STORES Magazine - January 2008 - (Page 94)

NUTS AND BOLTS / DATA MANAGEMENT Re-keyless Entry Data management application saves precious resources for Hannoush Jewelers BY KAREN M. KROLL J ust about everyone in the corporate world has access to a great deal of data, from general ledger reports to customer lists to marketing plans. But there’s one hitch – and it’s a big one: Little of the data, at least in its original form, is usable. “Everyone in an organization needs to get data to do their jobs,” says Mike Urbonas, product marketing manager with Chelmsford, Mass.-based Datawatch, a producer of information management applications. “They have to manipulate, analyze and report.” Hannoush Jewelers, a family-run company headquartered in West Springfield, Mass., consists of 70 owned and franchised stores. It also manufactures most of the jewelry it sells, through Canadian subsidiary Prestige Jewelers. Given the number of stores she must monitor, it was difficult for controller Terri Strandberg to “get my arms around the information and look at it in a meaningful way.” That’s because much of Strandberg’s time was spent re-keying into Excel spreadsheets information from reports generated by Hannoush’s enterprise-level reporting system. As a result, there was little time left for analysis of that data. After completing the three-hour tutorial on her own several years ago, Strandberg began working with Datawatch’s Monarch application. This has eliminated much of the re-keying, says Strandberg, who no longer has to request reports from Hannoush’s IT department. Datawatch’s Monarch software offers the ability to easily access and work with information, even if users aren’t familiar with database manipulation and business intelligence tools. Monarch transforms existing reports from a variety of enterprise systems, including general ledger, ERP and retail information systems. “You can leverage existing reports as live sources of data,” Urbonas says, and the data can be transmitted to several spreadsheet applications, including Excel and Access, for further manipulation. In addition to saving hours of re-keying time, this approach also reduces the likelihood of errors that might be introduced when vast amounts of data are rekeyed. Suppose, for example. a user wanted to analyze all the items shipped to different customers over a period of one month. Rather than re-keying the information from the shipping report, which is organized by date, and then sorting by customer, the user can automatically mine and sort the data within Monarch so that shipments are grouped by customer, rather than by ship date. “With report mining, your reports become a proxy for the underlying production database,” Urbonas says. Moreover, all reports can become data sources, including general ledgers, sales and shipping reports, customer listings, invoices and purchase orders. Many users take the process a step further and export some or all of the data to Excel for additional analysis. Avoid costly mistakes At Hannoush, for instance, Strandberg runs the accounts receivable, inventory and cash-received reports; she’ll pull the information into Monarch and then into a spreadsheet. That way, she can quickly see if anything looks amiss before the month-end close has been completed. Sales associates in the stores sometimes enter the purchase order number for a repair in the cost line, rather than entering the cost of the repair itself. The result? What should appear as a repair costing $50 can show up as a $2 million service. With Monarch, Strandberg can catch and correct such mistakes before the month-end close. 94 WWW.STORES.ORG http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of STORES Magazine - January 2008

STORES Magazine - January 2008 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Build a 'Bot Sneak Peek at Fashion Trends What Shoppers Think 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Cover Story: Fishing for Talent Retail CEO Compensation Research Concept2Watch E-Commerce Payment Solutions Online Merchandising POS LPInformation LP Vantage Point Newsbeat Industry Watch Cover Story: Making LP PCI-Compliant Mall Security Video Surveillance Industry Perspective Forum RFID Business Intelligence Data Management Logistics Turning Green into Gold Love of – and for – the Outdoors Loeb Retail Letter ARTS Update Point of View NRF News Retail Industry Calendar Last Laugh

STORES Magazine - January 2008

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