Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Vintner Gains Faster Access to Business Data for More Profitable Decision Making
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Agriculture
Customer Profile
Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, based in Woodinville, Washington, is the oldest wine company in the state. It has 1,000 employees.
Business Situation
Ste. Michelle executives needed immediate access to consistent information to make business decisions—but the company’s Cognos business intelligence software wasn’t meeting this need.
Solution
The company adopted a solution based on Microsoft® Business Intelligence that puts an intuitive, highly visual data dashboard on the user’s intranet home page.
Benefits
Enables better business decisions
Generates reports at least three times faster
Costs 50 percent less than alternatives
Leads to rapid adoption / “Our people grin when they see the dashboard for the first time. That’s because they haven’t seen data this way before, and it’s very pleasing to get a quick yet in-depth look at data.”
Joe Gregg, IT Director, Ste. Michelle Wine Estates
Washington State’s Ste. Michelle Wine Estates was growing rapidly. That made it important for company executives to stay on top of the business—and difficult for them to do so. To give them the information that they needed to make better business decisions, the company adopted a dashboard solution based on Microsoft® Business Intelligence. The solution provides at-a-glance views of information on sales and distribution, finances, operations, human resources, and more. Visual displays provide rapid insights into sales performance, and users can drill down to information by brand, sales office, customer, and more. A multicolored map of the United States provides a quick view of state-level performance as measured against internal metrics. Data-driven business decisions enable the company to maintain and increase revenues, and the solution cost half as much as most alternatives.
Situation
Whether your taste in wine runs to Chardonnay, Riesling, Merlot, or Cabernet, Ste. Michelle Wine Estates has a varietal wine for you. The award-winning vintner—owner of Chateau Ste. Michelle, Columbia Crest, Snoqualmie, Col Solare, Northstar,andother wineries—is the oldest wine company in Washington State, but it’s not relying on its past achievements to maintain its status. Ste. Michelle continually evaluates and improves the processes and technologies that support the production and sale of its world-class wines.
As its business has grown, so has the company’s need to keep on top of a growing range of business measures. A data warehouse based on Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 data management software housed timely and accurate business measures, but the Cognos business intelligence software that Ste. Michelle used to share that information among managers did not provide a unified view of the business across functional areas and geographic regions.
Business intelligence reports provided sometimes inconsistent views of the company’s health. Sales executives might get one view of the company’s status by looking at shipment information, while financial executives might get a very different view by looking at figures on operating profit. Still other executives might not see the information that they wanted if they didn’t know where to look for it. Some data, such as the average time required to fill new positions, didn’t appear in the reports at all, so it couldn’t be taken into account when making business decisions.
“We weren’t always on the same page,” says Joe Gregg, IT Director for Ste. Michelle Wine Estates. “That is never a good situation, but as our business grew, it became a bigger issue for us. Our business was more complex, and the information that we needed to run the business was more complex. But we didn’t have a great way to streamline delivery and provide uniform information that we needed to make better business decisions.”
Company executives knew they needed a better way to share information throughout the business. When the chief executive asked for an online dashboard that would provide the company’s “vital statistics” at a glance, with the ability to drill down to additional levels of detail, Gregg and his colleagues looked for a solution.
Solution
Ste. Michelle evaluated business intelligence software from IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy, DataJungle (now called Blink Logic), and Oracle but decided that those options were either too expensive or too inflexible to meet its needs over the long term. Instead, the winery turned to a solution based on Microsoft Business Intelligence.
“The Microsoft Business Intelligence solution gave us the best combination of price and performance of any of the options that we considered,” says Alan Stefanin, Database Architect, Ste. Michelle Wine Estates. “We have a best-of-breed strategy, and Microsoft Business Intelligence fit into that perfectly. A significant share of our IT infrastructure is based on Microsoft technologies, and this solution would operate easily with what we already used.”
The solution gives the company’s chief executive—as well as a growing range of executives and managers throughout the company—a dashboard on their personal computers that provides information on performance measures including sales to Ste. Michelle distributors as well as shipments from those distributors to restaurants, wine shops, and grocery stores.
Information is integrated into a map of the United States, with states colored red, green, or yellow for results that are below, above, or just meeting projections. Executives can click the dashboard to see more detailed results: year-to-date figures; comparisons to the previous year’s period; and breakdowns by division, brand, region, major account, and even individual retail outlets within anaccount, such as a single restaurant within a company that owns several restaurant chains.
Beyond information on sales and distribution, the dashboard has tabs for operational data, income statements, human resources data, and more. A section of the dashboard also shows the status of issues related to the company’s Six Sigma business process improvement program.
