Insight into fine wines By Vicki Powers
Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, the award-winning owner of Chateau Ste. Michelle, Columbia Crest, Snoqualmie, Col Solare, Northstar, and other wineries, continually evaluates and improves the processes and technologies that support the production and sale of its world-class wines.
But its business intelligence reports sometimes provided inconsistent views of the company's health. "We weren't always on the same page," says IT Director Joe Gregg. 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.
Ste. Michelle evaluated BI 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 company turned to a solution based on Microsoft Business Intelligence.
The solution gives executives and managers a dashboard on their personal computers with information on performance measures, including sales to Ste. Michelle distributors as well as shipments from those distributors to restaurants, wine shops, and grocery stores.
The 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 an account, such as a single restaurant franchise.
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 US$100,000 in the first year.
"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 the data." And, he adds, "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."
For more information on Ste. Michelle's BI implementation, follow
this link.
Vicki Powers is a regular contributor to Momentum,
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