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Success Story
J&B Wholesale Manages its Business Better with MITS
The Company: A Dynamic and Diverse Business with Distinct Needs
J&B Wholesale distributes quality food products and services to meat markets, retail grocery store and food service distributors in the Midwest. It uses its own fleet of trucks and is a division of J&B Group, located in St. Michael, Minnesota. J&B Wholesale serves over 3,000 customers in 11 Midwestern states.
The company runs its ERP software on an IBM RS6000 running UniVerse and AIX. All of the on-site desktop users are connected through a LAN and the remote users connect using Citrix. The IT department, which consists of seven full-time employees, provides all of the phone, network, desktop, software, and hardware maintenance for a total of about 375 J&B employees. The company is located in two buildings in St. Michael, plus a warehouse in Detroit Lakes.
There are about 150 active UniVerse users at J&B Wholesale, for whom Lyn Marshall, senior systems analyst/programmer, is directly responsible. She is one of two MultiValue programmers with the company, and oversees all of the UniVerse design and analysis, programming, documentation, end-user training, and phone support.
Marshall, who appears to love the challenges brought on by keeping a growing business state-of-the-art, explained that J&B has a mix of distribution, production and public cold storage, which leads to a corresponding mix of hardware and software solutions. "We have interfaces to scales, conveyor systems, mobile (truck) software and routing functions," she said. "We have such a variety of things happening that every day is interesting; every day holds opportunities to learn new things!"
It’s this diversity at J&B and the desire to be leaders in employee productivity, industry respect and customer satisfaction that created the escalating problems with the creation of customized reports.
The Circumstances: Users Were Demanding More Out of Their Reports
Before using MITS, J&B had purchased Cognos about five years ago. The Cognos cubes were built, but getting the users to utilize them proved difficult. "There was only one person that ever did use Cognos," Marshall remembered. She continued to say that J&B had several problems to overcome when considering a new BI (business intelligence) product. "We had a problem with eight to ten users running sales history reports at the same time. They were all beating on one huge file simultaneously, slowing down both themselves and everyone else."
Marshall said another crucial issue was that everyone wanted the same data, sorted 40 or more different ways. She explained: "We had a report called the ‘Ultimate Sales Report’ which used one big sales history file and gave the user literally 32 primary and secondary sort/select options, yet that still wasn’t enough! We kept adding options, or new menu selections, as needed. Finally, these reports were sufficient, but they were still just hard-copy reports - no drill-down, no quick change of the sort selection or different output columns, etc."
The Solution: MITS Provides the Speed, Flexibility and Compatibility with IBM U2 that J&B Required
Once Marshall and her peers in IT heard about MITS, it didn’t take long to make up their minds. "We saw a demo, saw how easy it was to use and how fast the response was, and we bought it!
Veni, vidi, vendi! (We came, we saw, we bought!)" Marshall said excitedly.
Three of them attended MITS training one year ago and, according to Marshall, "were able to hit the floor running upon our return! We installed the software, set up the server, modified a default hypercube that was provided from MITI, and began loading history. We had several people using the Sales hypercube before the past two years of history had even finished loading!"
Marshall said they never really considered any product other than MITS. "MITS had the ability to use our UniVerse data without having to write all those flat file, third-party interface files. It had everything we needed."
For Marshall, the ability to utilize the data dictionary to drive the population of the hypercubes was the biggest advantage, because "I know from experience how flexible that makes the software. I can do anything I need with dictionary items."
Marshall, who was once a professional educator for the MultiValue training company, JES & Associates, said the ease-of-use was also a huge factor in selecting MITS. "I have worked with and trained users since the early 1980’s, and MITS is a ‘no-brainer’ for the end-user. It is simple, straightforward, and easy. You can drill down, drill up, change your columns, change your sort sequence, etc. And it’s all done very quickly."
Another feature important to J&B was the fact the MITS did not require an additional SQL database and the hypercubes are built directly from the original UniVerse data. "This may sound like one of those ‘too good to be true’ stories, but MITS has everything we need: it is fast, it is easy, and the support is superb!"
The Process: Creating Hypercubes for Customized Business Requirements
Management Information Tools Professional Service staff provided J&B with an initial sales hypercube and Marshall used it as a template to expand upon the sales analysis and to immediately create additional hypercubes. The company has already created or is in the process of creating a MITS hypercube for nearly every department, including: Sales and Marketing, Purchasing and Receiving, Inventory and Warehouse, Accounting and Corporate.
"Every department is clamoring to get more information more quickly, so we are constantly working on creating additional hypercubes," Marshall said.
The hypercube for Accounting will display customer data such as name and address information, account balances, days outstanding, and other information. "We need to look at our customer data in terms of different market segments (retail customers, wholesale, foodservice, etc.) and also by company groupings, such as grocery store chains," she explained.
The Inventory hypercube is used for analyzing a variety of multiple product groupings to look at inventory turns, balances, movement, and all of the activity occurring in the warehouses. "When you have a large inventory, a tool like MITS can have very tangible benefits when it comes to managing and controlling that inventory," said Marshall.
J&B is also defining a new Purchasing hypercube to provide insight into vendors’ performances at different product grouping levels, as well as a new Sales hypercube aimed at the buyers using the same source data but with completely different drill-downs.
"I can foresee a hypercube built from warehouse activity data that could be utilized by Human Resources and the Warehouse for establishing productivity baselines and pay levels," Marshall forecasted. "Another hypercube could be developed to assist in setting pricing levels or to review assembly and cutting costs for Production. There is no limit to the applications and usefulness of this tool!"
The Results: The MITS Solution Empowers J&B Employees
According to Marshall, the business paybacks of using the product have completely justified the decision to purchase MITS just one year ago. "I only have so much time in a day, and I cannot add to or create new reports for every possible combination of sorts and selects that I know the users would like to see," she explained. "MITS has empowered each user and allows them to define and derive the data needed, adapting readily to their individual needs. That is a huge benefit to any company!"
J&B found MITS to be so easy to use, the company authorized two of its users to train the rest of the users. "I do not have to personally train everyone, which is a good thing since my day is already filled beyond capacity," Marshall said. 'Our main in-house trainer is not a programmer, but attended the MITS 101 and 201 classes and has become a ‘power MITS user’!"
Marshall said that many of the MITS users have told her they love the speed with which they can generate their own reports, change the columns, or do whatever customization they need to do. "One of our users has used MITS to do a lot of comparisons and then used the results to define our new product price categories, which will be used to drive our new pricing strategies in the upcoming year," she explained.
MITS has also been manipulated by a user to generate a unique Profit & Loss Statement for the Marketing Department, not your standard accounting P&L, but one with tonnage alongside the dollars. This has proven invaluable, Marshall said, because in the food distribution business, tonnage can be at least as important as dollars.'
"Our users are also happy with the ease of exporting data into Microsoft Excel," she concluded, "which enables them to readily disperse data to the people who need it, including customers or vendors. Best of all, the MITS user can make the output as succinct or as comprehensive as they want, without the need for a programmer to modify any number of programs!"
MITS is the Business Intelligence / Interactive Reporting solution available from MITS, Seattle Washington, USA. See their web site at
www.mits.com
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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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