VF, the apparel company that owns Wrangler, Lee and Nautica
brands, has simplified its
Lotus Notes groupware system using a tool from Integra to
reduce the burden of producing company-wide reports.
The company uses 300 custom databases, predominantly
Notes-based, to house many of its business processes. Barbara
White, project manager at VF, said, "We need to integrate and
report on this data for various departments around the world.
Different data is required by different teams at different
times."
The company used to collate these reports manually, but has now
automated the task using Integra for Notes, a product which claims
to be the only reporting tool for Lotus Notes.
White said on average it could take the IT team a few hours to
develop and export each report. She said that producing reports is
now much simpler because end-users can modify reports themselves,
without requiring the IT department's involvement. The company is
now using Integra to produce more reports.
"We saw Integra for Notes at a Lotus show and started small with
a handful of licences. Since then, we have rolled it out to other
departments and have approximately 300 users," she explained.
VF uses Integra for Notes to integrate data from multiple
sources and deliver reports in Excel showing project status,
product development information, statistics and customer service
data such as orders and returns.
The product supports reporting from Lotus Notes and other
sources including SAP, Peoplesoft and Oracle, to Microsoft Word and
Excel, as well as IBM's Lotus Symphony. It enhances printing,
reporting and analysis of data contained within these environments.
It enables users, developers and administrators to generate reports
from Lotus Notes and non-Notes databases without modifying the
design of the Notes databases and without the need to install files
on local machines or servers.