Giant Bicycles Inc., has been using TARGIT since 2003 and the solution is vital to the company’s everyday operations. “Especially for the Sales Department who can’t live without TARGIT. They use it on a daily basis," states Jean Scott, IT Business Analyst at Giant. Giant needs to process the data coming from various separate orders and shipments for its Purchasing, Accounting and Sales departments on a daily basis.
"A tool like TARGIT gives us the ability to look at all that information easily and the Sales Department benefits from being able to make on-the-fly analyses. Ad hoc reporting is also easy to create in TARGIT; thus, we save time and resources,” explains Jean Scott and continues: “With TARGIT, it is easy for the Sales Department to get an instant overview of the best-selling bike and the different categories of products and to act accordingly hence improving their position in the market. The Sales Managers use the results from TARGIT at the annual national sales meeting each year as well." The Sales Management Team benefits from using the analysis capabilities within TARGIT to create reports showing statistics based on all levels.
Favorite TARGIT feature
The drill-down feature is Giant’s favorite TARGIT feature. “I like the ability to create multiple objects in an analysis and to drill into the criteria affecting the other objects”, says Jean Scott. “Most people are used to the traditional flat Excel reports, but once they see the multi-object drill-down feature, they see other possibilities in using the tool to get the data more efficiently. Since we upgraded to a newer version of TARGIT two years ago and also customized our cubes, we have expanded the usefulness of the tool. It is an integrated part of the daily business process. I do not know how we would function without TARGIT,” says Scott and elaborates on the upgrade of TARGIT: “We utilized TARGIT Consulting Services to perform the upgrade. Our experience with the upgrade was excellent as everything went smoothly.”
It was Jean Scott who led the project with TARGIT. Giant combined the TARGIT Business Intelligence Accelerator (BIA) Inventory cube with their existing cubes to include and combine data for inventory, purchasing, sales, and warranty. One of the major changes to their cubes included the addition of forecasting, which is done in AX based on specific company requirements. These requirements are handled in the cube making the forecasting figures available in TARGIT. Recently, Giant also upgraded from AX 3.0 to AX 2009 in-house and making the relationship changes for TARGIT was relatively simple. “Time was spent modifying the ETL scripts for the OLAP cube. However, all TARGIT related tasks took less than a few hours,” Jean Scott concludes from the experience.
Great ROI on TARGIT training
Jean Scott has attended the TARGIT BI Basics (TBIB) and TARGIT Certified Professional (TCP) training classes at TARGIT University. “The training was extremely helpful. fter taking the TBIB class, I have a btter understanding of how to utilize the font-end features. The TCP class taught me how to properly create cubes and how o make connections. The class seemed difficult at the time, but the manual from the class proved invaluable going forward,” says Jean Scott and continues: “The TCP class is not just about TARGIT – it is about OLAP, which is universal.” The TCP course has paid for itself many times over now that Giant is able to make changes to their cube internally, thus saving consulting costs. Giant Bicycles Inc. is the sole authorized U.S. distributor for the world’s largest builder of top quality bicycles and frames.
