Business Problems Solved_withBI

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Board; The New World of Business Intelligence and Performance Managementwww.board.com877-US-BOARD

The New World of Business Intelligence andPerformance Management

Business Problems Solved:With better Business Intelligence

This document presents a series of business challenges, why organizations faced

them and how these problems were solved through the use of business intelligencebest practices.

Charlotte Russe

Charlotte Russe is a leading mall-based clothing retailer dedicated to

affordable women's clothing. The company currently operates 400 stores in 43

states. Despite its success as a fast growth company opening roughly 50 stores per

year, Charlotte Russe struggled with budgeting and planning.

Its sales, markdown and performance analysis/planning processes involved

manual steps that were a significant burden on productivity. Their plans and analysis

lacked accuracy and consistency. The processes had been subjected to misseddeadlines, fallout and fire-fighting. Charlotte Russe embarked on the transformation

initiative to automate and improve their sales, markdown and performance analysis

processes.

The implementation of BI applications enabled Charlotte Russe to improve

on all of their existing problems. Overall, the user-friendly dynamics were more

efficient and allowed the firm to utilize effective methods for collaboration and

reporting. Many users are now able to simultaneously work with the system. They

were able to streamline sales analysis and markdown planning processes from days

to minutes. They reduced fallout, eliminated data entry errors and improvedaccuracy and realism of the planning models. Now, analysts and management can

focus on analysis activities rather than data maintenance and administration tasks,

especially due to all the significant improvements in accessing, visualizing and

analyzing the relevant inventory and store sales data contained the corporate data

warehouse.


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Computer Gross

Computer Gross is the key distributor of computer hardware and software in

Italy. Computer Gross distinguishes itself by its high level of service and capacity for

innovation. Computer Gross has succeeded in acquiring over 2,800 retailers and

becoming the number one distributor of IBM products in Italy. Their business

challenges cover various application areas such as sales, budgeting, process

management, finance, and inventory monitoring.

Computer Gross Italy was looking for a way to achieve better control over

their daily business, to become more agile in their decision-making process and to

uncover new business opportunities. The general director of the company, Ingemar

F. Bianchini, explains their needs and their search for a solution that would finally

free our people in charge of product groups to create analyses themselves at will,

and to provide them with deeper detail than we believed possible."

The implementation of a BI application provided Computer Gross with a

single tool that could easily perform analysis, from simple to extremely complicated,

in a single view, with swift response times. One of the most significant benefits, as a

company in the retail and distribution industry, was the new ability to daily monitor

the course of business for over 5,000 products, with a detailed analysis of each

product line, geographic area, vendor and customer.

"The most surprising thing," underlines Sr. Bianchini, "is that the speed in

reply times and the flexibility to give autonomy to end users are accompanied with

considerable simplicity of utilization! The user training was really minimal, the IT

group responsible, after only five days, was able to train all of the users at Computer

Gross."

"The success reached enabled Computer Gross to extend management

intelligence to other areas of the business, such as management control, provide

attention to specialty products, perform margin analysis by product line, geographic

area and transaction, and then pass the analysis to the warehouse with indicators of

rotation and obsolescence, and to combine our Marketing efforts to continue our

growth, to become one of the largest distributors in the IT market," he said.


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Harvey Nichols

Harvey Nichols is a high fashion retailer, focusing on branded merchandise and

quality food and restaurant offerings. With a staff of 3000, Harvey Nichols is a

leading retailer in the UK and Ireland. The main areas this firm was experiencing its

challenges involved reporting/analytics, budgeting and forecasting.

They were in need of a harmonized approach that provided an easier, accurate and

cost-effective method for their operations. Martin Schofield, retail operations

director, explains Our existing reporting wasnt cohesive or reliable and was

produced by a myriad of different tools. Users were not confident in the accuracy or

reliability of the data.

The benefits that resulted from the addition of advanced business intelligence

included system enhancements, consistent data and improved performance. The

huge pressure put on the IT department by the demands of a retail business to

provide ad hoc reports/analysis and to answer a barrage of questions about the

accuracy, consistency and usefulness of the data has virtually disappeared. This

freed up time to concentrate on delivering further projects, and continuously

improving performance.

Business Objects reports used to take anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes to

run, and now those same reports can be produced virtually instantaneously. Martin

Schofield comments Users are now able to have the data that they require at their

fingertips, allowing them to concentrate on the analysis they should be doing, rather

than sitting around waiting for the reports to be produced.

Hein Gerike

Hein Gerike is an international trading company with a strong own-label

presence. The company sells equipment, technical products, luggage and all sorts of

accessories in addition to a wide selection of clothing and helmets.

For a trading company like Hein Gericke, its supply chain is the core of the

whole business activity, and is critical to the companys success. In order to be able

to satisfy market requirements in this dynamic field, the company was looking for an


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information and planning system through which its in-house optimization initiative

could be implemented.

The main areas of application that Hein Gerike benefitted greatest from by

implementing BI applications include top-down revenue planning and bottom-up

sales planning. Also rolling forecasts, which are inserted between the input of the

bottom-up planning and the final calculation of purchase-order proposals. They also

significantly benefitted from the forecasts of stocks, consisting of a "sawtooth curve

for the stock trend for the next 12 months that takes into consideration the

purchase-order proposals calculated by the system itself. Lastly, the use of purchase

order proposals allows buyers to rely on the BI systems proposals, instead of

generating vague purchase-order proposals for over 50,000 items on the basis of

long lists.

The above organizations selected BOARD as their BI application.

About BOARDFounded in 1994, BOARD International is the global leader in the Business

Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management toolkit space. BOARD hasenabled over 1800 companies worldwide to rapidly deploy BI & CPM applications in asingle integrated environment in a fraction of the time and cost of traditionalsolutions.BOARDs offerings are unique because we rapidly deliver an all-in-one toolkit solutionthat gives you a simple, easy to use, comprehensive view into each and every partof your organization, ensuring your ability to make the best decisions possible withthe most up-to-date information available. BOARD fully integrates your businessprocesses and therefore uniquely links performance to strategic vision at all levelsdown to the operational detail.

Business Problems Solved_withBI

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