Beauty Products Giant Increases Productivity with Indicee

Life before Indicee – a ʻspreadmartʼ quagmire

There was a time when sales and scheduling analyst William Smith had to do a whole lot of work to understand how sales were going at the companyʼs call centers, and how best to schedule employees, service the sales force, and perform related planning tasks.

Smithʼs problem is that the data he needs to perform these tasks is in different applications, and they arenʼt talking to one another. “Our big challenge,” he says,” is that we have to combine data from a system for monitoring calls, one for scheduling and forecasting, and another to track phone agent progress.”

Doing that used to mean manually entering data from each system into an Excel spreadsheet—a task that all too many business analysts know to be frustratingly time-consuming and error prone. Bridging gaps between software applications in this way has become so commonplace that the term “spreadmarting” has been coined to describe it. It involves using spreadsheets in ways they were never designed for. Spreadmarts tend to take on a life of their own, and high performance organizations strive mightily to avoid them.

With six call centers, each producing three reports running to well over a hundred pages, Smith had 18 sets of data to contend with from one system alone. Add the data from the other two systems, and the result was a lot of spreadmarting. “It took me about five days of effort every month,” explains Smith,” and by the time I got the information to the call center agents, it was a week old.”

There had to be a better way

Knowing there must be a better, faster way to get the job done, Smith and the companyʼs Information Technology (IT) department began exploring options. They started by looking at standard business intelligence (BI) offerings, but soon realized this was not the way to go. These solutions are complex and intricate. It would take IT time and effort to get them up and running. Smith and the agents would need training. And the cost for a full-blown BI system, most of whose bells and whistles they didnʼt need and wouldnʼt use, was prohibitive.

They also explored the possibility of letting a service provider tap into their data, process it, and deliver the results. But that would have meant letting the provider access the company's servers—something they were understandably loath to do for security reasons.

The Indicee alternative – upload, create, share

Then Smith learned about Indicee.

Indicee simplifies monthly reporting and analysis by taking data from almost any source, combining it quickly into a data mart, and providing the tools needed to generate reports using simple questions in everyday language. Itʼs an online application with no installation or maintenance overhead, and itʼs easy to understand and use, so the IT department was freed from the task of evaluating, deploying, and keeping the solution up and running.

Uploading takes minutes

Now, when itʼs time to report, analyze, and schedule, Smith simply uploads the necessary data from all three systems to Indicee. “We upload only the data we deem necessary,” says Smith, “and it takes only minutes. Indicee doesn`t access our servers. Weʼre in the driverʼs seat, and we control the process.”

“Munging” for flexible reporting

Indicee combines the uploaded data— they call it “munging”—in a data mart, a repository that stores the data with its structure intact to provide a strong foundation for very flexible reporting and analysis. Smith can key in plain language questions like “Who were the top performers this month?” to generate reports and analyses that give him the answers he needs to make decisions and take action.

Where once he had static spreadsheets to rebuild every month, Smith now has an increasingly large data resource that he can call on to report by month, quarter, week, year—any time period he wants. The old spreadsheet view has been replaced by a far more flexible and powerful reporting and analysis solution that not only saves time, but produces better information faster, making it easier for Smith and his team to take action and be more productive.

Easy information sharing

Indicee also makes it easy to share reports and analyses with people who can use them to perform better. It can send automatic emails to alert personnel when relevant information becomes available. They simply log onto the Indicee site to see the data they are permitted to access, and to ask analytical questions that give them the answers they need to under- stand and act. “Our agents were happy to be able to get performance information for themselves, instead of waiting six months for a review process,” says Smith.

Sales and scheduling could be just the start

Indicee has revolutionized the call center sales analysis and scheduling process at a world leader in personal care and beauty products. “What used to take almost a full week of inputting data into an Excel spreadsheet now takes me a couple of hours,” says Smith. But that could be just the start of what Indicee does for the company. “The reason for using Indicee was to help with call center operations,” explains Smith, “and itʼs done that. But I can see using it in several ways in my immediate group alone. And it could definitely be helpful in other areas, such as budgeting and forecasting. Itʼs really the same process, just different data, so thereʼs plenty of ways we can choose to expand our use of Indicee in the future.”