Niemann Foods Gains a Competitive Edge with Webfocus

Customer Profile

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Niemann Foods Inc.

Snapshot Organization Niemann Foods Inc. is a regional retail store operator with approximately 100 stores in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. The Challenge Provide executives and store managers with quick and easy access to information that can improve decision-making, enabl- ing the company to move faster and work smarter than competing national and Niemann Foods Gains a Competitive regional retail operators. The Strategy Edge With WebFOCUS Develop an operational reporting environment that tracks sales activity, Regional Grocery Retailer Takes on the Super Stores With gross profits, and the movement of Analytic Insight from Information Builders products through interactive reports, driven by the business community. Niemann Foods Inc. is a regional retail store operator with approximately 100 stores The Results in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. The company owns and operates Pet Supplies Plus, Niemann’s executive management team and Sav-a-Lot stores, mostly under the County Market and Cub Foods banners. The now has access to vital information that significantly improves corporate decision- employee-owned, family-run company was founded in 1917 and currently employs making. Regional managers and store 4,000 people. directors also have better information to manage the profitability of their stores Niemann is battling for market share in the Midwest with a number of national and and regions. regional retail operators in the region. With $650 million in annual sales, Niemann’s goal is to be a $1 billion company. This aggressive growth strategy drove the company’s Information Builders Solution senior managers to purchase Information Builders WebFOCUS, a business intelligence WebFOCUS, Maintain, and Professional (BI) and analytics environment that delivers vital information to people at every level Services. of the organization.

WebFOCUS iWay Software “We reached a tipping point where it became clear that a new reporting environment would save everybody time and be worth the necessary investment,” explains Larry Schaffer, director of information technology at Niemann Foods. “We had 14 stores when I started and we have more than 100 now,” he adds. “We continue to grow very aggressively, both organically and through acquisitions.”

Information Builders is helping Niemann Foods to monitor its information-driven business by creating an operational reporting environment that tracks sales activity, gross profits, and the movement of products. The retailer’s pervasive vision for end-user reporting entrusts business users with manipulating data, rather than requiring the IT department to continually develop reports in response to each request.

“We liked the ease of use Extending Homegrown Reports [of WebFOCUS] and its rich Over the years, Niemann has developed an intranet called NFINet that supports core operational development environment. systems, including a sales reporting application known as “The Numbers.” Most of its reports have The other BI products we been manually coded with HTML and Microsoft Active Server pages. Regional managers and store looked at were not as open directors depend heavily on these reports to make day-to-day operational decisions, but IT pros and customizable. With must constantly adjust, revamp, and extend those reports in response to ever-changing business WebFOCUS, developers conditions. With a thinly staffed IT operation, Schaffer and other IT pros found it difficult to keep up. can use GUI tools or drop As they examined several modern BI tools, they quickly realized that there was a better way to deliver down into the code to fresh insight throughout the organization. Niemann Foods runs a fast-paced operation based around meet more sophisticated daily orders that are delivered straight to the shelves. With no warehousing and very little back-stock, requirements.” the company’s just-in-time inventory model is a perfect candidate for real-time reporting. Larry Schaffer Director of Information “We wanted web delivery of operational data,” Schaffer recalls. “We needed a tool that would Technology Niemann Foods not only streamline our IT activities, but also enable people to access and manipulate data on their own. We realized that encouraging self-sufficiency within the user base was the best way to maximize the efforts of a relatively lean IT staff.”

After a thorough analysis, Niemann Foods selected WebFOCUS as its new enterprise reporting and BI platform. “We liked its ease of use on the one hand, and its rich development environment on the other,” Schaffer continues. “The other BI products we looked at were not as open and customizable. With WebFOCUS, developers can use GUI tools or drop down into the code to meet more sophisticated requirements.”

The IT team also liked WebFOCUS Maintain, which enables them to create closed-loop BI applications in which people can both retrieve and update operational data. They believed this type of BI application would be the simplest and most efficient way to give store managers control over the relentless flow of information.

