Presentation Transcript

1. WebFOCUS:Ace’s Reporting Toolbox

   IBI Chicago User Forum March 19, 2010 Tim Brynda – Software Engineering Analyst
2. Ace is the place Founded in 1924 by a group of Chicago hardware store owners who wanted to increase their buying power Privately owned co-op business model; Our independent store owners own the corporation Approximately 4,800 retail stores and contractor centers in all 50 states, as well as 70 countries on 6 continents $3.2 Billion in wholesale sales for 2009 Headquartered right here in Oak Brook, IL Manufacture our own “Ace Royal” line of paint products Ranked #1 in overall customer satisfaction in the Home Improvement Retail Store category for the past three years by J.D. Power and Associates
3. Ace is the place Recently listed in the Top Ten of the BusinessWeek “Customer Service Champions” rankings Behind Barnes & Noble Ahead of Amazon.com (Our nearest hardware competitor was listed at #22) Third consecutive year of being in the Top Ten
4. Historical Timeline POS data collection started with a small pilot group of retailers in 1997 Cognos was original reporting tool; SQL Server was original Ace Data Warehouse (ADW) for the first 3 years Teradata and MicroStrategy were both introduced in 2000 Started the migration to Information Builders’ WebFOCUS in January 2007 All existing production reports were reevaluated and either scrapped, combined with similar reports, or rewritten as-is using WebFOCUS Starting last year, our “Business Transformation” project has resulting in the re-coding of some reports to go against SAP/BI instead of Teradata
5. Ace Data Warehouse Over 600 tables and views in Teradata 4.8 Terabytes of data and growing We collect POS data from 2,700 of our 4,800 retailers, adding an average of 2.5 million rows of data into the data warehouse each day Approximately 300 IT-written reports which allow the users to select various date, store, and product parameters for each report Today we have over 12,000 named users in our WebFOCUS Managed Reporting environment Four user groups: corporate employees, field staff, retailers, and vendors
6. Ace Data Warehouse Corporate users account for the majority of our day-to-day reporting, followed by Field Staff, Retailers, and Vendors Merchandising, Marketing, and Finance are the departments which utilize WebFOCUS the most Most other departments within the corporation have at least a small handful of reports: Advertising, International, Paint, Rental, Retail Operations, and Supply Chain Each has its own “dashboard” where users can find launch pages for the reports they want to run, as well as their completed report output
7. Managed Reporting
8. Managed Reporting
9. Managed Reporting
10. Managed Reporting
11. Run Deferred We run all reports as Run Deferred Allows Managed Reporting to work as a repository for a user to keep their reports in one place for a rolling 30 days Trains users to follow the same procedure regardless of whether it’s a long-running or quick-running report Doesn’t “waste” any executions, as (accidently) closing an open window running an immediate-run report does not actually kill the processing on the server Prevents users from becoming impatient with an immediate-run report and closing that open window Users can pick up their completed reports (or see if a report is still running) on the Deferred Status tab in Managed Reporting, which we named the “Report Status” tab
12. Report Highlights
13. Corporate Reports
14. Corporate Reports Minimum Order Point Calculations
15. Corporate Reports Thousands of Items Have Proven to Sell in Quantities Greater Than One!!!
16. Corporate Reports Sales Coverage Methodology Example Step # 1 Step # 2 Facts: ADW looks at transactions for every store transmitting ADW POS information. ADW looks at five months of POS information.
17. Corporate Reports Sales Coverage % Thresholds
18. Field Staff Reports
19. Field Staff Reports “One Page Report”
20. Field Staff Reports
21. Field Staff Reports Consolidated District Manager (CDM) report or “one page report” was an early big win when WebFOCUS was first brought in house Report was too complex to build using previous BI tools It was built, tested, and deployed within the first 30 days of our WebFOCUS install Displaced a manual process that took 3 days every month to compile Now can be run on-demand in about 30 seconds
22. Retailer Reports
23. Retailer Reports Top Territory Ace SKUs Not in Store
24. Retailer Reports
25. Vendor Reports
26. Vendor Reports Monthly Vendor Sales Snapshot
27. Vendor Reports
28. Daily Sales Dashboard
29. Daily Sales Dashboard Sample Data
30. Guided Ad Hoc
31. Guided Ad Hoc
32. Guided Ad Hoc
33. Ace is the Place for WebFOCUS Questions?