Jelly Belly Candy knows plenty about the subjective business of pleasing palates, but when sales dropped off after the Sept. 11 attacks, the company wanted more to go on than gut feel to determine why. "Because we just had paper, we couldn’t analyze efficiently what was going on," says Dan Rosman, director of IT. Using BI, Jelly Belly confirmed its suspicion that many Mom-and-Pop candy stores—which represented half of the company’s business—were closing in the face of competition from the likes of Target and Wal-Mart. That justified Jelly Belly’s decision to increase staff handling its national accounts from four to 10. While the specialty store business has dropped 11 percent from 2001 to 2003, national business has increased 17 percent.

BI analysis can inspire companies to launch new business ventures. After using BI to realize that its strategy of selling product in small quantities to many different customers didn’t make sense, Quaker Chemical developed a value-added reseller (VAR) strategy for its small customers two years ago. In each region, the company sought a local partner with complementary, noncompetitive products already working with smaller customers. "That enabled us to get into this segment of the market in a way more in tune with our ability to serve it from a cost-effective point of view," says CIO Tyler. Small customers now account for about 5 percent of Quaker’s business. Its goal is to bump that up to 25 percent by leveraging the VAR strategy.

Track What’s Hot and What’s Not

To jump-start a campaign to reduce "red zone" inventory, TruServ used Business Objects to identify products that had been languishing in one of its 14 warehouses longer than 120 days. The company fed that information into supply chain software from JDA Software Group, which pulled the merchandise from the distribution centers and sold it to member stores at or below cost. That helped TruServ save $50 million in inventory carrying costs in 2002. Marketing managers at TruServ also use BI to identify where promotions are doing well and quickly redirect merchandise to those distribution centers from areas where the promotion is faring poorly.

Jelly Belly’s bean experts use Panorama’s NovaView to access and analyze cost and sales volumes to identify unprofitable products. The company realized Carrot Cake jelly beans and the product mix known as Apple Orchard weren’t selling well, so the decision to nix them from the lineup was a no-brainer. Rosman says product review meeting times have been reduced by 75 percent because their data is accessible and easier to understand.