PivotLink | Case Study - Bartell Drugs

Founded in 1890, Bartell Drugs operates 50-plus drugstores where it sells OTC medications, personal products, digital photo processing, and convenience items, as well as electronics such as digital cameras and MP3 players.

Challenge

The company employed a business intelligence (BI) solution to store its data, but report generation was slow. "Every time someone wanted to look at any type of sales performance, they'd have to ask IT and wait hours," said Bill Leonard, IT manager for Bartell. What they needed was a BI solution that could:

Generate reports using the data in their existing systems, without requiring re-entry
Give users across the organization access to reporting, eliminating reliance on IT
Provide faster responses to queries, to ensure employees would use it

Solution

PivotLink demonstrated their on-demand business analytics solution for Leonard, and he was impressed with both the speed and ease of use. "We're not a big company," he said. "We don't have any developers, and we couldn't afford to give up a staff person. PivotLink takes very little support - we could add the reporting capabilities without adding a staff person."

Results

For Bartell, sales analysis is quick, thorough, and completely in the hands of individual users.

Reports are run in seconds, even for data over a five-year period
Reports can be personally modified by any employee
Dramatically decreased workload for accounting staff
Prescription drug staff save as much as three hours a day
High employee acceptance

SmartWool
"The key factor that drove us to PivotLink's solution was usability. We needed a solution that would easily allow all levels of management, from president to sales managers, access to reports and ad-hoc queries."
- Kevin Lotz, IT Director

Anchor Blue
"There is a tremendous amount of data and it is important to be able to crunch that data all the way down to the item level and all the way up to class level. We never had that kind of visibility before."
- Harrison Kang, IT Director
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Car Toys
"PivotLink is terrific, so flexible. People can use it in whatever way they want. A merchandising clerk may only need it to check one thing a day; the senior VP of merchandising, who does heavy analysis, might look at inventory turns, inventory levels, and gross margin return on investments; and our replenishment team uses PivotLink to track sales trends and demand so they can make better buying decisions."
- Tom Lockwood, CIO
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