Fashion manufacturer Red Wing Shoes has become more
responsive to emerging business problems after becoming the first
user of Lawson's M3 enterprise resource planning system
to deploy the supplier's business intelligence application
alongside it.
Red Wing Shoes, a US-based manufacturer that globally
distributes brands such as Carhartt, told the Lawson annual user
conference that it had deployed 12 dashboards to meet different
business needs since embarking on a roll-out programme in August
last year.
The business users that are saving the most time by using the
dashboards are the senior executives and the mobile salesforce.
Paige Stajkowski, senior business analyst at Red Wing Shoes,
said, "We were struggling to get reports to end-users. Users used
to have to go look for exceptions, but now it is all automated for
them."
The dashboards provide relevant financial information in a
summarised format. Armed with this information, executives can now
quickly drill down to examine different parts of the business more
closely.
The firm's global mobile salesforce is also accessing
information more quickly because they are now only provided with
images of reports rather than real-time information. Because the
salespeople have to connect to the virtual private network
remotely, giving them images of reports that IT has already run has
enabled a substantial time saving.
Using the dashboards, salespeople are now able to get an account
profile in about a minute, compared with up to 10 minutes
previously.
Red Wing Shoes is using Lawson's Business Performance Warehouse,
part of the M3 ERP system, to hold the data needed by its new
business performance application. The datawarehouse runs on a SQL
Server database.
Stajkowski said, "The number of dashboards will double or triple
in the next year because departments across the business have been
constantly saying that they should have a dashboard for various
other new business processes."
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