Indicee at Alco Ventures Inc.

Finding opportunities to improve sales and trim operational costs has been on the agenda of building suppliers since the recent housing market drop, and aluminum product manufacturer Alco Ventures is no exception.

But without visibility into basic sales and forecasting information, how can a company find those opportunities? Alco President Ben Hume wanted to put better information in the hands of his salespeople, but the price tag of big BI license and consulting fees was hard to swallow.

“When we heard that Indicee provides a subscription-based service at a very reasonable cost per seat, we realized this was exactly the kind of thing we needed,” says Hume.

Before Indicee: Stale, static, disjointed reports

Because access to the Microsoft Dynamics NAV enterprise resource planning system was limited to the IT department, Alco executives and salespeople needed to submit a request to extract sales reports.

“By the time we got the report, we had lost any timeliness in the matter,” says Trevor Patrick, National Product Manager at Alco. “This scenario was not even close to what we needed.”

President Ben Hume describes the process. “You could get the report, but it took three to five days, and it was often not quite what we needed.” The reports were also static spreadsheets that didn’t let users drill into information or view it from different angles. IT had created a separate report for forecasts, but salespeople couldn’t compare actuals against forecasts side by side.

Canned reports and big BI were not the answer

President Ben Hume investigated the possibilities for improving access to critical information. Reporting off the ERP was not giving Alco employees the data consolidation and self-service they needed. Major business intelligence products came with high license and consulting fees, and offered a range of capabilities that would almost certainly go unused. And it was difficult to justify giving external reps – a significant part of the sales force – access to sales information at several thousand dollars a license.

Alco found a solution that matched its needs with Indicee’s offering of online data consolidation and self-serve ad hoc reports. Indicee updates the company’s data cube through a weekly data feed from Alco – a feed that Alco can update daily, if necessary. Busy salespeople can access their sales data at any time to analyze data and create standard or custom reports.

Custom reports in minutes, not days

“Using Indicee, we can now easily get a report in five minutes instead of five days,” says Product Manager Trevor Patrick. “We can create a detailed report that is personalized for the customer, so that they don’t just feel like a number. We can give them a good view of what they have bought over specific periods of time.”

Anytime access to information lets reps monitor sales on an ongoing basis. Patrick and fellow sales reps can immediately see when a customer is down from the monthly forecast. “When we’re alerted to it quickly rather than waiting on quarterly reports, we can get on our game and see where we have to pay attention.”

Multi-year, multi-dimensional data

Not only is the information quick to obtain, it is better in a number of ways. The Indicee reports let salespeople get a sense of the history and potential of each customer by showing sales in multiple years, by month, week, or even day, and by letting reps compare forecast against actual sales to see where they need to focus.

According to Trevor Patrick, it would have been a painful process with the old system to try to compare 2005 sales to 2009 sales, for example, side by side. “Because we can capture more data in one place, we can forecast in one report. It’s so much easier than before, when we had to read one sheet while entering data somewhere else.”

Indicee also allows drilling into multiple dimensions. Employees can view sales by product line, by color, by customer, by sale. Whereas with the old system they could only view sales by territory, they can now see sales by rep, making it easier to clarify whose customer is whose.

President Ben Hume: “Indicee reports are a godsend. Access to fundamental sales data in this company has gone up 1000 percent.”

Better information for outside sales

Over 40% of Alco sales reps are not company employees but outside agency or manufacturers’ reps. Indicee security permissions let Alco give an outside salesperson access to only the history and forecasts for the customers that rep is servicing.

“Giving our outside sales guys a better handle on what’s going on in their territory has been a great advantage for us,” says Ben Hume. “This was not possible with the old system, where it was painful to get information by customer.”

Alco sales holding steady

Because of the soft housing market, business has been tough for all suppliers. Most companies are 40 to 50 percent behind previous years. In this climate, Alco sales are only eight percent behind last year and 20 percent down from the previous year.  “We’re doing slightly better than the madding crowd,” says Ben Hume. “In addition to the focused efforts of each Alco employee, some of this success may also be attributed to our strategy of improved data access. Indicee is a big part of this strategy.”

Better data is certainly helping Trevor Patrick and fellow salespeople day to day. “Every one of our guys would say we’re getting better, more up-to-date information. In short, we’re getting reports in a timely fashion without tying up a ton of IT time for something that should be relatively simple.”

No more excuses

With any new system, the toughest part is getting people to dive in and use it. Growing pains aside, Alco salespeople are now signing in to Indicee regularly and using it as their main sales data tool.

Says Patrick: “We can get accurate information by asking a simple question in English. Because it’s an easy, two-minute adventure, sales staff can’t use the ‘I haven’t had time’ excuse anymore.”

Next steps and potential

Alco’s phase two plan is to add its product SKUs, or stock keeping units, into Indicee. Once that data is available, the company will be able to do accurate dollar forecasting and make supply chain operations leaner by reducing inventory levels carried and raw materials stored.

Pre-set templates for various report types and direct creation of forecasts within Indicee are some of the other next steps.

Patrick sees further potential in accounting and at the inside sales desk. “Right now they’re the ones getting phone calls from reps looking for sales numbers, which they have to go find in their own system. They could be using an Indicee report to make this easier.”

President Ben Hume also sees opportunities for expanding the use of Indicee at Alco. “I’m sure I’ll discover another need for Indicee beyond what is already planned,” he says.