Flexible Solution Provides Visibility
Across the Organization
Zones is a direct marketing reseller of name brand information technology products. The company offers more than 150,000 products from leading manufacturers including Adobe, Apple, Avaya, Cisco, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Kingston, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Sony and Toshiba. Zones sells products through sales, catalogs and the internet.
Challenge
Dave Henry, Vice President for Zones, identified a need for a solution that would transform data from the company’s various business applications into reporting and analytics that employees could use to make better business decisions. When Henry joined Zones, they had a legacy system for gathering data, which they used in conjunction with a reporting package they were licensing.
“The reporting tool wasn’t very flexible,” said Henry. “Employees tended to use Access or Excel for performance reports, but it wasn’t really reporting, just data extraction.”
Henry first introduced a new SQL 2000 database to serve as the engine, but the company “still needed the right user interface to analyze and present the data.” The existing tool was too technical for their business users, and it wasn’t web-based, which was a key requirement for security reasons.
What Zones needed was an on-demand business intelligence solution that could:
-
Give business users immediate access to data and analytics for better decision making
-
Provide easy to use ad-hoc data analysis and reporting
-
Provide faster time to value and reduce operating costs
Solution
PivotLink's easy to use interface empowered 400 Zones business users to access critical reports and conduct ad-hoc data queries. Reports that had been manually created by employees using legacy information were now automatically generated by PivotLink using the most up to date data.
Some of the reports Zones generates with PivotLink include:
-
Number of orders taken and shipped each day, including profit margin
-
Run rate versus budget by division, with views of net sales, margin percentage and margin dollars
-
Comparative view with last year’s numbers, with rollups for different divisions, product categories and customers
-
Revenue goals by person, sales team and group
-
Margin goals by person, sales team and group
-
Performance information for each brand and category manager, with run rate versus product sales goals for each
-
Trend analysis, such as the average rate of sale for each product in the warehouse over a one week, four week, and eight week period
-
Sales by business classifications (delineated by SIC codes)
-
Sales by company size for each Zones manufacturer
Results
“With PivotLink we have visibility into the business we never had before," Henry said. "It’s hard to measure things like customer satisfaction, but we can now see how many shipments miss our advertised one-day shipping policy. Now we can get to the bottom of what the problem is. Reports like this are just a matter of clicks, and every week it becomes clearer how PivotLink is helping us better serve our customers.”
Benefits
-
Return on investment of more than 1,000 percent
-
Secure, enterprise-wide access to relevant business data for better decision making
-
Enhanced sales performance and effectiveness
-
Reassignment of eight sales support staff who were manually producing reports
-
Saved 500 hours spent by merchandising staff on reporting tasks
-
Dramatically improved visibility into every aspect of the business
