Before
A national wholesaler acquired over 20 locations which operated on 4 different software platforms. To give management a better picture of their overall financial health of the company, each location had to have someone generate a spreadsheet that was then sent to the corporate office to be consolidated into one spreadsheet. In order to see the complete picture management had to wait and verify that all the locations information was there and correct. Only a limited amount of reports could be generated from this data because of the limitation of what they could receive via spreadsheets.
After
Software was added so that each location sent up their data for their day’s activities to corporate servers during the night. Once there the data from the 4 different platforms are formatted into a common format and loaded into SQL databases. Now all of the locations data is found in one centralized location and in the same format.
Not only was the financial data sent up to the corporate office but also the invoices and inventory of each location. With this new centralized system, we were able to generate dashboards for the sales reps, produce companywide inventory reports, and create many other financial reports.
An internal website was created using this data. The following functionality was added to this site:
- Allowed corporate, regional managers, and the individual branches to create their own reports on their sales data
- Maintain corporate wide product, vendor, and customer information keeping them consistent from one location to another
- Compile and edit commissions for sales reps
- Created electronic delivery of invoices of national customers that were sold inventory from multiple locations to the national customer’s corporate office.