| |
|
|
Success Story
MITS Discover Gives ROHL LLC a Way to Report Budgets Quickly and Efficiently
Custom Hypercubes Enable Supplier of High-end Kitchen and Bath Products to Measure and Track Sales and Supplies More Accurately
Company Background
ROHL LLC is a worldwide supplier of high-end kitchen and bath
faucets and fixtures, providing distinctive products for the
kitchen and bath for private homes, resorts, and hotels. ROHL
offers readily available inventory, technical training, and a
commitment to consistent and excellent customer service.
Headquartered in Irvine, California, and employing approximately 65
employees, ROHL has regional corporate offices in San Francisco,
the New York Metropolitan area, and Milan, Italy. Products are
available nationwide through ROHL's customers: independent kitchen
and bath showrooms.
The 100-person company supplies label application machines, thermal
transfer and direct thermal printers, bar-code verification
equipment, RFID, Smart Labeling, label design software, and thermal
ribbons. The services they provide include sequential bar coding,
numbering, and maintenance contracts for equipment.
The Challenge
Paul Satkin, ROHL's CFO, describes the company’s approach to doing
business: "Because our supply chain is long and our product comes
from overseas, one of our competitive advantages is we carry a fair
amount of inventory in our headquarters office in Irvine."
Expanding on the direct benefit of this approach, Satkin notes,
"When a customer calls, we can ship over 90 percent of their orders
in any given day."
ROHL had a specific Business
Intelligence/reporting challenge that went beyond standard reporting
practices. The company uses Eclipse as its ERP system, however, Satkin
points out that the Eclipse technology is more tailored to reporting for
showrooms than it is for distributors like ROHL. "Most Eclipse
customers order something from a vendor, and the next week the item is
there. We order something and it's not here for 6 months." On top
of this supply-chain issue, being a distributor, ROHL has independent
sales groups out in the field and needs to be able to budget and plan by
sales group, month, and product line.
Satkin, COO Lou Rohl,
and Director of Marketing Skip Johnson, attended a Six Sigma class where
they learned, above all else, that if you aren’t able to measure
something, you can't improve it. It was clear to the executives at ROHL
that "there were things that we weren't able to measure."
While Eclipse was a great tool for delivering instant access to
showroom-related information, it did not allow the company to report its
budgets efficiently. "So what we did," Satkin explains,
"was take all our sales information—by sales rep, by month,
by product line, by price line—put it into an Excel spreadsheet,
and then print out the sales and budgets manually." In fact, ROHL
had been maintaining massive amounts of sales and budget information in
spreadsheets.
This practice was labor intensive and did not
allow for real-time access to information. ROHL had access to
updated information only about once a month. According to Satkin,
"We knew where we were against budget in general for a month but we
didn't know more specifically which lines were doing better or which
sales reps were doing better on a day-to-day basis." The company
simply wasn't able to compare against plan.
ROHL approached
Eclipse about building a custom budgeting module to add the capability
of running reports with the budget included. The project expense plus
the ongoing fees for reintegrating the module every time ROHL upgraded
Eclipse were out of the company’s scope. Representatives at Eclipse
suggested ROHL talk to MITS.
The Solution
On behalf of ROHL, Satkin contacted MITS and learned that, through
MITS Discover, a separate OLAP database structure could be
implemented and reported on with ROHL’s Eclipse data—for less than
a custom Eclipse solution and with the added benefit of the MITS
Discover dashboard. An appealing benefit was the MITS-Eclipse
partnership, which made MITS Discover an attractive solution for
ROHL.
"We're a small company, we don't even have an IS staff, and
for us to try to implement some other system into Eclipse or start
from scratch wouldn't make sense for us," Satkin says.
"Eclipse does all the sales modules and such. The MITS
partnership with Eclipse is what made the company attractive to
us."
ROHL implemented MITS Discover and the dashboard. Because the
company has as much as a six-month gap between when a product is
ordered and when it is received, ROHL needs to report on open
purchase orders. ROHL worked with MITS' Professional Services staff
to create a custom Open Purchase Analysis Hypercube. ROHL also has
a Sales Analysis Hypercube and a Purchasing Analysis Hypercube.
The flash screens ROHL relies on are in a "common file"
that the company defined early on. "On a regular basis,"
Satkin explains, "we compare our sales by product line versus
plan versus last year. Also, we look at sales by sales rep and by
plan. We look at purchasing for the last six months and what our
purchasing trends are," he notes. The company also does ad hoc
reporting and drilling down into data to see what products are
selling well or are not selling.
Regarding the use of MITS Discover among ROHL employees, Satkin
points out how straightforward MITS Discover is to use. With some
initial MITS training by phone, ROHL's internal sales reps are able
to use the technology extensively as are Satkin, the COO, and staff
in the purchasing and marketing departments.
The Results
It used to take a full day for a ROHL employee to put budget
numbers into Excel and then print out spreadsheets to serve as
reports. "Now, with MITS Discover," Satkin states,
"I'll be at a meeting and someone will ask which items within
a particular product line are not selling as well as the others.
Being able to go to a computer anywhere in the company, pull up
MITS Discover, and find out that information in a couple minutes is
the real power of it."
Another clear benefit is everyone has access to the dashboard. Key
ROHL executives, including CEO Ken Rohl, who travels extensively,
log onto the system on a daily basis and look at the dashboard from
wherever they are, to get a visual of how the company is doing
based on their chosen key metrics.
Finally, Satkin pinpoints the success of MITS Discover for ROHL:
"When we implemented MITS Discover, our goal was to be able to
track against plan and measure things more accurately, and it
solved both of those issues."
|
|
|
|
COMPANY PROFILE
Name
ROHL LLC
www.rohlhome.com
Description
ROHL markets high-end kitchen and bath products. Through exclusive relationships with designers and craftsmen in Europe and America, ROHL offers product lines that span the upscale market.
Vertical Software Provider
Eclipse
Database
IBM UniVerse
|
|
|
