InSinkErator needed a cost effective way to manage their data, maximize their business intelligence investment, and reach out to their customers.
Solution.
Blink Logic’s software is a powerful, zero footprint business intelligence Web front end that enabled InSinkErator to create “live” dashboards – giving them a highly visual way to explore and understand their key performance indicators.
Benefits
Achieved $800K of incremental revenue growth in one month
Reduced report generation from weeks to minutes with Blink Logic self-service BI
Full geographic rendering and exploration of business data
“Blink Logic helped us identify that inventory levels at one of our major distributors were too low and that we were consequently foregoing sales. By boosting inventory we were able to achieve $800K of incremental revenue in one month.” Tom Orlowski, Director of EBusiness for InSinkErator
InSinkErator – a division of Emerson – Electric Company, is the world's largest manufacturer of food waste disposers and instant hot water dispensers for home and commercial use. Headquartered in Racine, Wisconsin, InSinkErator has built and distributed more than 100 million food waste disposers since it began operations in 1927. It has now grown into a multi-million dollar company that sells to over 80 countries worldwide.
Being the largest producer in a category, InSinkErator knows its customer base looks to them for leadership – not only in product excellence but in market intelligence as well. Their customers, who range from plumbing professionals, to kitchen designers, to large retail outlets, often ask for help analyzing their data. They want to know how their sales volume compares with other stores; if their sales are in synch with the market or below.
“Business intelligence is increasingly important. When you’re a leader in a product category as InSinkErator is, customers expect more than just product. They expect market intelligence. They expect it real time.” says Jerry Ryder, President of the InSinkErator Division of Emerson Electric.
Several years ago, InSinkErator invested in business intelligence tools to help them better manage their data and identify market trends, relationships, anomalies, and other key performance indicators. While these tools were very powerful when it came to handling transactional level detail, they were weak in terms of providing information to people in a usable format and in a timely manner. Anyone who wanted a report had to rely on their IT department or specialized report authors to pull data. This made it very difficult for sales and other decision makers to get the information they needed to do their jobs.
Creating these reports required a lot of heavy formatting and programming so they often took days, even weeks to produce. InSinkErator’s sales staff, for example, had to wait two weeks after month end to know how they did the previous month. Once the report was pulled, the author saved it as a PDF and sent it around via e–mail. By the time staff received their report, the information was often out–of–date.
“Performance is a key metric in all aspects of our business.” says Jerry Ryder, President of the InSinkErator Division of Emerson Electric. “We’ve got a lot of data
and mining that data and making it readily available to our user community – whether it’s our end customers or key decision makers – in real time is critical to us.”
BInSinkErator needed a cost effective way to manage their data, maximize their business intelligence investment, and reach out to their customers. But it wasn’t until Tom Orlowski, Director of E–Business for InSinkErator, saw a demo of Blink Logic that he realized how easy it would be.
"Traditional business intelligence tools typically found the most use on the desk of an analyst. We wanted to roll it out to everybody who needed the data. And that’s where Blink Logic came into play.” says Orlowski. “We saw a demo of Blink Logic and went, “Wow!” Right away we understood how that type of visibility and ease of use would fit onto the desktops of our users.”
Blink Logic is a powerful, zero footprint business intelligence Web front end that allows users to create “live” dashboards – giving them a highly visual way to explore and understand their key performance indicators.
Blink Logic provides a comprehensive set of business intelligence capabilities, including: dashboards, analysis, scorecards, location intelligence, annotation, collaboration, and notification. It enables information workers and managers to better understand the status of their key business metrics and to take actions in a coordinated manner to improve business performance. Blink Logic is the only comprehensive front end BI environment that provides users with true self-service capabilities. With Blink Logic, information workers can organize, layout, and navigate their views and dashboards without having to rely on the IT department or specialized report authors and report development environments.
Blink Logic allows InSinkErator to combine data from multiple systems. This provides a unified experience to users by incorporating all of the metrics, all of the key elements of their business in a single environment. Blink Logic also uses Microsoft Virtual Earth platform and Visio to offer a whole new set of capabilities called Location Intelligence. Virtual Earth drives geospatial data to the Virtual Earth mapping platform wrapped within the Blink Logic dashboard framework. Visio enables users to connect their business intelligence data and other data sources to their Visio plant diagrams, facility maps and workflow process diagrams.
With location intelligence, InSinkErator can take retail data from their point of sale systems, combine that with transactional data from their ERP systems and bring in demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Now, for the first time, sales can view their entire North American operations, on a single map, and at any point drill down into specific detail at the state level, regional levels, or the actual store levels and get the key metrics they need.
“Blink Logic together with the Microsoft platforms allows us to combine data and look for relationships and better understand our business in ways that we never were able to do before. What the Virtual Earth platform does is allow us to deliver that new found information to our field sales people who can turn that into actionable items.” says Orlowski.
Blink Logic provides a self-service environment that allows end–users to create, organize, and interact with their information dashboards without having to rely on the IT department or specialized report authors.
By making the information available to anyone who needs it, when they need, InSinkErator has made their existing investment in their legacy BI infrastructure pay off. The fact that Blink Logic allows them to build out on the Microsoft business intelligence platform provides a very compelling return on investment and lower total cost of ownership.
Field sales people can now look graphically within a marketplace and figure out where to focus their time – allowing them to be more efficient and more productive.
Users can define personal dashboard views that allow them to understand where their problem areas are, strong areas, and understand why one or two locations are in synch or out of synch. They can see key performance indicators at a glance and drill down for additional detail or perform further exploration when a deeper understanding and action is warranted.
“The deployment of Blink Logic has been a terrific success. It has generated a lot of excitement with our users and is already providing tangible benefits in a number of areas,” says Orlowski. “Blink Logic helped us see that inventory levels at one of our major distributors were too low and that we were consequently foregoing sales. By boosting inventory we were able to achieve $800K of incremental revenue in one month. Now that is a great ROI. With these kinds of results we expect a much broader rollout of Blink Logic.”
InSinkErator’s customers also benefit. Sales can now look at data in a particular region for a particular store and find out why their stores are not meeting expectations, and provide ideas for them on how to grow their business, how to make changes within their business, to bring it up to market level.
“When we can share business intelligence information and widely distribute it to our sales organization, we’re letting our customers know that we’re not only on top of our business, but we’re on top of theirs as well.” According to Jerry Ryder, President of InSinkErator,
One of the best surprises for InSinkErator was how little training it took to get users productive with Blink Logic. Even though InSinkErator’s training group set aside three hour blocks of time for training, people were often up and running within half an hour. Users wanted to get their hands on it because it was so intuitive and easy to use and provided so much useful information.
“Developing dashboards in Blink Logic is very easy. Rolling it out to our user community and getting their buy in has been downright enjoyable. From the first demos we showed to our user community, it was almost an instant success.” Says Orlowski.
InSinkErator initially deployed Blink Logic to the sales management organization but it’s now being rolled out more extensively to other areas, including the quality, materials, and finance groups.
Developing dashboards in Blink Logic is very easy. Rolling it out to our user community and getting their buy in has been downright enjoyable. From the first demos we showed to our user community, it was almost an instant success.