To provide these at-a-glance views of company data, the solution starts with data from a multitude of transactional and planning systems that the company already uses, including UltiPro, Microsoft Dynamics®Retail Management System, Logility, OutlookSoft, and JD Edwards software. Using a software-plus-services approach, the company also receives external data feeds about retail establishments. The solution uses Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services to bring this disparate data into the data warehouse on a nightly basis. It then uses SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services to create four data cubes containing 25 groups of business measures, such as shipment information.
The solution uses ProClarity® Analytics business analysis software (now part of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint® Server 2007) to pull data from the Analysis Services cubes and to create and populate the dashboard. The company plans to upgrade itsProClarity dashboard with an Office PerformancePoint Server dashboard to increase performance as use of the dashboard continues to grow. The map providing visual indicators of sales performance and underlying data on sales was built in Microsoft Office Visio® 2007 drawing and diagramming software, which also integrates directly with the cubes. In addition to being a great technology choice, notes Gregg, Office Visio 2007 was chosen because “we already had Visio in-house as part of our Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, so it didn’t cost us anything to put it to this additional use.”
The dashboard is a conduit for a tremendous amount of company information—including information that executives and managers in a given functional area might not need or might not have authorization to view. To help ensure that business users view only the information to which they are authorized, the solution tailors dashboard views based on the Active Directory® service group to which each user belongs. A regional sales representative, for example, sees sales data related to his or her region—but doesn’t see companywide human resources or financial data.
Ste. Michelle deployed the Microsoft Business Intelligence solution on what Gregg calls a “pretty quick” schedule–just two months in summer 2007. The cubes, analysis, and dashboard components run on a single server computer, with a second computer functioning as a staging server. Deploying the solution was a matter of setting the dashboard’s intranet address as the home page in users’ Windows® Internet Explorer® browsers. The solution was initially adopted by about 25 executives and analysts but has since expanded to managers who are responsible for the information that the executive team reviews. The company has purchased an additional 100 licenses to continue the rollout, and Gregg says he anticipates that eventually most managers in the company will access the dashboard.
Benefits
The executives at Ste. Michelle Wine Estates now have faster access to the relevant, timely information they need to make better business decisions, thanks to the Microsoft Business Intelligence solution. The company adopted the solution for half the cost of alternatives, and the solution is proving popular throughout the company.
Enables Better Business Decisions
Many executives and managers at Ste. Michelle, such as Glenn Yaffa, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, turn to the dashboard as soon as they start their workday. “The dashboard gives me an immediate view of the key performance indicators that I need to track,” says Yaffa. “It enables me to act faster to address potential problems.”
For example, Yaffa credits the dashboard with providing an early warning when the company’s orders for imported wine appear insufficient to meet anticipated demand, enabling Yaffa to call his national sales manager to address the potential problem before it becomes an actual one that could cut into revenues. (The Washington State wine company has partnerships with two international winemakers, Italy’s Piero Antinori to produce Col Solare and Germany’s Ernst Loosen to produce Eroica.) The dashboard also enables Yaffa to drill down on the performance of specific regions, divisions, and even individuals, to better assess responsibility for performance.
Yaffa says reports that took up to 10 minutes to generate using the old Cognos system are now generated in just 2 or 3 minutes using Microsoft Business Intelligence. The difference is significant. “In the past, you created a report and then you had to find something else to do while it ran—breaking your concentration,” says Yaffa. “With the Microsoft-based solution, we can generate reports when we need them, enabling us to be more focused on the issue at hand. Everyone is betteroff for that.”
Costs 50 Percent Less than Alternatives
Ste. Michelle put the Microsoft Business Intelligence solution into production for just half the cost of most of the alternatives that it considered, representing a savings of U.S.$100,000 in the first year, according to Gregg. He attributes the savings to several factors.
“The Microsoft Business Intelligence solution was a natural extension to our Microsoft-based environment, so integration was easy and we were able to take advantage of much of the software—such as SQL Server and Visio—that we already had,” says Gregg. “We didn’t have to throw out our existing database components, as we would have had to do with an Oracle-based solution. And while some solutions looked cost-effective for initial deployment, they would have become much more expensive as we scaled to support more users. The Microsoft solution will remain price competitive even as we add dashboards and users across the country.”
Proves Popular Among Users
For a business intelligence solution to be a success, users must be willing to adopt it. Executives and managers at Ste. Michelle are happy to use their custom business intelligence dashboard, according to Gregg.
“Our people grin when they see the dashboard for the first time,” says Gregg. “That’s because they haven’t seen data this way before, and it’s very pleasing to get a quick yet in-depth look at data. For executives who are perpetually under time pressure, that’s a tremendous benefit. The solution is so easy to use that we did a quick overview session with our executives and then sent the URL to them. That’s all we had to do. They did the rest.”
Gregg says he continually gets requests from managers who want access to the dashboard even before the company has begun actively promoting it—which he regards as another measure of the solution’s success.
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