Enterprise web reporting at Clopay

IntelliVIEW Reporting made easy! About Clopay Clopay is the subsidiary of the 1.4 Billion USD . It supplies and installs commercial doors and self-storage systems through the Clopay Building Products Company. Clopay Service Company distributes and installs building products such as bath cabinets, fireplaces, flooring, garage doors, and kitchen cabinets. Additionally, Clopay Plastic Products Company produces thin- Clopay had invested gauge embossed and printed films, elastomeric films, in technology and capital equipment and laminates of film and non-woven fabrics for use in products from disposable diapers and surgical “ on the manufacturing side and had gowns to graphic arts applications. Clopay a huge distribution set-up to service, contributes about 85% of Griffon's Corporation. maintain and grow relationships with installers and retailers. Business Scenario: Clopay - Building Products Company Clopay is the largest manufacturer and marketer of residential garage doors and among the largest Clopay maintains a strong relationship with its manufacturers of commercial sectional doors in the installing dealers and retail customers” as part of its . core strategy and has earned a reputation among them for producing a broad range of high-quality The company has a total of four manufacturing doors. facilities. These facilities are equipped with the latest in manufacturing technology, equipment and The company, in order to leverage its manufacturing proprietary manufacturing processes, thus enabling expertise and distribution infrastructure has invested the company to efficiently manufacture products in heavily in Information Technology. A key deliverable large volume and meet changing customer needs. for the IT organization is to optimize the business processes for greater efficiency and profitability. The The company distributes its garage doors directly to entire process chain from purchase of raw materials customers from its manufacturing facilities and to invoicing the customers is covered by the system. through its network of 47 company-owned The IT team at the end of every month would write a distribution centers located throughout the United set of queries to extract the data from the database States and Canada. The company's building and create a set of reports for end-users. products are sold to approximately 2,000 independent professional installing dealers and to major home center retail chains, including , Inc., Menards, Inc. and Lowe's Companies, Inc. These home center retail chains account for about 35% of total sales.

These distribution centers allow the company to maintain an inventory of garage doors closer to installing dealers and provide quick-ship service to retail and professional dealer customers.

IntelliVIEW Reporting made easy! Clopay then decided to go in for a reporting solution that would help the company achieve its Though the quality of data collected by the system goals. They decided on the following must haves was of top order the current method of reporting in their reporting solution; wasn't helping the company achieve its goals. The sales team was unable to gauge the success of a Wish List promotional offer until the month end reports were generated. This would further lead to undue delay in The current method led to heavy dependence on the developers and the process was both resource and replicating the promos to other territories. Also the time intensive. So a solution was required that reports were standard reports and the individual user would not only reduce the report creation time there had to spend a large amount of time just trying to by freeing developers for other tasks but also reduce locate the relevant information. The solution became the end-users dependence on the IT team. counter productive and instead of reducing time taken to get the right information it took more time. Standard reports generated at the end of the month did not help the end-users much. A reporting It was similar across functions. The operations solution that supported ad-hoc report generation manager was able locate a bottleneck only after the and was easy enough for the end-users to create their reports were generated at the end of the month own reports with minimal or no training was required. Since the end-users were spread across resulting in lost efficiencies. Status of a customer North America, the reporting solution had to order or a batch in production could only be found support web-based access. after sifting data from the standard report generated at the end of the month. The reporting solution had to support report creation and access with a thin client, as all the Thus the company's goal of optimizing business systems in the field were of low-configuration. The processes to improve overall efficiencies and company was not willing to invest in upgrading the profitability was not met. Instead there was poor systems for supporting bulk clients alone. process control and loss of traceability and efficiency at all levels. The reporting solution had to support presentation quality or pre-formatted reports for creation of purchase orders, invoices, or quarterly financial reports and interactive grid type reports with high analytics that would help business users understand the data better and make better informed decisions.

Environment: The reporting solution must be easy to deploy and Data source: maintain. “ Oracle 9i on Solaris Server The sales report had millions of records. So the Web Application Server: reporting solution had to be robust enough to handle Oracle OC4J, OS Win 2k Server the load while delivering the required reports. All of the above plus a low TCO (Total Cost of ” Ownership) was the solution they were looking for.

