Press Releases

North Carolina Footwear Maker proves Business Intelligence can be easy

San Jose, CA, December 21, 2007 — One mid-size footcare manufacturer in North Carolina found the ROI from business intelligence better than advertised — and worlds better than the average Fortune 500 company’s ROI.

Like so many other mid-size organizations, managing sales and inventory was nearly an all-consuming task. “Until about mid-2006, managing these operations was tough,” said Implus Footcare COO Sam Prestipino.

Implus struggled to analyze trends and transactions and to make forecasts. Answering a simple question like “How do these customers’ open orders compare with their previous volume?” involved looking back and forth among multiple reports.

Every time decision makers needed a new report, they had to ask the IT department to create one. That usually took hours. Also, because of the data volume, some reports ran too slowly for delivery when needed.

The key was the right business intelligence solution, DataSelf BI. It’s built with mid-size organizations in mind—providing simplicity for decision makers who don’t have the time, budget or support for big-company hairballs.

Today, managing inventory and sales operations is easier because of DataSelf BI. “After email,” Prestipino said, “DataSelf BI is the first thing the CEO checks in the morning. I use it religiously. You can drill down, drill up, and drill back in history. You can look at snapshots on how we’re doing versus how we’ve done the past three years.”

With the DataSelf BI solution, each user gets the information they need in the way they need to see it. Each person starts off with a set of pre-made queries, which the user can later modify or add to as needed.

Prestipino himself built one of the first custom reports to replace an old and time consuming 300-page sales-order report. The new report is a smart summary that’s just three pages long—and runs with a mouse click. It gives him a snapshot of the open orders sorted by ship date.

“I can give the smart summary to my warehouse managers and say, ‘This is the hot list,’” said Prestipino.

The DataSelf BI system has proven valuable throughout the company. For example, it calculates sales commissions, and it has automated an inventory aging report that used to require a staff accountant all day to produce. “It’s tremendously powerful,” said Prestipino.

The initial DataSelf BI deployment took about two days. Immediately afterward, Implus started to take advantage of the hundreds of reports pre-defined in the out-of-the-box solution.

DataSelf, which prides itself on its understanding of mid-sized companies’ needs, used its expertise to customize the solution for Implus’ specific requirements. For instance, many orders come from overseas in Swedish krona, euros, Canadian dollars and other currencies. DataSelf’s consultants integrated a multi-currency module for Implus and today the system provides sales analysis in source currency or dollar equivalent.

Implus is an excellent example of a mid-size company with forward-thinking management. All decision makers, observes DataSelf Corp. CEO Joni Girardi, are constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency and provide better service. “DataSelf BI clears the way to let them do that.” said Girardi, “Now Implus is free to focus on shipping products out the door.”

About DataSelf Corporation:

DataSelf, with main offices in the heart of the Silicon Valley , is a privately owned software publisher of business intelligence (BI) solutions.

DataSelf provides user-friendly and high-end BI solutions designed to support decision-making in mid-size organizations. DataSelf BI clients find that they can fulfill from 70% to 100% of their reporting needs without technical assistance. With DataSelf BI, decision makers can write reports from scratch faster than they can eat a donut.

More than 550 out-of-the-box report templates and key performance indicators (KPIs) allow fast deployment and adaptation by non-technical managers. These templates and KPIs are so extensive that some customers say they amount to a virtual "consultant in a box."

The solution leverages an easily customizable data warehouse and several OLAP cubes, allowing users to fine tune the BI system as reporting needs change. DataSelf BI also provides such valuable BI features as traditional reporting, analytics, dashboards, forecasting, budgeting, data mining and business activity monitoring.

DataSelf's solutions have grown out of more than 10 years of experience providing best-practice, high-end reporting, data analysis and analytic solutions to mid-size organizations. The DataSelf team understands the reporting needs of this market and knows how to fulfill them. The team gathers business requirements from cross-functional groups and extracts data from a wide variety of mid-market business systems, including Microsoft Dynamics, Sage Accpac ERP, Sage BusinessVision, SageCRM, Sage MAS 90 ERP, Sage MAS 200 ERP, Sage MAS 500 ERP, Sage Pro ERP, Sage PFW ERP, Sage SalesLogix, and SAP Business One.

For more information about DataSelf, please visit www.dataself.com.

###