That success led Boragno last year to expand the FAST application to include the ability to input expense forecasts to support the quarterly sales forecast process. Doing so ended the use of Excel templates, saved time and eliminated errors.

By combining the reps’ sales forecasts with historical sales figures that are matched with promotions and adjustments for seasonal sales, the finance department cut the amount of inventory on hand from 77 days to 35 days, saving the company $2 million a year in reduced spoilage and interest costs.

What did Boragno learn from the experience? "Don’t get all the bells and whistles right away," he says. "Keep it simple. Choose [an application] that can grow with you."

Keep the Garbage Out

A BI application is only as good as the data it is using. If a company’s data has errors or differing nomenclature and standards for products collected over decades, then be prepared to spend a lot of time cleaning up the database.

Last year JBHanauer’s Barnes began implementing a BI application to track financial adviser and firm performance. It also allowed branch managers to track how different investments were selling at their office. Barnes knew clean data was critical to the effort and that there were inconsistencies in JBHanauer’s database. For example, the firm had classified the various categories of municipal bonds, corporate bonds, preferred securities and other investments in different ways based on who conducted the transaction. Also, trades that had been canceled were being counted as having gone through, exaggerating the number of buy orders. While cleansing data, Barnes suggests CIOs work with business unit heads to determine how much data should be included in analyses. Is it of value to include two years’, five years’ or 10 or more years’ worth of the data? "Those kinds of things turn into significant challenges," she says. "It makes you analyze just how far back to go when including historical data. Is it helpful to go back a million years?"

Barnes recognized that the inconsistent data could undermine the BI initiative. After a thorough manual analysis of any common discrepancies, the data was cleaned up automatically. Barnes says the process took two programmers two months, a significant amount of resources for a company JBHanauer’s size. But it was a task that had to be done to make the application useful.

In November 2005, Barnes purchased the Cognos 8 BI package for an undisclosed sum, and in October 2006 the first phase of the application launched across the company. Now, every morning when branch managers turn on their computers, the first application they see is a report on the previous day’s activity in their office. Managers receive five separate reports, including a 45-day moving average on sales, which categories of investments are selling the best, how each financial adviser is performing and how the office’s performance compares with other branches’. Branch managers use the reports to understand their product mix and identify selling problems or opportunities. "They are asking questions that they’ve never thought of asking before," Barnes says.