IntelliVIEW Reporting made easy! The Solution: Delivered Synaptris Reporter with IntelliVIEW Designer Time saved, Money gained: “ The standard practice at Clopay was to generate a set and IntelliVIEW Report Analyzer of standard reports at the end of every calendar month, for the whole calendar year. With the help of re-usable report objects the developers had to create each of these reports only once. So when the report Security & Sharing: ” for a new month had to be generated all it took was a Through ACL Clopay was able to dictate access few clicks to get the latest data into the standard control terms at user level as well as report level. report layout with complete report logic intact. Also it took significantly less time to create the report with This helped the company regulate the policy of visual query builder as compared to direct querying relevant information access only. For e.g., the of the database as was the standard practice. This financial reports part of the accounting and financial helped developers save up to 75% on development division of the company was not shared with other time and effort. divisions and the same applied to all other divisions. At another level the managers at middle management was not given access to certain reports Web Access & Ad-Hoc Reporting: which senior personnel in their division had access End-users were able to create and view reports from to. Like wise many permutation combinations were all the 47 distribution centers and the 4 possible depending on the organizations information manufacturing facilities spread through out USA, strategy. This functionality helped the company in and Canada (they could connect to create and view improved control over the flow of the information, reports from any part of the world over the web). while making sure that right information was made available to right user. IntelliVIEW's solution is built with the business user in mind, thus with the help of the intuitive visual With this functionality the users were able to share query builder the business users can create their own relevant reports with customers, partners and reports with minimal or no training. Also with the suppliers while keeping the data safe. For e.g., the standard monthly reports the users with the run-time marketing manager with his web access and parameters functionality can view the data most necessary access was able to create reports, analyze relevant to them without any effort. This helped them and based on these results close a sale, plan a users get up to the minute updates on the variables promotional campaign, define the SKU-wise mix of under their operations immediately, thus enabling the order for the next quarter right across the table them to make better-informed decision with faster with the customers. corrective actions. This also significantly lowered business users dependency on the developers for report generation, as well as the load on the IT team. Thin Client - No installation required:As users in the field had low configuration systems, they could still create reports and view them in HTML format or ActiveX enabled web browser that supports all the functionalities of grid type report or in thin client Report Analyzer featuring high analytics. This functionality helped save Clopay hundreds and thousands of dollars, which would have been required to upgrade the hardware at all the field offices if they had opted for a competitive solution.

IntelliVIEW Reporting made easy! Multiple Report Types: The presentation quality report is being used in the generation of financial results, inventory/ work in progress report, bill of materials, invoices etc., as these reports can integrate table, charts, HTML and images all into one report.

The grid type report supports high analytical capabilities, thus was used to generate reports that Customization: was data intensive and required variety analysis The raw data that is queried for report creation in the function to help get the insights to make decisions. case of sales database ran into millions of records. For e.g., a report on a promotional campaign held for Clopay wanted a reporting solution, which would a set of SKU's within a given region and a set of have the bandwidth to handle this size over the web stores, will help the business user understand which as this would otherwise lead to serious bandwidth SKU is most preferred in the given region as well as and time lag issues even before the report creation which particular store/ retail format consumers process began. preferred. Based on this learning the business user could increase the stock of a particular SKU in other To give the users fast turn-around time for these regions but in similar store/ retail format. records over the web, Synaptris's team understood Clopay's data model and wrote stored procedures to query the data. Complete logic of the sales reports were understood and consolidated in stored procedures. As a result whenever the developer or the With ad-hoc reporting end user creates a report they would only query the Sales managers could plan stored procedures thereby allowing the end users to “ promotions and SKU wise create report on any configuration machine and from any bandwidth size Internet connection without annual sales plans with the experiencing any time lag or system failure due to retailers right across the table excess load.

Easy Exporting: ” Total Cost of Ownership: As most of the business users were well versed in Clopay has employees stationed at distribution and Excel, the export option to Excel supported in the manufacturing centers through out North America. solution greatly enhanced the value of the reports for The number of users of the reporting solution is set to the users. grow as company is on an aggressive growth path. If the company were to opt for a user-based or Easy Deployment:The Java variant of Synaptris processor-based licensing system the benefits would Reporter was selected for Clopay's Oracle not justify the cost. With Synaptris's uncomplicated environment. The variant is built completely on Java server based licensing system Clopay is experiencing standards and is thus most suitable for Oracle a cost to benefit ratio unrivalled by any solution in environment. This variant supports JDBC and native the industry. drivers for extraction of data. The data source was Oracle 9i database while the solution was deployed on OC4J web application server in the servlet container. No complex coding was required either for deploying the solution or for getting started with report creation.

IntelliVIEW Reporting made easy! Conclusion

Clopay had invested heavily in IT to achieve improved business process efficiency and profitability. Though there was an immediate increase in the efficiency as well as profitability, it wasn't to the level expected. On analysis it was found that though quality information was collected at all process levels, it was being converted to action. On further probe it was found that by the time the information reached the concerned team/manager it had become obsolete or it was so over loaded with irrelevant data that sifting to get the relevant information became a Herculean task.

Clopay then came to a conclusion that a reporting solution would solve their problem. After analyzing almost all popular solutions in the market, the company decided to go with IntelliVIEW's reporting solution.

IntelliVIEW's reporting solution helped Clopay achieve the following:

Leverage the investments made not only in IT but also across manufacturing and distributional set-up, thus achieving the competitive advantage it was working towards all along Faster time to market for new products. Improved customer service and relationship record. Better control on operational processes and efficiency. Faster correctional actions, resulting in better implementation of Strategy Lowest TCO helped Clopay achieve the fastest ROI than any of its earlier investments.

Thus helping Clopay achieve better business process efficiency and profitability goals.

Synaptris Information Management for the Real-time Enterprise

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