Solutions used: APOS PUBLISHER
Product Components Used: Bursting Manager
Background:
Genlyte Supply Division consists of three companies (brands); Crescent Lighting, Stonco Lighting and ExceLine. They manufacture a wide array of indoor and outdoor lighting products that serve the commercial, residential and industrial markets. Supply Division is focused on providing lighting products that exceed customer expectations. They offer service and support that is timely, courteous and competent. The Supply Division prides itself on continual improvement of processes and products while maintaining compliance with applicable regulatory, customer specified and industrial design engineering requirements.
Challenge:
Supply Division developed a sales report using Crystal Reports. The President and Regional Sales Managers are able to view these reports and download the information from BusinessObjects Enterprise XI Release 2 into Microsoft Excel to analyze the business. At month end, they are required to create smaller reports based on territory and email or fax them to the appropriate sales representative. The preparation and distribution of the 150 smaller reports required extensive manual effort and was very time consuming.
Supply Division wanted to find a way to create individual report files accessible to the respective sales representatives automatically from the system. They wanted to send smaller Excel reports to the company intranet (WIN system). The WIN system serves as portal for the sales agencies to use daily to check inventory, order status, catalog number and customer numbers. As part of the Supply Division’s efforts for continual improvement they contacted APOS Systems to assist with the solution.
Solution:
The success of this project required the synergy of many people, departments and companies which include Information Technology, Web Administration, Marketing, Sales Management, Sales Rep Agencies, and APOS Systems. Once APOS reviewed Supply Division’s requirements, it was agreed that Bursting Manager was the solution they were looking for. Bursting Manager was capable of bursting the sales report from BusinessObjects Enterprise into the smaller reports based on parameters set out by Bill Perlack, Information Technology Manager, Supply Division.
The preliminary concept was developed; the sales requirements were established; the intranet was prepared; and the reports were designed. With the APOS Bursting Manager demonstration software the pilot was ready to test. Barret Gorman, Northeast Regional Sales Manager for Crescent/Stonco tested the solution with three sales rep agencies within his territory and Bill McShane, Exceline National Sales Manager tested the solution with one sales rep agency within his area.
"After installing the Busting Manager demonstration software and completing the tutorial, it was tested with the actual sales representative reports. The Supply Division was able to assess the impact to system performance and the overall process before purchasing and final implementation. Throughout the whole testing process, APOS support was superb! I was pleased with their responsiveness and knowledge of Crystal Reports and the APOS tool. I was convinced that Bursting Manager was the solution Supply Division was looking for," said Bill Perlack.
Subsequent to the successful pilot test, the implementation was completed with the full rollout of the solution to all sales rep agencies. This was not a difficult implementation because the majority of pieces were in place. The APOS Bursting Manager tool was the add-on that extended the BusinessObjects Enterpirse capabilities in order to provide Supply Division the desired solution. The success of this project is attributed to creative thinking, team work and technology.
Bursting Manager has proven to be a very productive utility. The ROI was quickly realized with approximately 31 hours saved each month. Supply Division’s Regional Sales Managers can now work on business decisions without the manual preparation and distribution of reports to each sales rep agency. "Our sales representatives are now armed with real time sales and distribution data whenever they need it. They have the ability to customize reports by sales or product SKU. This will assist in better territory analysis and management," said Barret Gorman, Region Sales Manager.
Why APOS?
"The biggest selling feature was the setup and administration. I was able to test and implement Bursting Manager behind the scenes with absolutely no impact to our business process. I compared the Bursting Manager to the existing capabilities of BusinessObjects Enterprise. There is much less setup and administration work involved with the APOS Bursting Manager tool. Consequently, I could achieve our business goals much quicker," claimed Bill Perlack. "With the success of this sales project, we are also going to automatically distribute supplier on-time performance reports using the Bursting Manager tool," Bill continued.
APOS Systems Inc. is an SAP BusinessObjects software solution provider in the SAP PartnerEdge program. Named SAP BusinessObjects Technology Partner of the Year for the past three years, APOS has been a Crystal partner since 1996. APOS has acknowledged a key SAP BusinessObjects XI and Crystal Enterprise strength - its open architecture - and has designed and developed a variety of add-on solutions that offer customers additional capabilities within the SAP BusinessObjects XI infrastructure.
For more information:
Allan Pym, VP Sales and Chief Operating Officer
519.666.2020 or apym@apos.com