Worldwide Bakers find the missing ingredient as they adopt a new approach to reporting and analysis.

Frank Roberts & Sons Ltd

Challenge

The finance team spent too much time extracting and maintaining data in Excel spreadsheets.
There was no single version of the truth, leading to confusion and disputes.
Reports had to be actively distributed by the finance team, which was an unnecessary overhead.
End users did not have the skills to be able to conduct ad-hoc analyses over their own data, which was a burden on IT.

Advice was given on how to make best use of a previous investment in Microsoft SQL Server and elements of the Microsoft Business Intelligence tool stack were deployed.
A sales reporting application was delivered using SQL Server Reporting Services, with a direct link from the sales data in SAP to a sales cube, thereby reducing the risk of errors occurring.
A sales cube was developed using SQL Server Analysis Services, which allowed for ad hoc reporting and analysis.

No further investment in software was required.
SAP extracts and data loads no longer require any manual intervention, but are loaded automatically on a weekly basis.
All sales reports update instantly with new sales data, thus reducing the time spent on maintaining spreadsheets.
The data is easily manipulated, allowing the business to investigate problems and identify trends in sales.
The business now has a meaningful insight into the weekly sales across their products and customers.
The finance team now has more time to spend analysing their sales data.