The company plans to post selected warehouse data on its intranet, reducing dependence on paper-based communications. Stumpf expects the fully implemented warehouse to trim paperwork for each of the company's 100 sales representatives by one day per month. Until now, we had to cobble this data together from numerous spreadsheets. Now, we can quickly look at dollars spent on promotion versus depletions gained, and see where and how our investments pay off. For example, we can sort distributors by sales, profit, and depletion rates, and identify patterns among top performers that may translate into programs that boost the success of other distributors.
Data integrity is a priority.
We put a lot of effort into ensuring its correctness. Some types of data are updated monthly, but frequently changing information is refreshed every 24 hours. While helping the company increase its return from promotion dollars, the warehouse also improves the company's payback from information technology. We developed our initial version in about four months. The biggest challenge, recalls Stumpf, was to merge data residing in financial reports with information from customer records, such as depletion data.