Better safe than sorry: Allsafe achieves a complete client overview with Jedox

In order to react proactively to the individual needs of its large network of clients, allsafe needs to process, summarize and prepare large quantities of sales data every day. Until recently, the company had been relying on Excel for its number crunching: data were collected from ERP systems and transferred into Excel, where they were manually transformed using complex Excel formulas before being turned into visuals for employees to act on.

But this decentralized calculation and transformation of process-driven KPIs made work diffcult for allsafe. Calculation of KPIs required large investments of time and effort, so that daily reports were simply impossible – while at the same time, monthly reports meant that the company could no longer react to important changes at short notice. If a client changed an order, for example, or there was a sudden influx of new clients, production was unable to react flexibly, leaving revenue potential untapped.

In addition, getting the data required large amounts of manual input and processing; and because different employees had different approaches to the complex, fragmented spreadsheets, KPIs were often inconsistent. ERP project manager Christoph Lang and the sales department concluded:

The sheer mass of data collected by a manufacturer and the complicated formulas involved brought Excel to the limits of its capabilities. We desperately needed a professional solution.

Christoph Lang, ERP project manager at allsafe

What allsafe needed was a professional software solution tailored to the sales process, capable of producing up-to-the-minute reports from a central data store in order to maximize data reliability while reducing manual maintenance. The new EPM system had to be able to handle budgeting, as well as providing an easy import interface for existing legacy systems (such as Datev in the accounting department). Jedox impressed allsafe as an intuitive, flexible solution which even non-programmers could easily administer for themselves. But in order to pave the way for the new system, the project team led by Christoph Lang and sales representative Daniele Maiolo had to find a way of gleaning order from the KPI chaos and imposing clarity and consistency on the abas ERP system for inventory management and accounting.

After a two-month orientation period and several Jedox workshops, the existing processes are running smoothly via the Jedox Excel Add-in and Jedox Web. The goal was to combine the strengths of the existing SQL data with Jedox‘ intuitive power via the Jedox Integrator (ETL). In the words of Christoph Lang, “the architecture and the processing logic from ERP system to Jedox report are very transparent now. Automated tasks extract the necessary data from abas, combine them into an SQLtable, and then make them available company-wide, with Jedox keeping the entire ETL-process streamlined.”

The Jedox software‘s design enabled allsafe to create a basic reports framework defining Key Performance Indicators which model structures and processes – and thanks to the framework, sales figures are effortlessly synced to the Jedox Web dashboard. In communication with the Jedox consulting team, Daniele Maiolo used the same principles to independently build a “sales cockpit” for his department, of which he is particularly proud. Thanks to Jedox, outdated information is no longer a problem: cancellations, alterations, and additions to client contracts are instantly recorded in the central database. Financial controlling can see its processing lines modeled in the dashboard, and company employees have on-the-go, up-to-the-minute data at their fingertips with Jedox Mobile.

Sales representatives find the overview feature particularly helpful: thanks to Jedox, representatives can now see delivery dates, high-revenue articles, frequency of client visits and revenue shares by product category even when in meetings with prospective clients, wherever their headquarters. Daniele Maiolo emphasizes the company‘s newfound confidence in the data: “Thanks to our daily Jedox reports, we can now react to short-term market developments quickly.” Jedox also improves transparency in key account management: KPIs show the developments in revenue per client segment as well as prognoses, coverage, and supply overview.

After successfully implementing Jedox in sales, the company is looking to leverage the advantages of their new EPM software for procurement and manufacturing as well. Project manager Christoph Lang is happy with the cooperation and enthusiastic about scaling up the Jedox system.