Power Tool Manufacturer Saves Money and Eases Workflow with ASG-Report.Web™
Industry: Manufacturing
Location: Global
Black & Decker Taps ASG Reporting Solution to Produce and Manage Field Reports
The Black & Decker Corporation is a leading global manufacturer and marketer of power tools and accessories, hardware and home improvement products, and technology-based fastening systems. Headquartered in Baltimore, MD, Black & Decker’s Power Tools and Accessories Division features a successful, 400-person sales force that sells and distributes products to retail outlets and industrial tool distributors throughout North America.
The Challenge
Every month, Black & Decker distributes Sales and Marketing Monthly
Field Reports – or “Matrix Reports” – to its sales force
members. Until recently, the process was primarily paper-based – at
month’s end, managers created the Matrix Reports on the
mainframe computer, printed them in hard copy and mailed them to the
400 sales team members via the U.S. Postal Service. The process required
at least 40 boxes of paper per month, and reports took over a week to
reach the sales force.
With pressure mounting to streamline this reporting process, and with a pending migration to an enhanced SAP platform, Black & Decker sought to quickly implement a system that offered an alternative to printing and mailing monthly Matrix Reports.
The Solution
Black & Decker’s needs assessment and product search led to the
implementation of
ASG-Report.Web™ – a solution
that provides secure, efficient, and cost-effective report distribution
by Web-enabling host-generated reports to be viewed on corporate intranets
or extranets.
Report.Web supplies administrators with a powerful server engine to publish manage and distribute company reports – daily, weekly, or any time. End-users are able to view their reports through a robust, fully functional Web viewer, and receive their reports extracted into familiar spreadsheet formats. Report.Web is designed specifically for the Web, and offers a complete alternative to the high costs and time constraints associated with printing and mailing paper reports by sending this information electronically.
Black & Decker identified ASG’s Report.Web as the perfect, most cost-effective solution for its Matrix reporting needs.
“Realizing that almost every member of our sales force had Internet access, we knew that an online reporting tool would be feasible and practical,” said Skip Nees, Black & Decker’s manager of sales and marketing reporting. “Integration with our new SAP system was also important, and we were pleased Report.Web could deliver on that front.”
Implemented in the spring of 1999, the Report.Web installation took a mere six weeks to deploy and become fully operational. Because of the system’s user-friendliness and rapid user acceptance, Black & Decker was able to discontinue the old paper-centric reporting method entirely within three months of going live with Report. Web.
Measurable Results
Implementing Report.Web was a winning decision for Black & Decker’s
marketing and sales division. The creation and distribution of Matrix Reports
have been streamlined drastically; what once took an entire week of turnaround
time and 40 cases of paper per month now takes less than a day – sales representatives
simply log on to view field reports online. The system can even alert users
when a new report is posted with e-mail notification capabilities.
Black & Decker estimates that Report.Web saves the company $200,000 per year – already a 300 percent return on investment.
Black & Decker has been so pleased by Report.Web’s results that other departments have signed on to use the product beyond sales and marketing. An additional 200 operations and supply chain staff members have implemented Report.Web for their own reporting needs.
The Report.Web system also helped enhance the roles and contributions of the Black & Decker sales force. The old Matrix Reports took ages to reach employees and merely caught them up on the past month’s sales figures “after the fact.” Now, data reaches sales representatives instantly, allowing them to participate in the analysis and forecasting process and making the information more alive and useful.
“We couldn’t be happier with Report.Web’s impact on the way we do business,” said Nees. “During a critical period of systems upgrades at Black & Decker, the solution filled a critical gap in our reporting needs.”
