4-page Case Study - Posted 11/26/2007
Views: 534
Rate This Evidence:
Microsoft Online Customer Story: InSinkErator
“I am not on your timeline.”
A virtual dashboard for international business.
To stay competitive, business leaders have always had to ask the right questions at the right time. But in today’s fast-paced digital marketplace, “the right time” takes on a whole new meaning. So how can companies get market information today that will create value tomorrow? And how can a multinational corporation apply that information to every aspect of its organization?
When you’re running a $20 billion-per-year company, your decision makers need real answers in real time. And when you have 130,000 employees selling products to over 150 countries, that can be an enormous challenge. As a division of Emerson and the world’s largest manufacturer of food waste disposers, InSinkErator recognizes just how critical it is to meet that challenge.
“Being the largest producer in a category, your customer base looks to you for leadership. Not only leadership in product but leadership in information technology,” says InSinkErator President Jerry Ryder. And while the company had made a significant investment in business intelligence infrastructure, too few users were finding the data helpful or timely enough to justify the cost.
But when they discovered the Matrix product offered by DataJungle Software, a Microsoft® Gold Certified ISV Partner, it saw a tool that could offer new levels of insight into its business. According to Tom Orlowski, Director of e-Business for InSinkErator, “When we ran into the Matrix software, we went ‘Wow.’ People wanted to get their hands on it because it was so intuitive and so easy to use and provided so much information [that they were looking for].”
 |
I think that the Virtual Earth platform is going to allow us to take a quantum leap forward in delivering…information to the people who need it. |
 |
|
Tom Orlowski
Director of
e-Business for InSinkErator |
|
|
The Matrix product represents a new generation of highly visual self-service business intelligence software that’s based on the Microsoft SQL Server™ Business Intelligence, Virtual Earth™, and Office SharePoint® Server application platforms, as well as Office Visio®. These tools can be “layered’ in different ways to help InSinkErator maximize efficiencies in many different areas of the business.
On a large scale, Virtual Earth has been particularly powerful—creating opportunities for improvement in the farthest reaches of the company. According to Robert Tsuchiyama, Vice President of Retail Sales for InSinkErator, Virtual Earth “allowed us to dial in more closely to the market and better understand something we might have missed on a macro level. We’ll potentially be able to go into a market such as Milwaukee, find out why their stores are not meeting the expectation, and provide ideas for them on how to grow their business and how to make changes within their business, to bring that up to the market level.”
By using Virtual Earth, InSinkErator has been able to build out its business intelligence infrastructure and harness a very powerful, advanced location intelligence solution. Where it used to take weeks or months and multiple sources to get market information, this layered software
solution delivers critical information to InSinkErator within hours. And that time savings translates into cost savings. “By knowing the local marketplace and where you’re going and hitting the spots that are most important, [field sales teams] will be able to reduce their time on the road, as well as potential associated costs with that,” says Robert Tsuchiyama.
The benefits of these products have a ripple effect not only within the business itself, but with InSinkErator’s retail partners as well. By bringing Matrix and Virtual Earth into its business intelligence infrastructure, InSinkErator can now pass vital information to customers, drive incremental revenue for itself and its partners—and differentiate itself from the competition. Tom Orlowski believes that “the Virtual Earth platform is going to allow us to take a quantum leap forward in delivering…information to the people who need it.”
“When we can share business intelligence information widely distributed to our sales organization,” says Jerry Ryder, “we let the customers know that we’re not only on top of our business, but we’re on top of theirs as well.”
For more information, go to http://www.microsoft.com/.
