One standard report is the chart in this PDF that shows the past four sales weeks and the current-week sales stacked by day for a segment of our business. Note that this chart indicates that there are two days left in the current week—week five. The chart can easily be changed to look at gross sales by department for the various weeks and has drill-down capability to look at certain weeks, days, departments and stores.

Those who know me know that I like to do things in a small and controlled fashion (when possible) and roll them out in phases over time, thereby limiting the financial exposure of the company. Usually this means testing the waters in information services (my department) first, as my team is naturally driven to use technology. BI was no exception. Others at AG share my concern of embarking on a large-scale implementation of an enterprise-level BI system because initially, AG had very little understanding of the scope, requirements and benefits, which is why justification was so difficult. If we had been able to justify an enterprise-level tool early in the project, it would still have taken years to implement. Our current mode of implementation allows us to learn at a very small cost and create a desire and appetite for more capability over time.

In December 2007, our CFO took part in general training on the use of the BI tool. He was very intrigued and decided to create his own reports. He called me for some assistance and expressed some concerns about how users would go about creating ad hoc reports using the report portal. His comments were that the process and naming scheme is just not intuitive enough. And I must agree that it takes some time to understand how to access the data. Many users will only need standard reports such as metrics, but those super users throughout the company will need the ability to create their own reports. Training is very important. My CFO received some one-on-one training on the use of the system and proclaimed at a recent staff meeting that the BI tool is awesome. He had used the tool to quantify some missed opportunities of our retailer's purchase of full pallets. AG provides an incentive for many products if the retailer orders an entire pallet. This information was provided to the retailers as an opportunity for improvement. When AG handles a full pallet rather than a pallet of individual cases, it makes AG much more efficient and saves our customers money.

Limitations of the report portal are fairly basic. The system has accumulated some 50 million records. As such, there are times that we want to drill down to the item level but cannot because cubing that amount of data causes the size of the cube to grow exponentially causing the display of data to become lethargic to the point of freezing. In the BI world, when a cube has to process a huge amount of data and freezes, it's called an ice cube. Additional cubes, therefore, have been created for specific purposes. Second, the report portal cannot perform "void" reporting. In our analysis of other tools, it was a fairly straightforward request to show opportunities. For AG, this would mean the ability to show those items that are best sellers from the distribution center but are not part of a particular store's current product mix. Lastly, this tool does not allow for any predictive or "what if" analysis. In other words, it does not have any forecasting tools and cannot recast data based on a change in the underlying assumptions of the data. For instance, if AG wanted to know what our total margin would have been if we changed the markup, we could not simply apply that to the existing data on demand. In one case, static data sets have been created that show the revenue at various freight fees for freight analysis as discussed earlier in this document, but there is no way to change these variables on the fly.

So, how did I arrive at the total cost? First, understand that I have assigned no cost to the labor resources for those employed at AG. Considerable time has been invested by our infrastructure team and department stakeholders, but mostly by the database analysts. Employees learned how to create cubes and leverage the Report Portal from the local vendors hired to assist with the project. Internal employees became self sufficient and only needed to call the vendors on rare occasions. One employee in particular has held many positions at AG, which have exposed him to almost every aspect of data management. It was a natural progression for him to participate in this BI initiative. I can honestly say that we would not be as far along the BI path today without the talented employees here at AG. I hold my staff in very high regard. That being said, the remaining costs were very low. Approximately $10,000 was spent on professional services, less than $5,000 on licensing, and $10,000 on the report portal. One year later, BI for less than $25k.

Steven A. Miller is the senior vice president of strategic planning, projects and information services for Associated Grocers, Inc. in Baton Rouge, La. He is responsible for all information technology and strategic planning and projects that span the organization. In this role, he has the opportunity to implement projects that improve efficiency for the organization and participate in the development of employees for future key roles.