PUMA North America, a major producer of athletic footwear, apparel, and accessories, has more than 70 independent sales consultants who are required to make important daily business decisions based on data regarding orders, shipments, and product availability.
PUMA's data was housed in an ERP system that provided limited reporting capabilities. To view sales data, sales people contacted PUMA's internal database analysts, who sorted through the database, extracted the requested information, and forwarded it to the sales representatives via e-mail. Sales people would then import the information into an application, view it, and make the appropriate decisions. For analysts, the majority of their daily tasks focused on fielding requests rather than on proactively managing the database. For sales staff, it took hours to receive the information they needed to make critical business decisions.
PUMA invested in three components of SPSS' ShowCase® Suite: Enterprise Reporting, Query, and Report Writer. These products allow an unlimited number of employees, business partners, suppliers, and customers to access and share information through a standard browser, as well as create professional-looking printed reports.
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German-based PUMA is a leading producer of athletic footwear, apparel, and accessories. The company's North American operation has more than 70 sales staff members and executives who make daily business decisions based on data regarding orders, shipments, and product availability. Unfortunately for database analysts like Karen King, delivering that information to key decision makers was a time consuming, laborious process.
Sales representatives had to contact King to request specific sales information. She then searched for the desired information, extracted it, and e-mailed it back to the sales person. The sales person then imported it into another application, viewed the data, and made the appropriate decision. Depending on the inquiry's magnitude, the process could take as long as a day.
To make changes such as canceling an order in the database, King had to check a manual, review each line of each order, write down the information, "jump" to a different screen, and change the information.
Tracking order refusals was also difficult. PUMA credited accounts when a product was returned, but did not track why it was returned. As a result, PUMA could not determine whether the retailer or PUMA was at fault.
PUMA's problems were rooted in the limited reporting capabilities of its enterprise resource planning system (ERP), an application that helps the company manage product planning, inventory, supplier interaction, customer service, and order tracking. In fact, to reformat a report, PUMA had to call the software vendor to request template changes.
Recognizing that its ERP's reporting system was inadequate, PUMA selected three software packages from SPSS' ShowCase Suite: Enterprise Reporting, Query, and Report Writer. These products helped PUMA gain a better view of its sales activity and provide its sales force with updated information to make more informed purchasing decisions. With SPSS' reporting capabilities, PUMA can now create any type of report it wants and share it with any person in the organization.
In the past, it would take a day or more to create a report. Now we can obtain reports in less than an hour, and in some cases as quickly as 10 to 20 minutes. With SPSS, we have completely replaced 80 percent of our ERP system reports!
Karen King
Database Analyst
PUMA
Ninety percent of the reports PUMA generates are used by its sales force to track retail sales, identify which products are selling, and perform size run analyses (for example, how many size 13s sold versus size 8s). Reports also track individual store performance on an hourly, monthly, or yearly basis; measure how stores compare with one another; identify which clientele visit each store; and determine if the right people are in the right stores at the right time. If sales of a particular shoe model increase, PUMA can subsequently ramp up production of that shoe. Likewise, if a store falters, PUMA can shift inventory elsewhere or close the store entirely.
With Enterprise Reporting, PUMA can share information with all of its employees, business partners, suppliers, and customers, through a standard Web browser. Since originally implementing this solution, PUMA has introduced 200 users and more than 70 sales people worldwide to Enterprise Reporting. Because it is protected by a firewall, the sales force can securely use Enterprise Reporting to analyze schedules, open orders, customer purchasing habits, and sales forecasts, even when they are working remotely.
"Internal and external personnel leverage Enterprise Reporting to track inventory and provide customers with updated information regarding their orders," said King. "With the information available via the Web, calls to PUMA's internal database analysts from salespeople have been reduced by 20 percent in just two months!"
Query and Report Writer have become vital reporting tools for PUMA. Query lets users securely access PUMA's relational or multidimensional databases from a variety of platforms. Report Writer eliminates the need for users to manually format reports. Since users can generate their own reports, PUMA's information technology staff can focus on technology issues instead of fulfilling reporting requests.
"In the past, it would take a day or more to create a report," said King. "Now we can obtain reports in less than an hour, and in some cases as quickly as 10 to 20 minutes."
In the future, PUMA plans to roll out two other applications within SPSS' ShowCase Suite — Essbase® and Analyzer™. With Essbase data "cubes," PUMA's executive team will be able to look at data from multiple perspectives and in real time to analyze orders, sales, and customers. Analyzer will enable PUMA's executives to rank, filter, and sort data as well as identify variances or exceptions and determine where areas of opportunity exist.
For now, though, PUMA has replaced 80 percent of its ERP reports by using a combination of SPSS' ShowCase Suite applications. It has slashed valuable time off its reporting processes, providing the company with an advantage in competing more effectively as it races to gain ground on its larger rivals.
The complete list of global SPSS success stories can be found here
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