The Westye Group-Midwest, LLC. is the exclusive distributor of Sub-Zero refrigeration and Wolf cooking products in the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana and Iowa. The name “Westye” pays tribute to the founder of Sub-Zero Freezer Company, Westye F. Bakke. He founded Sub-Zero Freezer Company in an old two-car garage, and today, the company is the recognized leading manufacturer of premium built-in home refrigerators.
Used to base decisions on intuition
At the Westye Group, managing performance is a key factor for running the business efficiently; however, in the past, access to company data was limited, and they had insufficient insight into how the business was going. Director of Information Technology, John Petrucha says: “Everything was in a filing cabinet. It would take a couple of hours to find out how much was sold last year, and most calculations were done by hand.” It was complicated for Westye to analyze the profitability of customers and thus to prioritize the time spent on individual customers. Similarly, most purchasing decisions were based on intuition: “We guessed to form estimates of what our customers wanted”, Petrucha says.
To improve performance management, Westye started looking for a business intelligence solution. “We wanted access to our data, and we had to have a solution that was easy to use. Additionally, flexibility and speed were among the major requirements”, Petrucha says.
One sale shown in 16 measures
Westye chose TARGIT Business Intelligence Suite after using a trial version of the solution for four weeks without any prior training: “I saw that there were great opportunities for the solution immediately, and I could see that our users would be able to customize views and reports without involving other people.” Petrucha also stresses the importance of TARGITs ability to show data in multiple ways: “TARGIT is a very flexible solution. Other reporting solutions offered limited methods of presentation, but with TARGIT we can tell you anything that happened with any one sale – in 16 measures.”
Today, TARGIT is used by almost every employee at Westye. TARGIT collects data from their MBS Navision system and is now the primary access point for information.
Improved performance management
TARGIT has changed the way Westye does reporting. With TARGIT most users can generate reports on their own which significantly shortens the time spent on reporting. But most importantly, the system has improved performance management: “TARGIT helps us shape the business in every area. It is used by Finance, Sales, Operations, Inventory, and CRM. We can for example see if there is a need for more dealers in an area, we can see patterns in inventory which let us know which products to focus on, we can compare sales versus quotas, and see how much each customer is costing us”, says Petrucha.
All in all, TARGIT has made Westye more aware of the status of the business. “TARGIT allows us to react in time if a need for change arises. I must say TARGIT exceeded our expectations on many levels and met them on all.”
