ICON Health and Fitness Strengthens Its Reporting Capabilities

• Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
• Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

• Consumer Goods

• Business Operation
• Sales & Marketing

• Inventory Management
• Predictive Maintenance
• Supply Chain Visibility

• Data Science Services
• System Integration
• Training

ICON Health and Fitness, the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of home exercise equipment, was facing a challenge in tracking and analyzing operational performance across its various companies and business units. The company's IT department was already stretched thin managing a wide range of responsibilities, and the existing ERP system offered limited BI capabilities, making it difficult to compile historical information and perform data trending. Management wanted a business intelligence (BI) environment that could provide greater insight into key performance indicators (KPIs) across the company, especially to understand how each division was performing on a weekly, monthly, and year-to-date basis, with comparisons to previous time periods and business plans. This was crucial to ensure that the company was meeting its revenue and profitability objectives.

ICON Health and Fitness is the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of home exercise equipment. The company has nearly 2,500 employees and nine locations worldwide. ICON owns some of the best-known brands in the fitness industry, including NordicTrack, FreeMotion, ProForm, EPIC, HealthRider, Weider, Image, and Weslo, in addition to licensing the Reebok and Gold’s Gym brands. The company's IT department handles a wide range of responsibilities, from the internal phone system to security, in-house wiring, web services, and the management of the corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

ICON Health and Fitness chose Information Builders' WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform and integration technologies from iWay Software to address their challenges. The WebFOCUS BI platform was chosen for its flexibility in both data retrieval and reporting. It could use stored procedures in ICON’s DB2 database to preserve complex joins and data extraction routines, enabling them to reuse existing software assets. They also liked WebFOCUS Active Technology reports, which permit offline analysis, and WebFOCUS Visual Discovery, a robust data visualization environment for creating interactive reports and graphs. With the help of Information Builders Professional Services, ICON's team used iWay DataMigrator to extract transactional data from the ERP system and load it into specialized data marts, summarized to reveal historic trends regarding sales, finance, product shipments, and other business domains. They then created reports that reveal KPIs for finance, sales, manufacturing, and other parts of the business.

• Information Builders’ technology has had a multimillion dollar impact at ICON, as measured by increased efficiency and accuracy throughout the company, from the finance team to sales, R&D, production and customer service.
• Managers and executives enjoy greater decision-making capabilities, resulting in higher product margins, more responsive production lines, and a just-in-time inventory model that ensures customer satisfaction.
• The Assembly Report, created using WebFOCUS, helps ICON’s research and development team to track products with similar configurations, noting the impact of slight variations in consoles, motors, and other components on the overall system design. This has increased efficiency and speed in the R&D department.

• The Assembly Report saves the R&D department about $1 million per year.
• The new BI system has resulted in a multimillion dollar impact at ICON.