A global home-improvement specialty retailer, with more than
2,200 stores across the United States, Mexico, and China, tracks
its extensive operations through a weekly set of reports called
"Controllables." These time-sensitive reports extract planning,
forecasting, and sales information from a variety of systems across
the organization, and are reviewed by senior business leaders each
week.
Glitches across the systems were interrupting the quality,
timeliness, and accuracy of the Controllables reports. The retailer
needed a more reliable reporting solution and turned to Slalom
Consulting for help.
The Slalom team worked with resources in the company's IT
department to identify needed improvements to the Controllables
reporting process, and then leveraged Microsoft PowerPivot to build
a solution. PowerPivot provided a ready-built platform capable of
importing the retailer's massive amounts of data from multiple
system sources. And since the Controllables report was already
based in Microsoft Excel, PowerPivot's Excel interface made for a
seamless transition to the new reporting platform. The new report
integrated with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to manage and
auto-refresh data.
The Controllables weekly report is now a fully automated, more
accurate, zero-touch reporting solution. In turn, the company's
Merchandising Operations team can make more informed, strategic
business decisions.
