| |
|
|
Success Story
North Coast Electric, Activant Eclipse and MITS Overcome Challenges to Create Actionable Analytics and Reporting
Company Background
Seattle-based North Coast Electric, founded in 1913, is a family-owned and operated full-service electrical distributor with 38 locations across the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and Arizona. The company, consistently ranks in the top 25 electrical distributors by Electrical Wholesaling, supplies a wide range of electrical equipment to the electrical contractor, factory automation, industrial maintenance/repairs/operating and commercial and institutional markets.
In 2005, North Coast decided to replace its 20-year-old legacy business systems and begin managing its sizable operations with Activant Eclipse™, a full-range enterprise software solution designed specifically for distributors. From the beginning, North Coast knew it would need to significantly augment the Activant Eclipse solution with reporting and analytics capabilities.
“We have a proven, report-driven management style at North Coast,” says VP of Information Technology and CIO Les Johnson, “so access to information is critical—and we knew Activant Eclipse to be based on MultiValue data structures, which are highly efficient, but minimally transparent.”
Choosing MITS Discover and MITS Report
The then-emerging Activant Eclipse reporting and analytics capabilities were powerful, but not designed for the kinds of reporting North Coast required. Unwilling to “reinvent the wheel”—as Johnson describes the notion of developing its own reporting and analytics functionality, North Coast looked carefully at thirdparty providers.
With its solutions already being re-sold as an Eclipse add-on solution by Activant, and because of its familiarity with both Eclipse and MultiValue databases, MITS was an easy choice. North Coast implemented Eclipse in late 2006, and began working with MITS the following spring to integrate the MITS Discover™ online analytical processing (OLAP) solution and the MITS Report™ operational reporting solution.
The Challenges of a Large Operation and an Exacting Customer
With a long history of steady growth and careful management, North Coast has developed a range of guiding principles—both technology and business-focused—plus many functional, performance and operational requirements for its business systems. These requirements, which the company cites as part of its culture of success, also result in rigorous standards and some interesting challenges for technology solutions and their vendors. For example:
Discrete Report Server. To ensure both security and efficient operation of their Eclipse system, North Coast required all analysis and reporting be conducted on a separate server, housing access-tuned data to be synchronized daily with the operational system. Fortunately, MITS solutions can be deployed in this fashion, creating “hypercubes”—analytics-ready data environments—and “report sources” used for creating operational reports, all stored separate from operational data.
A night’s work in a night’s time. The challenge was refreshing the hypercubes and report sources quickly enough. At North Coast, up-to-date information had to be available by 7:30 A.M., requiring the report server to be fully refreshed within a short, 11-hour window. At first, the work of copying, extracting, and formatting the data for access took far longer. Activant Eclipse and MITS technical teams located third-party solutions—IBM FlashCopy and the open-source RSEC tool (rsync)—that sped
the data copying and hypercube building processes; after considerable effort, refresh time was within the required window. It’s worth noting, thanks to those efforts many parties—MITS, Activant Eclipse, and North Coast, and their customers—will see ongoing benefits from this work.
A matter of status. North Coast's commitment to balance all Discover cubes and report sources to Eclipse standard reports revealed the standard MITS Sales hypercube for Eclipse wasn’t set up to interpret the complex system of status codes set up in North Coast’s Eclipse system. The ensuing exchange of information and ideas on data definitions, semantics, updating processes and more—along with significant persistence on everyone’s part—got the problem solved.
Data anomalies. When business users learn a new system, they create situations unexpected by the system’s creators. The result? Seemingly harmless conditions in Eclipse, such as two material receipt transactions which “add up” to the single actual delivery that occurred, could throw reporting and analytics applications for a loop.
Solving these mysteries required close cooperation among North Coast, Activant Eclipse, and MITS as well—so they worked out a system of high availability and regular email and phone communication. After encountering a series of issues, North Coast designated Eclipse as its “fiscal source” or system of record. Everything had to reconcile to Eclipse. Now, it does.
Results
North Coast is going live with MITS Discover and MITS Report in Spring 2008, after nearly a year of analysis, configuration, tuning, testing, and training. In recent months, the company has completed a pilot program in which approximately 40 end users were trained on the system and encouraged to put it through its paces.
Reactions from the trainees were encouraging. Some discovered actionable information and insights they had thought unavailable to them anywhere in Eclipse. Others predicted hours of time savings, on a regular basis, thanks to the newly available reports and analysis cubes. Johnson predicts a better use of scarce IT resources as business users are able to access, create and customize reports themselves, freeing IT for more complex tasks. Taking the self-service concept to the next level, North Coast Electric plans to begin offering self-service reporting and analytics to key customers by the end of the year. Johnson is also expecting significant performance improvements on their production system as a result of moving the bulk of their report processing to a dedicated report server.
One more happy result: many of the refinements to MITS Discover and MITS Report, made at North Coast’s request, reflect a proven business model that can be leveraged by other MITS customers in the distribution world and beyond.
The teams at North Coast, Activant Eclipse, and MITS look with genuine satisfaction at their achievement. “We have been very satisfied with MITS,” reports Johnson. “From day one they’ve been very responsive, and we’re impressed with the integrity and caliber of their people. I can’t think of an instance where they didn’t try their very best to meet our needs.”
The MITS team knew that North Coast’s requirements and requests weren’t random: they reflected a culture of excellence, and also demonstrated a desire, on North Coast’s part, to help MITS succeed. “It was a long learning process of continuously improving communication,” concludes Johnson. “Now we’re ready to go.”
|
|
|
|
Company Profile:
Name:
North Coast Electric
Employees:
750
Description:
North Coast Electric is a full service electrical distributor with 38 locations across the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and Arizona
Vertical Software Provider:
Activant Eclipse
Database:
IBM UniVerse
Web Site:
northcoastelectric.com
| “The three-way partnership among North Coast, Activant Eclipse, and MITS was critical to the success we’ve had. It was a long learning process of continuously improving communication. Now we’re ready to go.”
| - Les Johnson
North Coast Electric VP of IT and CIO |
|
|
