When your company sells 400,000 distinct items with a half million SKUs in a configure-to-order business across 100 countries, record-keeping can be a challenge. That was the case at A. W. Chesterton Co., a 120-year-old industrial supplier, before an analytics dashboard gave it unprecedented sales insights.

Chesterton makes industrial fluid sealing systems, protective coatings, cleaners, lubricants and specialty maintenance products for industrial customers. The company adheres to the highest standards for manufacturing excellence, but until three years ago its sales reporting was still done primarily with spreadsheets. “The VP of sales’ office table was covered with notes and reports that were assembled manually,” remembers Tom Meier (right), vice president of information technology.

Part of the problem was Chesterton’s global reach. Different products are sold in different parts of the world, and a single corporate customer can go by different names in different countries. Chesterton had a reporting system in place based upon IBM’s Cognos business intelligence platform, but Cognos was oriented toward the needs of financial pros and was too complex for sales managers to use, Meier said. The process of pulling data from multiple different sources was also time-consuming and inflexible. Reports could track sales of products by region, but further breakdowns required a lot of heavy lifting. The company needed a multidimensional database and a user interface that mere mortals could understand.

Chesterton scoured recommendations from top IT analyst firms and considered multiple solutions before settling on a business intelligence suite from Targit A/S, a Danish software company that develops targeted solutions for vertical industries, including manufacturing.

Just do it

The Targit Decision Suite was appealing in part because of its usability. A second important factor was integration with the Microsoft Dynamics ERP and SQL Server engines that Chesterton uses. The clincher was the first meeting with the software supplier. “They came up here for a week and interviewed the heck out of us till they understood everything they needed to,” Meier said.

Chesterton had a tight, 90-day timeframe to get analytics up and running. Targit assigned a database engineer full-time to the task. “They put together an express database along with plans to move to an enterprise database,” Meier said. “Then their engineer just put his head down and did it.”

One of the ancillary benefits of bringing in a new analytics system is that it forces a disciplined process of data normalization. Chesterton worked with Targit to apply metadata that harmonized regional and product line differences. That cleaned-up data was then stored in the data warehouse where other applications could access it. “So now we have mobile apps in different regions using the same processes that Targit set up for us three years ago,” Meier said. “How cool is that?”

Another appealing feature was Targit’s XBone server, an in-memory database that makes it possible to analyze data from external sources without storing them in the data warehouse. Users can literally drag and drop spreadsheet files into a virtual server to combine desktop data with warehouse records on the fly. “It’s absurdly easy,” Meier said.

From reports to insights

With Targit pulling operational data into its warehouse on a daily basis, sales information is never more than 24 hours old. Analytics enable sales managers to see changes in sales activity quickly enough to redirect efforts to areas where activity is spiking. “It used to be we got reports,” Meier said. “Now we get analysis.”

The software also proved to be intuitive enough that business users could take control of defining their own needs. That’s has been crucial to satisfying one of Chesterton’s top criteria for success: The solution had to be used. IT is responsible only for database, system support and administration. “Operation of the system 75% outside of IT,” Meier said.

Giving business users ownership of analytics “has dramatically reduced friction between sales and the finance organization,” Meier said. “IT was not seen as the one delivering the product. The acceptance was high because it was a business-to-business decision instead of IT-to-business.” Sales managers say they’re saving two hours per week in time not spent searching for information, and mobile access has been a bonus.

Future plans include integrating Dynamics CRM with Targit and using the native data warehouse to feed more mobile apps. Chesterton is also planning to integrate industry information from third-party sources into the analytics stream.

The bottom line: Sales managers are happier, forecasts are more accurate and Chesterton is more in sync with field sales. “The frustration level has gone down dramatically,” Meier said.