Cognos Analytic Applications, Makes Waves at ADVANTIS TECHNOLOGIES
“I wish we had this 10 year ago we would've been
so much further ahead.”
Keith Lewis,
Vice-President, Business Development
Company Overview
Advantis Technologies, Inc. manufactures surface
water chemicals, pool and spa chemicals, and
accessories. The company’s flagship swimming pool
and spa chemical brands include GLB Pool & Spa,
Leisure Time, Robarb, and Applied Biochemists, as
well as Blue Devil tools and accessories.
With three divisions, three manufacturing plants,
over 2,000 branded and private label products, and
20 sales territories, Advantis needed to get a
better understanding of its historic and current
sales records and their product and customer
profitability.
Challenges Faced
-
Difficult to extract sales
information from ERP system
-
Provide timely and accurate
sales reports to territory managers
-
Streamline custom reporting
process
In 1995, Advantis consolidated its multiple operational systems
resulting from acquisitions into one central JD
Edwards ERP system. “The
transactional system resulted in a good sales
history database but it was difficult to extract
summary and comparative information,” explains Keith
Lewis, Vice-President of Business Development at
Advantis. “To generate our management reports, we
were re-keying data from JD Edwards. Inevitably
mistakes were made so instead of interpreting and
analyzing our business, a lot of time was wasted
figuring out whose numbers were right, and we still
could not articulate sales performance by
territory.”
Furthermore, because it took two weeks to prepare
and send monthly reports to sales managers, the
information was always out of date by the time it
reached the sales force. “Our sales reps never felt
comfortable walking into a customer for an order
because orders could have already been placed
yesterday or last week,” said Keith.
The company investigated a number of options,
including hiring a full-time programmer to generate
custom reports, but the time required to produce and
maintain the reports was prohibitive. Advantis
turned to its technology partner,
CD Group, an EnabledWorlds partner for a solution and they
recommended
Cognos Analytic Applications.
Benefits Realized
-
Immediate and rapid integration
with
JD Edwards ERP system
-
Reduce monthly reporting time from two weeks to two
hours
-
Improved reporting accuracy
Advantis chose to use Cognos Sales Analysis Analytic
Application, part of the Analytic Applications
Business Performance Management foundation, which
provided a pre-configured information asset to
capture the business metrics and reports they needed
and more. The Analytic Applications solution also
includes mappings into JD Edwardss' file structure
to speed up implementation, enabling Advantis to
leverage pre-defined valuable business reports
within the space of one month." This was a major
benefit and our previous experience trying to get
this data proves it," said Keith.
The monthly reporting process has
also improved dramatically allowing Advantis to
redeploy a resource to higher value-add activities.
Reporting time has been cut from two weeks to two
hours and the reports are being distributed twice
per month. Instead of mailing bulky reports, they
are now emailed to territory managers the same day.
And because the reports are based on the
transactional records from the ERP system, there are
no discrepancies between transactional information
and report information." This has improved
accuracy," said Keith. "Everyone is working from the
same numbers, driving confidence and increased
productivity. It has been a good morale booster too
because we are more responsive to the salespeople.
Receiving near real-time answers to their questions
increases their ability to work their territories
with confidence. We are giving people the support
they need."
As a result of the Sales Analysis
Analytic Application, Advantis has identified
opportunities to restructure product offerings and
is changing sales force compensation from its
historical focus on revenues to a system based on
profit margin. "It's something we always thought
about doing but discarded before because it was too
much work given the reports we had. The data was
there but we just couldn't get to it," said Keith.
Now the company can quickly and easily analyze
profitability of products, product types, and
customers and uncover the effects of price, cost,
volume, and product mix using the packaged reports
and the flexibility for ad-hoc queries inherent in
the
Cognos solution.
"We can now conduct analysis we
could not do before - and see things we had not
considered before. Cognos Analytic Applications was
a very good match between what we wanted and what it
did. All that and cash neutral in year zero."
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