“The grocery industry has razor-thin margins, so we continually strive to keep costs and overhead down,” Schaffer notes. “It is a very numbers-focused business. Beginning at 5:00 am, everybody is reviewing the performance stats from the previous day. They want to monitor daily sales and also know how those numbers compare to a year ago, such as which categories are up, which ones are down, and how the performance rolls up from store to store and region to region.” Empowering Users With the Information They Need Most of Niemann Food’s operational data is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database. It serves a menu-based reporting system that lets users examine sales by company, community, store, and department. Every time somebody wants to run a report, the system generates a new query.

The IT team is gradually shifting away from this older reporting system as it creates new reports with WebFOCUS. So far, the emphasis has been on monitoring sales and gross profits, but Schaffer sees the potential for much more.

“We are using WebFOCUS to replace this menu-based system with a tabular system of multi- dimensional reports,” he explains. “As long as people understand the data, they will be able to get the answers they need, often without having to engage a technical resource.”

Running key WebFOCUS reports each night ensures that all the necessary data is pre-sorted and summarized, conserving compute cycles and speeding up analysis activities during the day.

The old menu-based system is now represented by one tab in the WebFOCUS system. Schaffer and his colleagues are gradually adding additional tabs to permit end-user inquiry into other domains. Ultimately, pre-aggregated summaries will take the form of drillable charts and graphs that permit fine-grained analysis.

Schaffer admits that making a wholesale migration to WebFOCUS will require a cultural shift for “WebFOCUS supplies the user community. Most of Niemann’s existing reports present columnar data with percentage many types of reports and comparisons. These reports do the job and people are comfortable with them, but they are only a many ways to present data shadow of the functionality available in the WebFOCUS environment. to users; it lets you choose your preferred output on “The challenge is to extend the vision of a few pioneers to the organization as a whole,” Schaffer the fly.” notes. “The user base must be willing to adapt and change as the organization provides new Larry Schaffer technology.” Director of Information Technology Already, users value WebFOCUS for the wide variety of output formats that it offers – from simple Niemann Foods HTML displays to printable PDFs to automatic uploads into Excel, complete with all formats and formulas. WebFOCUS can automatically populate Excel spreadsheets with data from Niemann’s SQL Server database, making information instantly available for analysis.

In addition, with the WebFOCUS Connector for Microsoft Excel, users could write-back or update a central database from within Excel spreadsheets, eliminating the need to collate and update data manually from separate worksheets. With this connector in place, users can simply click the “Save” button on their worksheets to instantly send changes to the database.

“WebFOCUS supplies many types of reports and many ways to present data to users; it lets you choose your preferred output on the fly,” Schaffer says. “For example, parameterized reports make it very easy to drill down into a region, product, or store. We are also exploring graphical, exception-based reports that let managers focus on items that need attention.” Find Out More Evolving Business Analytics for Competitive Advantage Achieving Niemann’s vision for business intelligence requires educating the staff on what’s To find out how we can help available and what they can do with WebFOCUS. Schaffer believes the end will justify the means your company succeed, talk to by making the staff more efficient. “Eliminating manual reporting tasks will make our lives easier,” he states. “We currently spend hundreds of hours submitting queries, cutting and pasting data your local Information Builders into Excel, and revamping the data in our current presentation system. WebFOCUS can automate representative today. Visit us at many of these activities.” informationbuilders.com, For example, Niemann Foods plans to create WebFOCUS dashboards to give executives real-time or in the U.S. and Canada, call tools for monitoring sales. Schaffer would also like to deploy WebFOCUS InfoAssist to extend report- (800) 969-4636. To improve development tools to department managers, and he sees WebFOCUS Active Technology as an ideal way to provide interactive reporting capabilities to people throughout the organization, with your skills with our solutions, data pre-selected for individual regions and stores. visit education.ibi.com. “Each milestone we achieve with WebFOCUS just whets our appetite for more,” Schaffer concludes. “Most grocery retailers run their businesses the same way today that they did 20 years ago. Companies that are willing to step out and acquire new technology will gain a competitive advantage over those that are not.”

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