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Success Story
Busy HVAC Supply Firm Saves Hours with Every Report - and Gains Highly Efficient Access to Relational Data Platforms
The Company:
Founded in 2000, Independent Supply Company (ISC) has become a premier wholesale distribution company supplying refrigeration, heating, ventilation and air conditioning parts and equipment. Based in Burnaby, BC, the company has more than 70 employees in nine locations located throughout western and central Canada.
The Challenge:
Since its founding in 2000, Independent Supply has relied on its Activant Eclipse® ERP solution and a custom-built, in-house CRM application to provide operational data and metrics. As the company grew, however, so did its data files - and its need for fast, accurate data access, reporting and analysis. Providing the needed reports and analytics on inventory, sales and other areas became more and more cumbersome and time-consuming.
To ensure profitable operations, ISC carefully analyzes inventory in a number of ways, tracking and optimizing current, new, excess and slow-moving stock. "We spent a lot of time pulling data out, massaging and combining it, then providing it to managers in spreadsheets," says Scott Nelson, Business Analyst at Independent Supply. "Those spreadsheets were then manipulated by several managers and merged, involving even more time - and creating opportunities for costly errors." Meanwhile, critical inventory questions could go unanswered, delaying important business decisions.
Addressing the problem with relational platforms. To ease the strain on the Eclipse system and speed query activities, ISC decided to extract much of the needed data from Eclipse and store it in a MySQL® database. But creating quickly-needed, one-time and repeat-usage queries for the relational data, together with additional time formatting spreadsheet-based reports, was still extremely time-consuming.
The ISC team began looking for a new, more productive way to tap the wealth of data stored in their Eclipse system - and a way to efficiently sort, filter, summarize and format critical information from multiple sources into easy-to-use reports that could keep managers focused on managing.
The Solution:
The ISC team, already working with the MITS Discover analytics solution, saw a demo of MITS Report 2.0, and considered its processing speed a very compelling feature. Nelson and his colleagues also liked the solution’s ability to access popular relational database platforms, although just how beneficial that would prove to be wasn’t immediately obvious.
Soon thereafter, Independent Supply chose and installed MITS Report as its operational reporting tool. In a very short time, managers were getting the information they needed, delivered via email, without the need to further massage the data. Where store managers needing a "dead stock" report might have been forced to run a pair of reports, dump them into Excel, and then do more sorting and summing, they can now get precisely the answers they need, formatted for easy use, with a one-click MITS Report.
The reporting solution’s optimization for large data volumes and powerful filtering features help save even more time. "Now instead of putting together SQL queries and waiting to format the output later, we can just run a report with the right filters on it. It saves both set-up and processing time," says Nelson. "Knowing the data is solid - and receiving it in a scheduled job - makes our managers’ lives a lot easier."
Database connectivity saves more time, brings new convenience. Once the MITS solution was installed, it wasn’t long before ISC began using its MySQL database - long a repository for inventory and sales data extracted from Eclipse - as a key data source for MITS Report. "Essentially, we began using MITS Report as a high-end query tool, in addition to its obvious reporting capabilities", says Nelson.
To protect operational system performance and ensure fast-running reports, MITS Report is typically used to create a separate "report source" data store, then access that data to create reports. But it’s also possible to use SQL queries as report sources, enabling MITS to connect directly to any of more than 10 popular database platforms. MITS Report extracts precisely the data needed for a given query or report, then formats and presents results to end users.
"I think MITS Report is a bigger tool than they sometimes pitch it," says Nelson. "To me, MITS Report becomes a general front end to databases - it’s not just a different way of looking at your ERP data." Where Nelson once created spreadsheets and emailed them to dozens of end users, now store managers and headquarters staff can run the queries themselves, using MITS Report, and have the results in minutes, freeing up Nelson for other tasks.
The results:
"Now, everyone can just log in and get whatever they want, when they want it. It’s a great, general-purpose database query tool, especially for places that are using more than one database and platform," Nelson says.
"To say MITS is running reports exponentially faster wouldn’t be an exaggeration," claims Nelson. "And tasks that used to be just painful are easier to do - and take much less time."
Nelson is enthusiastic: "For me, the reporting and processing speed was the first thing - but MITS Report is also a great tool because you can connect it to MySQL. MITS Report works perfectly as a general front end to databases."
Now, saving hours of time with each query and delivering regular, one-click reporting to busy managers is the norm. Neither Nelson nor end users are saddled with extensive, spreadsheet-based data manipulation. Nelson sums up: "Saving time is what it’s all about. No one likes waiting for data they need."
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Company Profile:
Name:
Independent Supply Company
Description:
Independent Supply Company is a premier wholesale distribution company in Burnaby BC, Canada
Vertical Software Provider:
Activant Eclipse®
Database:
IBM UniVerse® and mySQL
Web Site:
www.isc.tv
| "Knowing the data is solid, and receiving it in a scheduled job makes our managers' lives a lot easier"
| - Scott Nelson
Business Analyst
Independent Supply Company |
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