Finding a Competitive Edge With WebFOCUS Magnify

Worldwide Supply Combines Search and BI Technology to Improve Sales Cycles and Response Times

Worldwide Supply is a leading global buyer and supplier of quality certified pre-owned networking equipment, including switches, routers, cable modem termination systems and associated parts, and peripherals. The company specializes in finding high-quality pre-owned equipment that is either end-of-life or back ordered from the original equipment manufacturers, and then turning it around to fulfill customer needs.

To succeed in this fast-moving environment, Worldwide Supply continually sifts through vast amounts of internal and external data to determine product availability, pricing, and configuration requirements. Toward that end, company leaders decided to create a unique business intelligence (BI) solution to consolidate data from multiple types of internal and external data sources. They also needed the ability to discern quickly what sectors of the market they’ve been selling to recently and what notes they have on potential customers from their SQL Server databases.

It took the team two years to find a BI solution that would satisfy their specific requirements. After evaluating products from eight BI vendors, they unanimously selected Information Builders WebFOCUS and its Magnify enterprise search to obtain better access to real-time information and gain an edge over their competition.

Versatile Tools for a Versatile Business

“In some ways our business is like the stock market,” says Jill Ayers, IT manager at Worldwide Supply. “We have to keep track of how much products sell for today, what we paid for them yesterday, and their projected value tomorrow. Our success depends on getting accurate information from a wide range of sources very quickly.”

Worldwide Supply often gets its products by arranging trades with customers, consigning equipment, or even reselling products they’ve purchased from competitors. The better they can access information about past sales activity, customer history, inventory, and quotes, the better they can make wise business decisions. “It’s all about the demand for a product at any given moment,” Ayers continues. “If you can quickly locate and deliver the products that customers want, you can command a premium for your services.”

Although the majority of the BI vendors said they could help Worldwide Supply structure a consolidated database, most were not able to create an enterprise search index. “Our technical team was willing to take on a challenge that eight BI companies wouldn’t even try, including Cognos and BusinessObjects," Ayers explains. "Information Builders was the only BI vendor that rose to the challenge. They were true collaborators who had the resources to pull it off. They also had a unique technology platform that combines search with BI.”

The linchpin of that platform is WebFOCUS Magnify, a unique software environment that can search and index any data, structured or unstructured, regardless of its source or location. Magnify gives users a familiar and intuitive Google-like interface to instantly access detailed records, unstructured documents, aggregate summaries, and more. Search terms are fed to the WebFOCUS BI platform as parameters, which automatically trigger the generation of reports or guided ad hoc forms that can be used to further refine report content.

Untangling Network Data Sources

Worldwide Supply already had an SAP R/3 ERP system, as well as applications for sales, prospecting, product configuration, quoting, contact management, order entry, and more. Reps also access information from industry sources, which formerly meant searching both internal and external networks before manually combining the results. The company needed a consolidated system that could pull data from all of these systems, combine it into a searchable database, and present cohesive results on demand. To meet these needs, Information Builders Professional Services worked closely with Ayers and her team to create a BI portal and associated search index.

“Information Builders Professional Services came back with great solutions for every problem,” says Ayers. “The engagement was very well structured, which helped ensure that we got everything we wanted.”

Today, WebFOCUS consolidates Worldwide Supply’s diverse sources of information into one easy-to-use system that can be accessed throughout the organization. Magnify searches through a variety of structured and unstructured databases to see which products are available and to identify the potential buyers for those products. It can even capture part numbers from messages and documents, parse the pertinent information, and load it into a structured database.

Magnify uses fuzzy logic to ensure that even partial search strings yield usable results for the sales team, giving shape to vast quantities of data. The system reveals instantly if Worldwide Supply has a particular product in stock, what the current market demand is for that product, and what the value should be. Users can drill down to see a purchase history for that item over the last 30 to 100 days or to search related sources of price and availability information.

Magnify dynamically groups related information so users can easily narrow down results and filter large sets. It provides users with a simple, uniform, and interactive search experience so they can navigate, understand, and analyze search results as they are presented. Records, transactions, and messages are dynamically captured as they are sent.

In addition to search results, Magnify displays underlying categories derived from a record’s metadata. Instead of sifting through pages of results, as most popular search engines require users to do, they can filter them by categories, such as manufacturer, product type, or document source.

Many of the 30 employees at the company use the BI environment, including sales staff, sales administrators, purchasers, and sales managers – anyone who needs to fill an order or find out what products are available.

An Information System That Drives Sales

With this new information system in place, Worldwide Supply is enjoying the competitive edge that comes from being able to quickly respond to the very specific requests from customers. Sales reps can synthesize information about parts, manufacturers, and related technical notes, leading to more complete and accurate orders. The system even boosts sales by providing lists of potential add-on parts and peripherals.

“Reps feel knowledgeable about what they are doing because the system brings together information seamlessly,” Ayers explains. “This is especially true when people are new to the industry and don’t know that certain cables are required for certain parts and so on.”

The BI/search system not only makes the existing sales team more effective, but also saves time and money when a new team member joins the company.

“The learning curve and the training materials for this system are much shorter than under the previous system, which had data stored in various ways and required different types of access throughout the company,” says Ayers. “Now employees go to one place, initiate one request, and all of the information comes to them. They have to be trained on only one piece of software, so they can hit the ground running.”

Ultimately, this combination of a knowledgeable sales staff wielding reliable information contributes to greater customer loyalty and satisfaction, which is vital in an industry where customers have many choices for their equipment suppliers.

That’s why Worldwide Supply is sticking with Information Builders. The company is looking forward to implementing more BI initiatives in the future, including dashboards that display key performance indicators to help managers monitor performance. They also plan to use WebFOCUS to enhance their SAP financial-reporting capabilities and WebFOCUS ReportCaster to schedule, run, and deliver reports by e-mail. Finally, Worldwide Supply plans to create an external-facing BI portal that lets customers answer their own questions, such as when an order is slated to arrive and if certain parts are in stock.

According to Jay VanOrden, the owner of Worldwide Supply, Information Builders’ technology has been a huge success for the company. Not only does it save time for the sales staff, it makes the organization more productive and their customers happier.

“We know that we win business simply because we respond faster than our competition,” VanOrden concludes. “Thanks to Information Builders’ BI and search capabilities, we’re outpacing other network equipment suppliers.”