Business Impact has built and enhanced the corporate data warehouse for Jennmar Corporation which now allows them to analyze sales, inventory, general ledger, manufacturing, receivables and purchasing data in their Ross Enterprise System.

Jennmar deployed the Ross Enterprise ERP System to support business operations and later purchased the Ross Enterprise Performance Module (EPM) to gain better insight into their sales and inventory data.

“At first we began to use the reports that were generated with the Ross EPM system but soon realized that we needed to bring in data from other areas of the company so that we could see a complete picture of our sales, finance, manufacturing and inventory,” said Ted Benham, CIO at Jennmar. “We chose Business Impact, and they delivered for us each time—technically, operationally and strategically.”

In the past, Jennmar had the ability to see trend and summary reports but found that they had to manually put data into Excel in order to perform more detailed analysis on their data.

“We also had a major problem as various employees extracted and interpreted data differently using individual business rules,” said Benham.  “It was possible to see different gross margin figures depending on which report you were looking at.  It was critical to us that we define a single set of business rules while storing the data in our data warehouse to produce consistent analyses and reports.”

Business Impact helped deliver one view of the truth while expanding and tuning the data warehouse supplied as part of the Ross Enterprise Performance Module through a “process with a series of projects,” explained Benham. Short, iterative projects were defined with each expanding the content of the data warehouse, thus giving the users exactly the data they need.

To begin, Business Impact implemented the Business Impact Enhancement Solution for Ross Enterprise. This consists of a series of templates that define the data connections to various Ross Enterprise application data, contains the ETL processes needed to load the data into an enterprise data warehouse and finally allows for the automatic creation of the OLAP cube needed for reporting and analysis.

Following the templates, Business Impact helped define and apply the logic for business rules around things like net sales and yield. “Having common data definitions and implementing conformed dimensions alone has helped us get out information to users 200% – 300% faster,” said Mark Johnson, Senior Systems Analyst at Jennmar.

With common definitions, conformed dimensions and an enterprise platform, surprises were uncovered—and fixed quicker than ever before.

“Our CFO remarked that our investment paid off within the first 6 months,” said Benham.  “Within a year we had expanded the use of the data warehouse three-fold.  Today we are making business decisions weeks earlier than before, saving significant costly mistakes.”

Jennmar employs upwards of 30 users using the data warehouse daily in finance, sales, purchasing and operations. Access to data comes in the daily, weekly and monthly operating reports that are automatically generated by the system and dozens of other reports are now generated from the data stored in the data warehouse enhanced by Business Impact.

With the Business Impact Enhancement Solution for Ross Enterprise, Jennmar’s insight extends into all critical areas of their business. Data from manufacturing, general ledger, inventory, sales, receivables and payables are all linked together to provide management with a total view of their sales and allows them to better plan for inventory and raw material requirements, all which helps them keep a firm roof over their heads.