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Privately Held Wholesale Distributor Achieves Comprehensive View Into Overall Businesses With Informer
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Quality Assurance
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
- Training
The Challenge
With over 300 employees and over a dozen locations across the United States, this privately held company is a leading business-to-business wholesale distributor of equipment and related parts. The Company offers customers access to an inventory of over 12,000 products as well as maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) parts from over 400 manufacturers. The distributor had been using Entrinsik Informer since 2006. Prior to implementing Informer, only a few individuals within the company conducted data analysis. They used spreadsheets containing a tremendous number of rows. Due to the time-consuming complexity of working with this data, only one person had intimate knowledge of the information and was able to glean meaningful insight through analysis. The Director of the company’s BI Department previously worked there and used an early version of Informer. After leaving the distributor, he returned in 2017 and was asked to build a new business intelligence architecture that would enable people throughout their organization to easily access and analyze data to make better and more timely business decisions. Not only had the company been growing organically, it had also grown through acquisition by acquiring multiple businesses in 2017. The challenge this presented lied in pulling data from the different businesses to get a comprehensive view into the overall business. One of the newly acquired companies continued to use their own systems for data capture and reporting. Still, the BI Director needed to track metrics and key performance indicators (KPI’s) and produce operational reports for the combined business. In addition, the distributor’s business development group relied on him to pull together consolidated reporting and dashboard views for bi-monthly board meetings. According to the BI Director, it was also important to build out stories for analytics, for example to understand the new company’s buying journey work flow, including: Work orders created, When work was completed, When work orders were turned into billing, When work orders were turned into invoices, When invoices were sent out, When payment was made. The BI Director’s vision for their new BI architecture required a modern data analytics environment that supported the success of the distributor’s growing business.
About The Customer
This privately held company is a leading business-to-business wholesale distributor of equipment and related parts, with over 300 employees and more than a dozen locations across the United States. The company offers customers access to an inventory of over 12,000 products, as well as maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) parts from over 400 manufacturers. The distributor has been using Entrinsik Informer since 2006, and prior to its implementation, only a few individuals within the company conducted data analysis using complex spreadsheets. The Director of the company’s BI Department, who had previously worked there and used an early version of Informer, returned in 2017 to build a new business intelligence architecture. The company has grown both organically and through acquisitions, which presented challenges in pulling data from different businesses to get a comprehensive view of the overall business. The BI Director needed to track metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) and produce operational reports for the combined business, as well as provide consolidated reporting and dashboard views for bi-monthly board meetings.
The Solution
In April 2017, the BI Director attended the Entrinsik Informer Users Conference and was impressed with the new, redesigned version 5. The design features and functionality of Informer 5 fit nicely into his vision for a modern BI architecture. One of the key requirements was having strong ETL functionality to stage the data coming from different sources, which is one of Informer 5’s many strengths. With Informer 5, the BI Director pulls disparate data from over a dozen data sources (Postgres SQL, UniData, Microsoft SQL Server, etc.) and large spreadsheets into one place. Using Informer’s unique Data Flows feature, he reviews, cleans, and prepares the data as it streams into Informer and builds curated Informer Datasets, Informer Reports, and visualizations for different stakeholders. The BI Director started using Informer 5 in July 2017 and immediately began generating ad-hoc reports and visualizations for several managers and executives. To consolidate data necessary for analysis, he worked with the newly acquired company’s IT team to extract data from their FileMaker database and import it into Informer as separate Datasets. These Datasets range in size from 2K rows for the customer set to 3.7 million rows for the line item detail set. After the consolidation process, the core data file resulted in 700K rows with around twenty columns. With this data now blended, he generates graphics and KPI reports that the business development team uses for board meetings. The BI Director also generates dashboards and reports that he publishes out to various business groups. He uses an inventory Dataset to pull an inventory status report every morning using real-time data from 3 different data sources (2 SQLs and a UniData database). That information is disseminated using Informer’s Jobs feature, which sends automated daily emails that include a link to inventory updates and dashboards.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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