Webfocus Brings Analytic Self-Sufficiency to Associated Food Stores

Customer Profile

Organization An American retailers cooperative, Associated Food Stores supplies more than 400 independently-owned retail supermarkets throughout Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Oregon, Nevada, and Wyoming.

Associated Food Stores

The Challenge Eliminate haphazard, inaccurate one-off reports; free IT staff from dealing with individual requests for information; reduce the cost of providing relevant data to users; automate analytics, report development, and information distribution. WebFOCUS Brings Analytic The Strategy Self-Sufficiency to Associated Food Stores Use WebFOCUS and InfoAssist+ to create a flexible, company-wide analytic BI Portal and InfoAssist+ Help Grocery Cooperative environment that enables business users to create custom reports, dashboards, Compete With Large Chains and InfoApps™ to deliver information and insights to everyone. Associated Food Stores (AFS) helps independent retailers compete against national The Results chains by combining buying power, warehouse facilities, and technology – so even Managers have a current, company-wide small mom-and-pop stores have enterprise-caliber capabilities. The retail cooper- view of critical metrics. The IT department is ative ships more than 750 truckloads of groceries each week to 400 independently free to develop new programs, rather than owned supermarkets and 43 corporate-owned stores in an eight-state region. spending all their time troubleshooting. The Thanks to WebFOCUS, these retailers share another important commodity as well: business community is more self-sufficient. analytic insights. AFS has reduced software-licensing costs by standardizing on WebFOCUS. “We use WebFOCUS Portal and InfoAssist+ to analyze vital information quickly,” says Information Builders Solution Jason Hickenlooper, business intelligence (BI) manager at Associated Foods. “We link WebFOCUS BI Portal, InfoAssist+, and dashboards and reports together, and easily tailor content for each corporate unit and Professional Services. each retailer’s needs.”

This attitude of self-sufficiency has characterized AFS since its founding in 1940, when Information Builders helps Donald P. Lloyd, president of the Utah Retail Grocers Association, convinced 34 Utah organizations transform data into retailers to band together to face the growing threat of large grocery chains. Today business value. Our business their self-service analytic environment lets business users control how information intelligence, integration, and data is styled, displayed, and arranged, as well as how they navigate through content. integrity solutions enable smarter Responsive design techniques ensure a consistent user experience on computers, decision-making, strengthen tablets, and phones. customer relationships, improve performance, and drive growth.

WebFOCUS iWay Software Omni Customer Profile

For example, Hickenlooper and his team rolled out a Retail Portal that allows store managers to track daily sales and labor from a time and attendance system. The portal combines point-of-sale data, financial data, and customer account information, then compares it against scheduled labor hours, total labor hours, dollars spent on wages, and overtime labor to gauge profitability.

Managers previously had to run multiple reports in the time and attendance system – as well as punch information into spreadsheets – to tabulate this information. According to Wade Judd, Chief Information Officer at Associated Food Stores, developers spent too much time responding to report requests, and users loaded the results into Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access to further manipulate the data, causing confusion about which numbers were accurate. WebFOCUS combines the information and makes it available through a dashboard, where approximately 1,000 people at 90 stores actively use the system to manage their operations. “Our users create and distribute their own reports from a self-service, IT-managed, secure reporting environment,” adds Judd.

Custom Portals and InfoApps™ Extend Insight AFS is rolling out BI portals and InfoApps to internal business units such as finance, marketing, advertising, team services, design and print services, logistics, transportation, procurement, payroll, retail counselors, and its executive team. InfoApps are interactive apps that enable non-technical users to easily explore data via charts, graphs, dashboards, and reports. Authorized users view relevant content on computers, iPads, iPhones, and Android devices.

One specific InfoApp allows warehouse staff members to analyze incoming purchase orders to optimize the unloading process, as well as to determine which trucks have the highest “Users get the information they priorities based on current inventory levels. “Every three minutes the screen is refreshed to tell need without having to go to the warehouse staff what to do next,” explains Hickenlooper. “WebFOCUS helps improve slotting the IT department to request efficiency, avoid mark-outs, and deliver the right items to the right stores.” a report. They get answers more quickly, and we are more Buyers on the category management team depend on another InfoApp to determine which efficient in IT.” items in different categories are selling, where the market is moving, specific items to promote, and other items to discontinue. “WebFOCUS streamlines data mining activities for this team,” Henry Call says Hickenlooper. “They have an organized portal environment for gathering information and WebFOCUS Administrator Associated Food Stores monitoring trends.”

