More Than 10,000 Questions Answered Each Month
Kansas City, Missouri-based SmartWool is the inventor and manufacturer of award winning, high performance wool socks and apparel. SmartWool fabric was engineered 12 years ago by former New England ski instructors to be soft, quick drying, itch-free and odor-free.
Challenge
SmartWool was faced with the immediate need to address a company-wide business intelligence deficiency, including lack of analytical flexibility and the inability to produce interactive "what if" scenario reports. The company needed reporting capabilities for internal employees and an external sales force, as well as the ability to provide these users with a single version of the truth to facilitate crucial business decision making and to continue driving growth.
“We are an organization that has grown quickly,” said Kevin Lotz, IT Director for SmartWool. “Our 60 plus employees were relying on spreadsheets and other manual processes to extract and report on data from SmartWool’s operational databases. Consequently, there was little flexibility in the way information could be analyzed, and the overhead and inconsistency of data created significant operational challenges that threatened to stunt our company’s growing profit margin.”
What SmartWool needed was a business intelligence solution that could:
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Allow non-technical users to conduct on-demand, ad-hoc analysis
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Provide rapid deployment and lower TCO
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Enable the company to get a single, comprehensive view of business performance
Solution
Lotz did not want SmartWool users to be constrained by pre-aggregated data cubes, which meant that an on-premise business intelligence solution was not a viable option. He also wanted a solution that would empower non-technical users across the company to easily run on-demand ad-hoc queries. The company reviewed PivotLink and was impressed with its unmatched ease of use, affordability and Software-as-a-Service delivery model.
“The key factor that drove us to PivotLink was the usability of its browser-based solution,” Lotz said. “PivotLink is able to return ad-hoc queries in a matter of just a second or two. We needed a solution that would easily allow all levels of management – from the president to sales managers – to access reports and conduct ad-hoc queries.”
PivotLink also gives SmartWool a high level of query customization, with over 10,000 queries typically executed each month by both internal staff and a third-party sales force.
Results
Since the initial implementation, SmartWool has expanded its use of PivotLink to monitor inventory information such as available to sell and uncommitted inventory metrics, as well as available to promise and purchase order data. PivotLink is now used at every level of the organization, from the company president to employees who manage day-to-day orders.
“PivotLink exceeded our expectations of what we thought we could get with a BI solution,” said Lotz. “With traditional solutions we were not able to find this degree of flexibility, power and customizability.”
SmartWool’s Supply Chain and Operations Analyst Geoff Beltzhoover, who has years of experience helping organizations implemented traditional BI systems, echoed the positive impact of PivotLink on the company, “there was a huge usability difference that I saw here.”
Benefits
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Enabled business users to analyze and view data in any way
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Easy to use and learn
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Faster, more informed decisions
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Reduced reliance on IT
