Reducing Time Spent On Reports By 80%
Scott Kapocsi, Senior Systems Application Developer at Florida’s Natural Growers, Inc. shares his perspective on the challenges addressed by Dimensional Insight’s end-to end business intelligence (BI) platform, Diver Platform™ (Diver). Florida’s Natural replaced their paper-based reporting and analysis system, vastly improved their analysis capabilities, and significantly reduced the burden on IS by implementing Diver.
Problem solved
“Our standard sales reporting system was robust, but we were constantly having to upgrade the HP 9000s as the sales department grew. People were running reports to retrieve just a few numbers at a time. For example, they would create a hard copy report to see what, when, and how many products a broker sold, and then throw out the paper. Now, with Diver, the sales department is able to answer those quick questions online without slowing down the entire system by using the HP 9000s. We quickly recognized that other departments would benefit from the functionality of Diver.”
Rapid time-to-insight
“We use Diver to keep track of and analyze efficiency, revenue, and expense throughout the company. In manufacturing, we track line efficiencies and downtime on a daily basis. In production departments, products and locations are bar coded, so we scan all transactions and download the information to be accessible by Diver. We analyze information down to the user level to see who is doing what, and how much time is spent on a particular job. That information can be cross-referenced with a record status to see how many times sales changed an order in the middle of loading and unloading. We also use Diver to allocate budgets to 149 centers (glass production, concentrate production, sales, administration, etc.) based on historical data for electricity, steam generation, waste treatment, and refrigeration. There are 24,000 accounts in our general ledger, so in the past, compiling a quarterly budget would take ten days. Now it takes only two days. At the end of a quarter, senior management is always interested in summary level revenue and expense reports for all corporate centers. Preparing these reports now takes less than a day, as opposed to a week. If the number of units produced is increasing, senior management wants to know if the percentage of income and expense is also being followed. A correlation between payroll expense and sales, or finding out the cost for a group of centers, is quickly attainable with Diver. We are able to combine the individual data Models together in order to see the trends at the corporate level.”
“There are 24,000 accounts in our general ledger. So in the past, compiling a quarterly budget would take ten days. Now it takes only two days.”
Self-service reporting and analysis
“On the IS side, Diver’s greatest strength is the lack of IS intervention. The Models are created, turned over to the users for approval, and then all reporting from that point on is handled by the user. Speed and flexibility are also the product’s strong points. If we build a multidimensional Model and it’s not exactly what we want, it’s easy to go back and manipulate the Model by swapping a dimension, adding an info field, or changing a calculated column. All of this is accomplished with a simple Windows interface. On the user side, Diver allows fast access to large amounts of historical data, and the ability to view information by any conceivable category. We’re building Models that hold information from 376,000 invoices in Accounts Payable. Users are able to quickly get down to the invoice, even though the database covers a four-year period.”
Lowest total cost of ownership
“Other previous BI solutions were extremely hard to administer, they required a substantial amount of time to implement, and the price was extreme. Dimensional Insight fulfilled our needs, the solution could be developed quickly at a reasonable cost, and we didn’t have to invest time in SQL training.”
Challenges
- Printer platform required constant upgrading as requests for sales related information grew
- Paper based reporting was cumbersome, expensive and unproductive
- Growing demand for new reporting and analytics applications platform
Solution
- Provide powerful data manipulation capabilities
- Deliver an easy-to-use solution offering a zero footprint interface for broad adoption
- Access reports, charts and analytical applications via a single point of entry
Results
- Replaced paper-based reports with self-service reporting and analytics platform
- Enhance the budget analysis process
- Free IS to focus on mission critical initiatives instead of report generation
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Organization
Florida’s Natural Growers, Inc
Industry
Consumer beverage producer
Grower-members
1100+
Customer since
2000
Website
www.floridasnatural.com
Solution
Diver Platform