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Success Story
MITS Report Gives J&B Wholesale the Power to Create Custom Reports Quickly and Easily
Food services wholesaler and distributor uses new operational
reporting environment from MITS to deliver efficient and secure
reporting across the organization
Company Background
J&B Group began in 1979 as J&B Wholesale Distributing, Inc. and
is headquartered in St. Michael, Minnesota. The company serves a variety
of retail and foodservice customers, offering a combination of
wholesaling, branded products, custom food service cutting, cold
storage, and transportation of a variety of meat, poultry, and deli food
products. They employ more than 400 associates to work with their
customers and partners.
The Challenge
With more than 400 employees at J&B Wholesale, at any given point, as
many as 150 users may request reports on the company's numbers. While
many standard reports are available, these don't necessarily meet
individual reporting needs, for example, requests for the addition of
new sort sequences.
Lyn Marshall, one of only two IT staff members at J&B, poses the
question, "How can we respond to single, one-off requests without
creating a new version of the report every time?" She goes on to
describe the challenge: "To try to alleviate the programming load,
the idea was to find something where the users could create their own
reports on an as-needed basis, without needing somebody to do the
programming."
J&B employees were making requests for non-standard sort options, such
as sorting the customer master report by state, or changing output
columns. Perhaps a user would want to see the customer name, contact
name, and AR phone number on one day, and would want the warehouse
contact name and phone number on another day.
"We’ve got this huge custom library where we deviated from the
standard. Often that’s what it is—just a variation on something that's
already out there. But that still takes time. The idea was to find a way
to give the users what they need without us spending all day creating
new reports or variations on a theme."
J&B has a sales report that sorts customers and products by 16 different
fields each. This yields 32 options, and yet it is not enough to meet
users’ needs. However, Marshall states, "Somebody always has a
deviation that they need to have handled. That’s where MITS Report comes
in."
The Solution
J&B Wholesale has used MITS Discover for two years, and when MITS Report
was released, Marshall attended an online webinar with some colleagues
who would be potential users of the reporting environment. Following the
webinar, Marshall asked the J&B Wholesale participants if they could see
themselves using the software on their own. The response was a positive
one, prompting Marshall to do a trial run of MITS Report in her company.
She reemphasizes the impetus for the new technology: As J&B Wholesale
continues to grow and more reporting requests are made, the need to
offload the work from the IT team of two programmers becomes more of an
imperative.
Marshall notes that implementing MITS Report was a smooth process. "I
set up some simple master files—customer master, product master—and
turned a couple of our power users loose on it." She wanted them to
play with the software to see how they would make use of it. After
getting the go-ahead from the power users, Marshall created the source
definition for J&B Wholesale’s large order and line-item detail file—the
same file the company builds its main Hypercube in with MITS Discover.
This modification allows the users to put their own spin on that data.
The Results
With MITS Report installed, users can create their own reports, looking
at the company's data in exactly the way they want to view it. "If
a user wants to do a one-shot report on the customer master or the
product master using a field that is not a standard type of sort field
in the ERP package, we can give them a way to use it," Marshall
says. She describes MITS Report as offering "a lot of flexibility,
a nice GUI front end, and ease of use."
The company is now in the process of setting up in-house MITS Report
training for its less technical users. Training will be geared toward
the main requestors of information: sales reps and buyers. While power
users have the advantage of knowing the dictionary items, general users
can dictate their sort sequences and add new columns easily.
In addition to being able to report on the master list and the order
detail, Marshall foresees making summary invoice information and
purchasing information available. This will allow users to make a pass
on the purchase history for a particular product by a particular vendor
and do their own sorting on it. "I’m foreseeing building a lot
more source definitions."
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Company Profile:
Name:
J&B Wholesale
Distinction:
Produces and markets premium meat products with locations in Minnesota, North Dakota and Nebraska
Vertical Software Provider:
Advanced Food Systems
Database:
IBM UniVerse
Web Site:
www.jbgroup.com
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