ICON Health and Fitness Strengthens Its Reporting Capabilities

Leading Equipment Manufacturer Gets Fit With WebFOCUS

With nearly 2,500 employees and nine locations worldwide, ICON Health and Fitness is one of the largest manufacturers and marketers of fitness equipment in the world. ICON owns some of the best-known brands in the fitness industry, including NordicTrack, FreeMotion, ProForm, EPIC, HealthRider, Weider, Image, and Weslo, in addition to licensing the Reebok and Gold’s Gym brands.

ICON employs a relatively small IT department that handles everything from the internal phone system to security, in-house wiring, web services, and the management of the corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. As a result, its IT resources were already stretched thin when upper management requested a business intelligence (BI) environment that could provide greater insight into key performance indicators (KPIs) across the company. Management especially wanted to know how each division was performing on a weekly, monthly, and year-to-date basis, with comparisons to previous time periods and business plans, to ensure that the company was meeting its revenue and profitability objectives.

ICON managers were intrigued by the flexibility of the Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform for both data retrieval and reporting. For example, WebFOCUS could use stored procedures in ICON’s DB2 database to preserve complex joins and data extraction routines, enabling them to reuse existing software assets. They also liked WebFOCUS Active Technology reports, which permit offline analysis, and WebFOCUS Visual Discovery, a robust data visualization environment for creating interactive reports and graphs.

The Information Builders Difference

Led by David Brown, chief BI architect at ICON, the company sought a decision-support environment that could capitalize on its IBM iSeries platform to streamline the way they access, manipulate and distribute information and insight throughout the organization. The team also evaluated a packaged BI solution from Cognos, which had a partnership with the ERP vendor SSA, but found that its rudimentary reporting capabilities didn’t have enough flexibility to create a suitable customized reporting solution.

“Because our ERP system offers limited BI capabilities, we had to purge our records frequently, only retaining about six to twelve months of data at a time,” explains Brown. “As a result, compiling historical information was a tedious and time-consuming process. We wanted to create new KPIs and perform data trending with historical information, and Information Builders had a robust reporting and data access solution that was tailored for the IBM System i platform.” 

IBM verified the ability of WebFOCUS to run optimally on its System i platform (formerly the AS/400 and then later the iSeries), with fast, direct access to the DB2 database and native support for the AIX and Linux operating systems. This endorsement validated ICON’s decision to purchase WebFOCUS to create executive dashboards for sales and financial reporting, along with iWay DataMigrator to build a new data warehouse architecture.

Information Builders’ technology has had a multimillion dollar impact at ICON, as measured by increased efficiency and accuracy throughout the company, from the finance team to sales, R&D, production and customer service. Managers and executives enjoy greater decision-making capabilities, resulting in higher product margins, more responsive production lines, and a just-in-time inventory model that ensures customer satisfaction.

A New Regimen for Reporting and BI

With help from Information Builders Professional Services, Brown and his team used iWay DataMigrator to extract transactional data from the ERP system and load it into specialized data marts, summarized to reveal historic trends regarding sales, finance, product shipments, and other business domains. They then created reports that reveal KPIs for finance, sales, manufacturing, and other parts of the business.

Brown says it was easy to set up the back-end architecture using DataMigrator’s intuitive, drag-and-drop interface. “You simply identify the source data and tell DataMigrator what type of process to perform,” he explains. “It then automatically loads it into the data marts and combines it with other information that you specify.”

Within a few months, Brown and his team had built more than 20 KPI reports along with a parameterized reporting environment that permits customer service personnel to create custom reports in just a few minutes with very little training. They also set up a scheduled reporting system with WebFOCUS ReportCaster to automatically run and distribute these reports to management.

For example, Flash Reports are financial snapshots that reveal how each division is performing on a weekly, monthly, and year-to-date basis. Accessible via a custom WebFOCUS dashboard, about 50 top managers and executives regularly use these reports. They can click on any timeframe or sub-company, then drill down by customer or product to see what adjustments need to be made to ensure that the company is meeting expectations.

“Flash Reports are gospel to the Finance department,” explains Mary Joe Davis from ICON’s IT Reporting Needs group. “It used to take us three days to manually compile this same type of information, which meant that it wasn’t very current by the time we distributed it. Now managers can access real-time information instantly, increasing efficiency and data quality throughout the company.”

Stepping Up to Quality Analysis

The team went on to create the Assembly Report, which helps ICON’s research and development team to track products with similar configurations, noting the impact of slight variations in consoles, motors, and other components on the overall system design. In the past, engineers had to print as many as eight reports and then manually compare the configurations during production meetings. Now the Assembly Report consolidates all of the information into one parameterized report that the engineers can view and manipulate electronically. Brown says this one report saves the R&D department about $1 million per year, increasing efficiency and speed.

ICON also created cost reports to enable more precise pricing and more timely fulfillment of orders. Previously, ICON used standard cost for all of its reporting, which meant that the price of an item wouldn’t necessarily reflect the actual cost of production, importing, shipping, and other variables. ICON has domestic and international production facilities, and as each order is accepted and scheduled for production, management wanted to be able to instantly determine their most cost-effective and expedient options.

“In the past, if we wanted to compare the cost of producing something in Asia and shipping it to the U.S. versus producing something on U.S. soil, we would have to extract information from the ERP system and manually calculate those costs in a spreadsheet,” says Brown. “Now, because all this information resides in the data mart, we can use WebFOCUS to review all of the variables through parameterized forms.”

Product managers can also determine margins on each order based on location, local labor costs, shipping fees, warehousing, direct shipment, and other factors. Having this insight permits them to streamline the supply chain and minimize on-hand inventory, enabling direct shipment to customers rather than stocking inventory in a warehouse. This just-in-time model lowers cash-on-hand requirements, reduces Day's Sales Outstanding, and improves the accuracy of ICON’s sales forecasts. Most customers request delivery within a very narrow time window, and ICON can now easily calculate the best option for sourcing the products without driving up costs.

A Standard for BI Prowess

Since the outset of this project, WebFOCUS has become ICON’s company-wide BI standard. It has enabled them to access sales, finance, and product data directly from the ERP system to generate real-time reports, as well as to access historical information that has been summarized in the data marts.

“We love how quickly and easily we can create powerful reports within a tight turnaround time,” says Davis. “People especially love WebFOCUS Active Technology reports because they can manipulate information outside of Excel or even offline.”

Looking ahead, ICON plans to use WebFOCUS Visual Discovery to enhance the graphical capabilities of these reports, enabling users to dynamically change perspectives on the fly by selecting, zooming, pivoting, or recoloring charts and graphs. These visualization techniques make it easier to monitor trends and detect relationships among the data elements.

“A lot of people think you can’t do BI on the iSeries, but that’s just because they only consider the packaged applications that are commonly used on this platform,” says Brown. “WebFOCUS works perfectly with the iSeries. We can create reports and give management the insight they need using our existing hardware and software infrastructure. That’s a huge timesaver for the company and it has a direct impact on profitability. The sooner we can access KPIs and other valuable data, the sooner we can react to problems and the better off the company will be.”