WebFOCUS Purifies Aqua Clara's Data

Aqua Clara, a leader in the water delivery industry known for its high-quality purifying system, improved its information sharing ability with Information Builders WebFOCUS.

Water-Delivery Company Improves Information-Sharing Ability With Updated BI

Aqua Clara is a leader in the water delivery industry, providing water bottles to homes and offices. Best known for its safe, high-quality water-purifying system, Aqua Clara has more than 70 franchise companies that produce and sell water.

The company headquarters in Japan is responsible for providing its franchises with the required business resources and knowledge, as well as managing water production and quality. Over the past few years, increased government orders on natural disaster preparedness have established Aqua Clara as part of the country’s social infrastructure.

Aqua Clara offered a main operating system to its partner community as a means of sharing business information. However, the system only covered sales operations management. If partner companies wanted to aggregate and/or analyze information from a certain viewpoint, they needed to obtain the data in CSV format and process it manually. Most of the company’s partners are small businesses that cannot afford technicians to handle data processing.

Additionally, these cumbersome aggregation and analysis processes were a huge drain on Aqua Clara’s resources. Monthly sales reports from partners were printed and distributed in hard-copy formats, so data needed to be rekeyed into the main system to generate related reports. Results were typically not available until, at the earliest, half a month later – a delay that negatively impacted the company’s ability to provide advice and guidance to its partners.

When Aqua Clara joined ACLemon Groups, the company decided to renovate its main operating system, and planned to extend it with a data-aggregation and analysis tool to better support partner businesses. Because the company’s business model is so unique, it wanted to develop the reporting system in-house using a robust tool set.

There were four main requirements Aqua Clara defined when it began evaluating business intelligence (BI) systems: the solution had to provide access to data via the Web; it had to have a user-friendly interface for non-technical staff; it had to be fast and easy to install; and it had to offer fixed-fee pricing regardless of the number of users.

"First, we wanted a product that was Web-based, since client/server systems can be quite troublesome when it comes to installation and maintenance, and would require each partner company to purchase an individual license," said Naomasa Furuya, director, general manager of product development at Aqua Clara. "Simplicity was also very important, as our partners do not necessarily have a person on staff who is familiar with data analysis.

"Furthermore, the product had to offer accelerated development, because we needed to devote the bulk of our development resources to building the new main operating system. And, finally, licensing was another important point. We wanted to avoid products that charged more as the number of users increased, since our base of partner companies was rapidly growing."

After comparing numerous solutions on the market, and assessing their ability to meet the criterion, the company chose WebFOCUS, a business intelligence platform sold by Information Builders’ Japanese representative K.K. Ashisuto. WebFOCUS is a comprehensive, fully integrated, enterprise-scale platform that delivers powerful and feature-rich, yet intuitive business intelligence across an entire organization, enabling timely, accurate reporting at the executive, analytical, and operational levels. With WebFOCUS, any data, in any enterprise source (including documents and other unstructured formats), is made readily available, accessible, and meaningful to any user, in any location.

WebFOCUS would serve as the foundation of a reporting environment that would help Aqua Clara’s partners increase client satisfaction. The system would also be used to analyze operations at the company’s headquarters.

Because WebFOCUS is Web-based, users never need to install and maintain software on their desktops. Its simple user interface and GUI development environment ensure the highest productivity. Additionally, processor-based licensing makes it affordable and economical to scale and expand the system to support additional partner companies and their users.

With WebFOCUS, the partner business-support system was designed, developed, and tested in three months, then put into full-fledged production just one month later. Now, partners can easily retrieve, consolidate, and analyze information that used to require much more time and energy to access. For example, partner companies can perform highly sophisticated data segmentation, classifying customers by property, researching purchasing tendencies by group, or examining which marketing method will be most effective for certain audiences. They can also instantly create lists of the best and worst customers based on prior purchases, payment histories, and other factors. Because users can rapidly create visual reports in the format of their choice, such as Excel and PDF, the data they need to address customer needs is now just one click away.

Partner companies appreciate the new system, as it allows them to leverage data about each individual customer to provide more personalized service. The system has also contributed to increased profitability by enabling Aqua Clara to provide better advice to its franchises. As a result, both partners and company executives want to expand the reporting environment even further.

"The greatest difference is that WebFOCUS simplifies data access, which used to require a lot of time and labor," Furuya adds. "Now, partners can obtain what they need with just a single mouse click. Additionally, corporate management has vital information that can be used to more intelligently advise those partner companies who are struggling to increase sales."

In the future, Aqua Clara plans to reinforce marketing activities based on customer analysis using WebFOCUS, and will enhance its corporate reporting environment with a fully integrated geographical information system. Armed with timely, relevant, and complete business data, the company’s community-based business is likely to continue to grow.