Walsworth Publishing Moves to Head-of-the-Class Business Intelligence

Walsworth Publishing, a publisher of yearbooks and other print materials, built a WebFOCUS-based reporting portal that gives its clients quick and easy access to information.

Renowned Yearbook Publisher Uses WebFOCUS to Enhance Reporting Capabilities For Customers and Staff

Walsworth Publishing, a publisher of yearbooks and other print materials, built a WebFOCUS-based reporting portal that gives its clients quick and easy access to information.

The typical high school yearbook staff usually comprises a bunch of dedicated students entrusted by classmates to immortalize their high school years. As they frantically snap photos, lay out pages, and crop images, yearbook staff members are also charged with other, less glamorous tasks, such as meeting publisher deadlines and adhering to the contracted prices structures.

Walsworth Publishing has been helping students put together these cherished books for nearly 80 years. With roughly 3,700 schools as customers, the Marceline, Missouri-based company has learned that rapid turnaround time is the key to keeping its customers happy.

The company is accelerating its processes with a WebFOCUS-based reporting portal that allows clients to easily access information. All of their information, including the status of printing jobs, page submissions, proofs, and deadlines (which determine pricing) are now available electronically. Students can monitor page submissions, see a list of items that need attention, and review color-coded proofs (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. An external-facing dashboard for yearbook customers.

According to Sherri Pickman, Walsworth's finance and cost accounting manager, this new external dashboard improves customer loyalty by giving schools the unique ability to track progress in real time. It also helps Walsworth to publish each school's yearbook more efficiently.

"Printing season is dependent on the schools sending us those pages," she says. "This system helps them complete their books on time at the lowest possible cost."

Graduating to a New Level of Success

Ensuring schools have up-to-date information about every step of the process – from the moment electronic versions of pages are finalized to the day their books are printed, bound, and shipped – required a massive technology overhaul that included deploying a new ERP system called Prism Win, a vertical application suite for the printing industry.

Overhauling its back-end systems impacted Walsworth's customer-facing applications as well as its internal reporting systems. Corporate officers decided to establish a single business intelligence (BI) platform that could combine fragmented data created by different programmers using different databases and data management tools.

"Our former reporting capabilities weren't scalable, they weren't flexible, and they couldn't keep up with our growth," says Pickman. Walsworth decided to integrate all the diverse pieces of this data management landscape into a comprehensive BI environment that gave their customers self-service access to account information and streamlined operational reporting for internal sales, manufacturing, and finance personnel.

Studying Up on WebFOCUS

Walsworth hired a consultant to help with the initiative, and together they looked at leading BI tools from Information Builders, Cognos, and Business Objects. Pickman and her colleagues found that Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform offered the same or better capabilities than any other competitor – for a much lower cost. They were impressed by WebFOCUS' ability to easily gather data from many types of systems – including Lotus Notes, SQL Server, Prism Win, Microsoft Access, and DB2 data from a variety of AS/400 applications.

"We purchased WebFOCUS first to stabilize the reporting environment," explains Pickman. "Since we were going through a lot of changes to the back-end systems, we knew we needed a strong and flexible business intelligence platform to support the rest of the changes we were making."

"We were confident that WebFOCUS could easily reach into all of our different types of data to create a common platform for reporting." Walsworth turned to Information Builders for help getting started with WebFOCUS. A local Information Builders consultant came into the Walsworth offices to run a six-week training workshop on the new software and four members of the Walsworth team attended additional classes.

Making the Grade

The team quickly progressed. They used WebFOCUS Developer Studio to create a dashboard for the yearbook salesforce, which includes more than 120 employees. In addition to the sales staff members, managers and executive-level employees now have access to the dashboard as well, bringing the total number of users to roughly 170.

Prior to the creation of these dashboards, the sales staff had to wade through information coming from multiple sources. None of this information was interactive, parameterized, or updated more than once per week. "With WebFOCUS, we put all the information they needed into one dashboard that is updated at least four times a day," says Pickman. "The sales staff loved it. Suddenly, they had parameterized reports that allowed them to drill down and select their own information."

With WebFOCUS guided ad hoc reporting technology, users can easily choose columns, sort criteria, measures, and output formats to generate their own personal reports. Each guided ad hoc reporting template uses parameters to generate thousands of different reports to meet the requirements of many users, from executives to frontline workers.

Taken together, WebFOCUS reports and dashboards give the entire company a better idea of key metrics, including revenue and production operations. In the past, Pickman and her team manually created offline reports to track their sales throughout the year.

Getting Into the Popular Crowd

Walsworth plans to update the sales dashboards with forecasting reports that will enhance the way its commercial sales reps do business. For example, sales managers used to manually create sales forecasts using paper copies of invoices, quotes, and estimates from each rep. The dashboard will automate this process and enable everyone to improve sales forecasting accuracy.

Walsworth is also on the verge of rolling out new finance reports to more than 200 people. Currently, department managers review expense statements each month. To obtain a breakdown of each expense they must manually compare these statements with a separate report from accounts payable. WebFOCUS now combines this information along with key performance indicators (KPIs) to reveal whether a department's expenses are in a red, yellow, or green zone versus its budget. Users automatically see different views of monthly expenses based on their roles and staff level (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Leading indicators and KPIs from the internal sales dashboard.

This type of automation allows Walsworth to streamline its processes, saving valuable time that can be used to improve forecasting and drive sales. The team plans to continue to use WebFOCUS to enable better planning and higher-quality reporting than their competitors.

"After we implement our new manufacturing system, WebFOCUS is going to be even busier," says Pickman. "Once our new information systems go live, we will have roughly 1,000 reports that will no longer be valid. We are counting on WebFOCUS to help us quickly recreate these reports. We depend on this information to run the business."

Walsworth also plans to develop KPIs for executives and managers. For example, the chief operating officer will be able to track metrics such as performance to budget, operating income, equipment utilization, material yield, and total cost of quality.

Pickman's experience with WebFOCUS makes her confident that her team can handle these and any future challenges. "I would recommend that any company going through a transition like we are should look into WebFOCUS," she says. "It's been an invaluable tool."