The e-commerce group, which handles online orders with retailers, views metrics and KPIs through a customizable dashboard that offers guided self-service reporting for common queries, such as “top five” and “bottom five” reports. A loss prevention portal empowers store managers to drill down to the cashier level when they see patterns that might indicate theft or training issues. Other portals display daily sales, customer accounts, invoice data, and point-of-sale data. “WebFOCUS makes it easy to sort by cashier, store, region, and other variables,” notes Hickenlooper.

Meanwhile, standard financial reports let managers compare sales from the current week to the same week in previous years, revealing expected versus actual revenue, margins, and other crucial information. Shipping reports summarize credits, returns, damaged goods and all aspects of warehouse operations. AFS also distributes Accounts Receivable statements to its retailers. Customer Profile

InfoAssist+ Engages the Business Community Associated Food Stores is rolling out InfoAssist+ to enable business analysts to develop and design new portal pages and create pertinent KPIs. WebFOCUS supports a productive division of labor: IT professionals develop data marts and reporting objects. Each retailer and department can have its own portal, as well as analysts to design and develop new InfoApps™ for their staff who consume information.

“InfoAssist+ allows us to do a quick mock up with a new data set,” says Hickenlooper. “Previously users had to find their own information. Now we’re using InfoAssist+ to expand the BI adoption in our community. The environment can be customized for each brand, yet all be part of one unified portal environment that we maintain centrally.”

There are currently about two-dozen InfoAssist+ users. Hickenlooper expects that number to double, dramatically expanding AFS’s ability to extend BI and analytics throughout the organization.

Built-in security enables the IT department to determine which data and tables users can access, depending on their roles and responsibilities. The single-sign-on environment leverages Microsoft “Information Builders has Active Directory to control precisely which content users can see through the portals. “This is a been a great partner, and huge advantage, since we don’t have to manage all the user administration details,” continues their tools have allowed us to Hickenlooper. “Authorized users can click in from other parts of the intranet, and external streamline and standardize our customers can login through the firewall.” reporting and BI development processes. We have enabled WebFOCUS Anchors New Reporting Standards better accuracy and controls by AFS standardized on WebFOCUS because its GUI interface makes it easy to develop dashboards standardizing how and where and InfoApps using HTML5. Previously, users had multiple reporting technologies, and people data is consumed.” created private reports and databases with Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, MicroStrategy, and Wade Judd Crystal Reports. This led to inconsistencies throughout the organization. Chief Information Officer Associated Food Stores “Back then, many users only received rigid hard copy reports,” says Henry Call, WebFOCUS administrator at AFS. “If they wanted more information, they had to query the daily ledger. They couldn’t analyze the data or drill down to pertinent details.”

What Are InfoApps? InfoApps™ deliver highly interactive analytics content, such as data visualizations, charts, graphs, and reports to users through an easy “app store-like” experience. Instead of learning complex tools and worrying about data preparation, users can tap into InfoApps to serve themselves and quickly get answers and insights from relevant data, right when they need it. InfoApps make it easy for non-technical, mainstream users to get and analyze information on both web browsers and mobile devices. Customer Profile

Now, if a sales figure looks incorrect, it’s easy to use the new BI environment to drill down to the underlying data to obtain additional details. Within seconds, a user determines what went awry in a region, or even in an individual store, and takes corrective action. Throughout AFS’s organization, people are more efficient. For example, the payroll department had only one full-time employee developing reports, along with significant efforts from the IT staff. Today a single user can run payroll reports in less than half the time. “Our payroll manager has all the reports she needs to analyze and respond to issues,” says Call, citing one of many examples. “She runs all the payroll reports herself.”

Much of the reporting data is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database, while financial data is maintained in an Oracle database. WebFOCUS Active Technology allows users to sort and visualize the data. Distributed reports and other BI content can be password-protected and include expiration dates.

AFS uses WebFOCUS alerting capabilities to automatically distribute reports when predefined thresholds and exceptions are reached, giving department managers and division managers a company-wide view of daily, weekly, and year-to-date totals, along with the ability to drill down to the store level to resolve problems.

Call says these and other features promote independence among the user community. “Users get the information they need without having to go to the IT department to request a report,” he notes. “They get answers more quickly, and we are more efficient in IT.”

Judd agrees. “Information Builders has been a great partner, and their tools have allowed us to streamline and standardize our reporting and BI development processes. We have enabled better accuracy and controls by standardizing how and where data is consumed.”

Find Out More We can help you succeed. Talk to your local Information Builders representative to learn how. Visit us at informationbuilders.com, e-mail [email protected], or call (800) 969-4636 in the U.S. and Canada. To improve your skills, visit education.ibi.com.

Corporate Headquarters Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121-2898 (212) 736-4433; Fax (212) 967-6406