GrandMetrics

We set 3-Year macro financial targets of 5% YoY sales growth and 12% NOI margin for our company. The effective formulation and execution of our vision and strategy were made possible by GrandMetrics’ guidance as well as initiatives and management actions on its unique Strategic Planning & Execution structured approach.

GrandMetrics has the solid understanding of the Wholesale/Distribution industry we compete in. Their unique approach helped us effectively define, prioritize, measure, monitor, and communicate our strategic goals and objectives across the organization in order to successfully execute our strategy.

Having established our Grand Strategic Pillars, GrandMetrics’ industry-configured interactive visualizations provided our responsible managers the capability to identify and manage our initiatives in a more collaborative way.

The clarity, breath, and depth of the insight GrandMetrics provides is essential for sound decision making throughout the enterprise. Having the critical business intelligence with granular, accurate, and actionable content at our fingertips helped us considerably enhance our capability to make strategic and operational decisions every day.

We now have the capability to identify and focus on the most relevant investment priorities, seize profitable growth opportunities and trends, as well as speed up the decision making process in a much more robust way.

We were able to effectively capitalize on GrandMetrics for our decision making needs primarily through internal benchmarking; learning from the best performers and applying this learning to others for better decision making across the organization with great strides in performance improvement.

GrandMetrics’ decision support system provides us a great visibility into our business and acts as an essential building block for our business needs across the organization -- such as Customer/Shipment Profitability, Pricing Support for Products, Inventory Management, AR, AP, Benchmarking, Productivity, KPI’s and so forth.

The alarm and alert conditions we set for our operations with GrandMetrics helped us manage anomalies and exception cases more effectively. This resulted in improved margin management and significant improvements in our working capital.

Immediately following our GrandMetrics implementation, we saw a significant boost in our earnings!  Year-over-year profits following implementation rose 12%, which I can directly associate with the actionable insights we derived from GrandMetrics BI.  When coupled with the improvement in our asset turnover enabled by GrandMetrics, our return on capital is running more than 50% greater than the norm for our industry.

In order to ensure we grow our company’s revenue profitably, we performed multi-dimensional costing and profitability analysis utilizing GrandMetrics’ highly affordable Powerful Financial Management & ProfitWrench™ that is also industry-specific and pre-configured to meet our unique business needs.

The profitability analysis at customer, segment, product, SKU, category, invoice, and invoice line item down to Net Operating Income (NOI) showed us how to allocate our scarce resources for more profitable business. It also helped us focus our sales efforts and come up with more effective sales strategies by modifying our pricing, promotions, supply chain, portfolio, cost to serve, and channel strategies to improve delivered margins.

Using GrandMetrics BI, we re-slotted the SKU’s in our warehouses to save put-away and picking labor based after reviewing the turnover by bin reporting.  I can’t wait to find other hidden profit opportunities as we move forward.

It’s only been 90 days since implementing GrandMetrics BI, and we already discovered huge pricing inconsistencies amongst our salesmen, so we rolled out a new pricing strategy with guidelines.

I never thought we could be up and running on GrandMetrics across all our system platforms after only weeks.  Our IT department easily satisfied GrandMetrics’ required data specs, and your help connecting our payroll and GL data was much appreciated.

Our customers often request reports on their past purchases.  These reports were always cumbersome to build in our legacy ERP system, and were not easily exported to excel, and required a lot of manual manipulation to make them look presentable to the customer.  As a result, our sales staff had to come to me to run the report.  Now they go directly to their GrandMetrics dashboard and with a couple of clicks they can get the information.

I love the new open sales orders visualization that connect our open sales orders with the related open vendor purchase orders.  Previously, our salesman had to contact customer service to research the status of an open order, who would in turn have to jump from screen to screen to research every request.  Now our salesmen have the needed information at the click of the mouse!  They love it and so do our customers!

GrandMetrics BI has changed the way we do business.  Previously, we were not at all data driven, as the reporting available in our ERP system was way too cumbersome to utilize. But now, every day we discover a new opportunity to improve our bottom line!

We have eliminated much of the weekly management reporting that our accounting department used to distribute, and our IT department has reported a significant reduction in the number of special report requests they receive.

Prior to GrandMetrics, we always struggled with distribution and accuracy of reporting at our company.   We had a ton of reports and spreadsheets developed and circulated by each department.  Some were emailed, some were posted to our network shared drive, and some were simple standard reports available on our legacy systems that typically no one took the time to look at.  Now, all important information is available to each of our managers through one portal customized to satisfy each of their personal needs.  They love it!

Prior to GrandMetrics, vendors would issue a new price list, but it was nearly impossible to determine the overall impact of the changes. But now, GrandMetrics computes the annualized impact of each change, thereby prioritizing which unit selling prices require immediate updating.

Every week we use the lost customer reporting to identify lost business, and our salesmen immediately contact these customers to find out what is going on.  Since using this report, we have recovered several larger customers that otherwise would have been lost for good to the competition.

I hate to admit it, but prior to GrandMetrics BI, we rarely tracked our company’s ROI.  We are a private company, and although our CFO may have understood ROI, the rest of our senior management team certainly didn’t know it, or didn’t know what levers we need to pull to improve it.  Now, we review our ROI monthly using GrandMetrics BI, and we discuss the specific actions we need to take to become a high ROI firm in our industry.  It is changing the conversation at our senior management meetings.

As an Inventory Manager, I particularly love the GrandMetrics reports that show excess SKUs of a particular item at one branch while we have a deficient number of SKUs of that same item at another.    Before, it was nearly impossible to identify such situations using our standard ERP reporting…it was like finding a needle in a haystack.   I also love how easy it is to quickly identify slow moving inventory.  GrandMetrics BI even helps me to put a dollar amount of the potential loss, which helps me to get the support of our management team to take action.

We saved $6k in our first week since implementing GrandMetrics BI.  Our Director of Procurement discovered on his dashboard that we had failed to file for a large rebate from one of our major vendors.  It just jumped right out at him the first time he was reviewing his dashboard.