standardized plan managed on a company-wide Excel forms. The illustration of the planning process using the counter-current method (top-down and bottom-up in the same solution), but also the intended use of the actual analytical data as foundation for the planning process proved to be too high a standard for the Excel logic. The decision to implement BOARD, the user-friendly Swiss Business Intelligence product was made due to the products high implementation speed, its close connection between the database and extremely easy-to-use front end, and its ability to run calculation procedures without any programming effort. Köenig+ Neurath have developed individual sales planning module (counter-current method, revenue and variable costs) and other planning modules such as HR costs, investments and other types of cost. BOARD has provided them with maximum flexibility when connecting to a variety of different data sources and now collects data for analysis from SAP R/3, SD, FI and CO via an ODBC connection directly into the OLAP world of BOARD.