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Problem: Reorganization creates information vacuum and decision gridlock.
Background
The client designs and markets upscale branded sportswear and outerwear and sells
its products primarily through golf pro shops and resorts, corporate sales accounts,
and specialty retail stores.
To improve management focus, the client embarked upon a company-wide reorganization.
The changes, which decentralized business functions such as inventory management and
shifted them to six strategic business units organized around markets, have created
a demand for key business data among a wider range of managers within the company.
"As we anticipated reorganizing into our new structure, we recognized the need for much
more powerful data analysis and reporting capabilities." Our goal was to make the huge
amount of business data locked away in our legacy systems available to the SBU leaders and
analysts in an environment that allows them to easily access, report, and derive key
information to make better decisions and optimize their businesses. We also wanted
to reduce their reliance on IT people for static reports from the legacy system."
Intelligent-Information Solution
In this highly competitive business, it was necessary to design a solution, which
could track bookings, sales, margins, and inventory management performance.
The client also needed to be able to analyze large volumes of customer and purchase data,
track sales based on multiple dimensions such as channel, sales representative,
geography and season, as well as monitor inventory levels to ensure that the right apparel
is available to meet multi-channel demand. In addition, the solution needed to automatically
broadcast literally hundreds of reports to its managers and employees on a regular basis.
All Business Units needed to have their intelligence needs served by an enterprise solution.
Results
Each Business Unit started out with very general reports, but it quickly got more advanced
as the team learned the capabilities of the system and how it mapped with its business process.
Key sales reports include the daily bookings report, and the net booking versus net invoicing report.
Another bonus was precise sales and operational detail such as new visibility into order cancellations.
And for customer returns, sales management has data down to the individual piece level so it can learn
where an item was returned and why.
Key performance factors can be accessed and analyzed online, for example, through a browser
one can quickly and easily drill down into quarter-to-quarter bookings data. Or one can move
from high-level to very specific data, going from overall bookings, down to region, salesperson,
and even the specific account. With this information, the sales teams have the facts to determine
whether they should continue calling on a particular account, or if they should change the way we
work with them.
Reporting tasks that used to take about 1000 hours a year to run, analyze, format, and distribute,
now it takes us about 10 hours." So with information-driven sales initiatives that require less
IT time, both the sales and IT teams come out ahead.
For more information contact:
Mike Restle 920-882-1904 or
restlem@versifit.com
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