Driving Performance: Facing the Customer
Intelligence Tools Create Smart Reports
November 1, 2002
By John Pallatto
Before the advent of web-based business intelligence tools, a lot of enterprises were practically flying blind when it came to understanding how fast their products were moving through the distribution chain. If companies wanted to learn how much product was in their inventories compared to the inventories of their wholesale and retail distributors, they had to rely too much on paper reports provided by sales staff in the field or on the courtesy of their customers. Next, the battle was trying to collate sales and inventory reports from data stored in separate, incompatible databases—one containing production line information, another containing warehouse inventory tallies, and yet another for order management.
Bringing this disparate data together involved countless hours of grunt work, transcribing the information from computer printouts into spreadsheets before the product line managers could start crunching the numbers to find out what was actually going on in the marketplace.
However, since the mid 1990s, companies have discovered ways to bring all these disparate data sources together using Web-based business intelligence tools. These tools not only speed up and automate the process of gathering the information, but also provide analysis tools that offer deeper insights into the dynamics of their distribution channels.
With business intelligence technology, enterprises get more timely information, they discover new sales opportunities, devise more-sophisticated pricing strategies, and learn more about which products are their best sellers and where they are most popular. All of this information helps adherents of a well-implemented business intelligence program increase revenue and improve profitability.
TaylorMade Keeps Sales in the Fairway
At TaylorMade-adidas Golf, one of the top-of-the-line manufacturers of golf clubs, the problem was an even more acute backlog of reports that the com-pany's information systems group had neither the resources nor the time to produce.
The company didn't have a centralized enterprise resource planning system. It only had a series of legacy applications for manufacturing, order management, finance, and accounting, explains Tom Collard, information systems director with Carlsbad, Calif.-based TaylorMade.
If the company wanted to generate business reports, it had to run report- writing applications for each of the systems. This involved running a COBOL program for the order management system, an Oracle Reports program for the financial system, and a Progress database language program for the manufacturing system.
Rather than employ full-time programmers to produce these reports, TaylorMade would outsource the report production chores. The report backlog produced a nagging problem for its sales representatives, according to Collard.
When salespeople went out to visit TaylorMade's customers at golf pro shops and sporting goods retail chains, they didn't have up-to-date inventory reports. The sales reps would take orders for clubs, accessories, and clothing without confidence that the goods were available for delivery as promised, Collard says.
To solve this problem, Collard says TaylorMade decided in 1995 that it needed to build a data warehouse and implement business intelligence technology to get a better handle on its inventory.
It selected the Business Objects business intelligence package because it was one of the early successful products on the market, and the company offered a Macintosh version to match TaylorMade's desktop standard.
The goal of this business intelligence implementation was to eliminate the reporting backlogs by making report production a self-service process and creating a data warehouse to consolidate data resources, Collard explains.
With these systems in place, TaylorMade has not only eliminated the report backlog, it has gradually shrunk the time it takes to get updated inventory reports out to its sales representatives.
Before this system was implemented, the sales staff had to rely on hard-copy computer printouts of sales and inventory reports that were mailed to sales representatives around the country. "By the time the reps got them, the reports were already two or three days old and they would hold these reports for a week or more," says Collard.
This meant that the sales reps were promising product delivery based on inventory information that could be almost 9 to 11 days old. As a result, there were many occasions when sales reps had to call customers to tell them that TaylorMade could not fulfill an order it had accepted the day before, he says.
With the Business Objects platform in place, the sales staff can access TaylorMade's inventory reporting system over the Internet and download a report that is only a day old. For the sales reps, "now it is just a matter of getting a report the night before and going to visit their accounts," says Collard.
The technology has helped TaylorMade not only reduce costs by eliminating the reporting backlog and the need to outsource the report-writing tasks to contractors, it has eliminated a lot of the wasted time and effort that resulted from booking orders that it couldn't fulfill.
Getting a clearer view of inventory was especially important, Collard says, because TaylorMade, a subsidiary of Adidas-Salomon Group, based in France, is a global company and "we have inventory positions all over the globe."
TaylorMade has doubled its sales over the past three years from about $300 million to $600 million, and seen its market share grow at the expense of its key competitors Callaway Golf Co. and Titleist. Collard says he believes that the business intelligence platform and the generally improved access to corporate data have helped the company double its sales.
An extract from Internet World - full article available here.
