Employees use the information to modify their individual and team work practices, which leads to improved performance among the sales teams. When sales executives see a big difference in performance from one team to another, they work to bring the laggard teams up to the level of the leaders. "We try to identify [using our reporting tools] where best practices exist inside our work teams and then extend those best practices across the company," says Phillips.

One of those best practices is to alert customers if a product they have purchased in the past is about to be discontinued. Salespeople can ensure that customers have ordered enough for all of their future needs or identify a new component to replace the one that’s being phased out. Those kinds of conversations boost sales and convince customers that Avnet’s salespeople are looking out for their needs and interests.

It helps that Avnet’s sales team is flexible and willing to adapt to the information. "Because our sales team is so flexible, they’ll take this information [from BI reports] and [change] processes [when they see a benefit to it]," says Phillips. Sometimes, they don’t even realize they are changing the ways they work—a kind of organic reengineering. Indeed, salespeople benefit so directly from better information and have such a big impact on revenue that they can be the best advocates for transformative BI in the company (see "Who Should Get BI Tools First?" above).

But this kind of effortless link between information and processes doesn’t happen by magic. Phillips says his company has been able to use BI effectively because IT and business users have worked closely and steadily in the past four years (the project began in 2001) to build up the company’s BI capability and determine how Avnet’s business units could support their operational management processes (such as taking orders, fulfilling orders and following up on quotes) with information from the data warehouse. IT, along with businesspeople, did business process mapping exercises to understand and flesh out the informal and formal aspects of standard operating procedures. "We needed to know how things really happen day to day, over and above the documented processes so that we could anticipate some of the business’s information needs as we built out the warehouse," says Phillips.

One particular activity that IT sought to understand and make easier for salespeople was their preparation for quarterly meetings with customers. When IT sat down with sales leaders to learn what went into the quarterly reviews, IT quickly realized that while the sales leaders traditionally created their reports individually, they all incorporated the same information (customer profitability, number of orders booked and billed, percentage of on-time deliveries and so on). So IT wrote a program that automatically populates a standard PowerPoint template that all salespeople now use to prepare for those quarterly business reviews. Because they no longer have to build the review from scratch, salespeople can meet with more customers each quarter. And they no longer have to hunt down the information themselves.