Case Study

Background:
Founded in 1968, Southern Wine and Spirits of America, Inc. is the largest distributor of wine and spirits in the U.S. With corporate headquarters in Miami, Florida, the company operates in 11 states. Following a period of expansion and growth, Southern Wine and Spirits’ sales for 2001 reached more than $4 billion, commanding more than 12 percent of total domestic wine and spirits revenues in the U.S.

Challenge:

Recent acquisitions of additional wine and spirits distributorships by Southern Wine and Spirits contributed to a proliferation of different reporting tools and processes. This led to an increasing need for a standard reporting mechanism to provide sales information to its suppliers. Without a standard, central reporting system, each of Southern Wine and Spirits’ sites only had time to furnish select suppliers with information on sales using a variety of less efficient de-centralized reporting systems. In addition, the amount of reports and information that was demanded by the suppliers was beyond what could be effectively handled by any one of Southern Wine and Spirits’ sites alone.  “We had three objectives when we built our Business Partner Xchange,” says Bob Burg, CIO for Southern Wine and Spirits. “We needed to provide a common centralized reporting system to get sales and marketing information to our supplier partners; the solution needed to be web-enabled, available 24 x 7, and we required that it be intuitive and easy to use. Crystal Enterprise met all of our needs and then some.”

Solution:
Southern Wine and Spirits chose to implement a combination of products from Crystal Decisions and APOS Systems, Inc. (http://www.apos.com), a certified Crystal Decisions Enterprise Partner, to help it quickly put together a central reporting system with a standard set of reports for all suppliers. This highly-scalable system met the requirement to be able to scale enough to deliver more than 15,000 sales reports every month to approximately 2500 suppliers in 11 different states via a single extranet information portal—at significantly reduced costs than Southern Wine and Spirits’ current collection of reporting methods. 

“After evaluating several alternatives, we chose Crystal Decisions’ Crystal Enterprise reporting system as the solution we needed to get this job done. It was one of the few reporting systems with an architecture that could provide the scalability required to handle our large batch reporting needs,” says Ted Harwood, Network and Reporting Systems Manager for Southern Wine and Spirits. “This system is able to easily scale either horizontally or vertically, which provides us an incredible amount of flexibility. In addition, it has the ability to load balance its report generation, cheduling and other key services across servers for better performance.”

In the lab, Southern Wine and Spirits scheduled batches of thousands of reports at a time against a highly tuned Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database with 23 million rows to assess the erformance capabilities of Crystal Enterprise.

“Because of the scope of the project, we performed extensive internal lab testing with Crystal Enterprise to ensure that we were not going to run into scalability or performance issues,” says Harwood. “The Crystal Decisions solution passed these lab tests with flying colours.” Southern Wine and Spirits also chose Crystal Decisions for its open development interface that allows for easy customization. It partnered with APOS Systems, Inc. to facilitate scheduling large batch processing using APOS’ scheduling software as well as converting the reports into PDF and putting them into a file folder structure for secure access by the suppliers using the report distribution system.

BUSINESS BENEFITS
Crystal Decisions is helping Southern Wine and Spirits eliminate reporting redundancy, increase IT productivity, boost customer service and supplier loyalty, and drive market share. 

Southern Wine and Spirits is using Crystal Decisions to centralize and consolidate reporting across the enterprise. A small team of people at Southern Wine and Spirits’ central IT department is able to easily create a standard set of parameter-driven reports that covers the reporting needs for thousands of suppliers across the Internet. Because of the ease-of-use of Crystal Decisions’ reporting tool, Crystal Reports, this team can also respond to requests for report modifications much more quickly than previously.

In addition to supplier reporting, Southern Wine and Spirits is also using Crystal Decisions internally to generate help-desk reports and is beginning to use Crystal Enterprise to help address other internal reporting needs.  “Crystal Decisions’ reporting software is so flexible, we can use it against almost any data source in the company,” says Harwood.

For more information:
Allan Pym, VP Sales and Chief Operating Officer
519.666.2020 or apym@apos.com