With more than 1.5 million items produced for sales and service locations in more than 100 countries, A.W. Chesterton needed an advanced solution that let them easily pull reports and analytics from many disparate data sources to get a comprehensive view of company health and activity.
Without a single solution to bind every department from every location together, employees struggled to get up-to-date data on their accounts, leaving Chesterton to work and problem-solve reactively instead of proactively.
Chesterton had been using various models of ERP systems for more than 20 years to store and manage their vast amounts of data. For everyday employees however, that meant there was a pile of valuable data locked away in various systems of which they had limited access.
Different company departments—sales, finance, marketing, and supply chain—would pull data to create reports at disparate times throughout the month or even day. As a result, whenever departments compared data at company and departmental meetings, the numbers never agreed. This was a frustrating scenario for managers and employees alike that went on for more than a decade.
With the millions of products mass and custom produced for Chesterton customers, the sales team struggled to put together reports with what was sold to which company in what industry in what month. Reports were largely estimated, and the process of budgeting for an upcoming year was tedious and prone to error. If territories shifted or new employees entered the fray, numbers became almost impossible to calculate correctly.
Chesterton wanted a BI system that could pull the most up-to-date data from various systems and digest it, then automatically send it in the form of a report to the right people. So their thorough search for a business intelligence and analytics solution began.
The Journey to BI
The company’s first step on their journey to BI began by meeting with the various departments that would benefit from a complete business intelligence for manufacturing solution. Chesterton recognized that in order to implement a solution that was successfully adopted across the organization, they would need input from more than just the IT department.