Jack Nadel International Outflanks Competitors With Custom BI Apps

WebFOCUS Energizes Information Nerve Center for Promotional Products Agency

Jack Nadel International (JNI) is a marketing and promotional products agency that specializes in brand identity reinforcement and maintenance. The Los Angeles-based company serves as an extension of its clients' sales and marketing teams, combining creative and unique merchandising solutions with cutting-edge information technology to help companies achieve their marketing goals.

Unlike many of its competitors in the promotional products industry, JNI goes far beyond branded gimmicks and trinkets. JNI's creative team works closely with its clients to help them advance their marketing efforts. To that end, the firm relies on information to work smarter, faster, and more effectively than other firms in its field. With more than 200 employees throughout the United States, JNI depends on Information Builders WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform to enable on-demand reporting from any location.

"WebFOCUS enables us to provide our widely dispersed workforce with self-service access to the information they need to best serve our clients," says Ross Hooper, IT director at JNI. "These BI tools allow us to be more responsive to our sales staff by giving them the information and insight they need, which makes a world of difference to the way they see our administration. Our salespeople are happy because they can grab what they need at midnight if they want to, and we don't need to employ people on our administrative staff to answer those questions."

JNI's new WebFOCUS system is doing much more than keeping its salesforce happy. As a direct result of process improvements from the new BI environment, the company has been able to reallocate five full-time administrative employees.

"We're getting a payoff multiplied by four or five every year on the original cost of this technology," Hooper reveals. "It has been a tremendous bang for the buck."

While WebFOCUS is now the reporting standard for JNI, Hooper and his colleagues initially purchased the BI software to solve a different problem: data quality. JNI was using a Lawson ERP system, with a Web front end that was built in Domino. Despite their best efforts, the interface between the two systems generated many errors. "Our orders were messed up and we didn't bill for a month," Hooper explains. "We were drowning in data problems."

The company brought in consultant Peter Ellis and contractor Colin Kastner to help them sort out the difficulties.

"Because WebFOCUS can connect to virtually any data source, we were able to dig into the data and determine what was wrong." Hooper says. "We used WebFOCUS to connect to the SQL Server tables in Lawson and put it all back in order so we could get back in business."

When the time came to select a reporting tool, Hooper remembered how easy WebFOCUS had been to deploy and how comprehensively it had solved their problems.

"As a former consultant, I knew that tools like Hyperion, Cognos, and Business Objects have a reputation for being difficult and expensive to deploy," he says. "Because we were short on time and money in the aftermath of our ERP implementation, I took a look at what the consultant and contractor had done with WebFOCUS on a shoestring budget and realized it was the tool for us."

Improving Business Processes Throughout the Organization

JNI deployed WebFOCUS Developer Studio, hired Kastner as a full-time WebFOCUS developer, and built a parameter-driven reporting system integrated with JNI's MyNadel order-processing system, which Hooper calls "the nerve center for information in the company." Virtually everyone in the organization uses MyNadel, including the CEO and CFO.

"Every day, the CEO logs on to monitor how we are doing hour-to-hour and to see what orders have been entered that day," Hooper says. "Salespeople can see the status of commissions, review customer orders, and run historical reports with a few clicks of the mouse."

WebFOCUS also streamlines important workflow processes. For example, instead of sending monthly packets to the sales force, reps use WebFOCUS to view sales information whenever they want.

"We used to print, collate, and FedEx information about sales pipelines, AR balances, and other details the reps need to run their business," says Hooper. "The information was often two weeks out of date by the time they got it. That whole packet is gone now, as are the costs associated with creating it."

JNI uses a WebFOCUS feature – conditional styling – to alert users to specific issues that may need to be addressed.

"With conditional styling, we can highlight anything on the screen, based on logical criteria," Hooper explains. "For example, if we have a gross profit that is lower than a certain threshold, we mark it in red because there might be something wrong with the pricing on that order. That cues the manager to talk with the salesperson about the gross profit percentage on that order. Or, if freight costs are high, that may get flagged in yellow, so the rep knows there may be an issue."

Salespeople quickly adjusted to being able to get reports on demand rather than waiting for paper reports and sales packets.

"We've had a virtually zero learning curve," says Mercy Romero, business intelligence developer at JNI. "We haven't needed to provide training courses for the new system. Our users pick it up quickly. They love the drill-down capabilities, the conditional styling, and especially having real-time access to current information in a Web-based format, which reduces questions to the IT department."

Making Self-Service Reporting Easy for Users

JNI has already created about 60 self-service reports in WebFOCUS. The reports are parameterized, with drill-down capabilities that enable users to easily create variants. The IT staff retains control of the database and maintains data quality.

The BI system operates on Intel-based computers running Microsoft Windows, and accesses data from Microsoft SQL Server databases as part of a .NET environment.

"WebFOCUS interfaces with our Windows environment perfectly," Hooper says. "We have reduced implementation costs by using commodity hardware with .NET."

Savings in infrastructure do not curtail flexibility or quality. There are four reporting tabs in MyNadel: Administration, Managerial, Sales, and Utilities. Within each of those tabs, users see a different set of reports based on their role in the organization. For example, salespeople can run reports about current sales, month-to-date sales histories, and order status. IT personnel have additional reports for tracking and maintaining data quality. Managers can run reports offering overviews of an entire department, region, or business function.

Romero still responds to ad hoc requests when users need specialized reports, and popular reports are quickly institutionalized so they are available to everyone. As a result, JNI has been able to deploy and maintain the new reporting system with very little investment of capital or resources.

"We have been able to transform reporting and information delivery for many disciplines with one tool and essentially one developer," says Hooper. "It was a low-key, relatively simple process compared to my previous experience in the consulting industry."

Future Ambitions From Today's Success

JNI plans to expand its use of WebFOCUS to provide information directly to customers so they can monitor their own accounts, inventory, and orders. The promotional products agency also wants to enable mobile reporting capabilities via iPhones, Blackberries, and other mobile devices, so remote users can always view corporate data. In addition, JNI plans to improve analytic capabilities with WebFOCUS Quick Data, an Excel add-in that enables spreadsheet users to build reports from multiple data sets, so they always have current information for analysis.

"Our return on WebFOCUS has been phenomenal," Hooper says. "We credit the BI software with direct bottom-line savings in accounts receivable and other administrative domains simply through more intelligently tracking, routing, and presenting of information. We're encouraging self-sufficiency throughout our user base, which makes our entire organization more efficient," Hooper concludes. "From staff reductions to process improvements to keeping our sales force empowered with the information they need to work efficiently, WebFOCUS is making us more nimble and competitive."