Johannesburg, 16 Oct 2008
Harvey Jones, South Africa's largest Microsoft-centric business intelligence (BI) specialist, has set what is believed to be a local record by implementing a functioning data warehouse in four days at Peters Papers. Data warehouses are normally characterised by long implementation times, sometimes taking up to 18 months.
Peters Papers is the first black empowered paper merchant in South Africa. The company sources products from more than 40 of the world's most prominent paper mills, which it distributes to the industry via six sales and distribution outlets in South Africa and Namibia, as well as into Botswana and Swaziland. Peters Papers has also established an export division, based in Durban, which distributes into sub-Saharan Africa.
The company had been running Crystal Reports against its specialist ERP system, Merchant Express, but this approach was slow and inflexible and did not lend itself to detailed reports, or any level of granularity. Requests for new queries led to new reports being developed continually. All of this slowed decision-making, and meant Peters Papers could not easily review historical data.
"We went to tender for a data warehouse," says Peters Papers IT manager Colin Godleman, "and chose Harvey Jones for a number of reasons: their professionalism, their local and international track record, their promised speed of implementation, and the fact that their price point was the lowest of the companies we surveyed. We run a Microsoft shop, so there was a good architectural fit. Finally, their pricing was spot on for a company of our size and nature"
Harvey Jones implemented ProfitBase, the quick BI solution from the Norwegian company of the same name, which it represents in South Africa.
"Within just four days we had a functioning data warehouse, running against three years' sales and stock data," says Reinald Bormann, sales executive at Harvey Jones, "and we delivered the entire business intelligence solution in under a fortnight."
"Such speed is incredible for a project of this nature," says Godleman. "This was one of the easiest, smoothest, most hassle-free projects ever implemented at our company."
A major feature of Peters Papers was the quality of the data contained in the ERP system, a custom-built suite from South Africa's Singular Systems. The data warehouse is updated daily, and Peters Papers can now make informed business decisions more quickly, and on a more regular basis, and without having to ask IT to write new reports.
"With Radius and ProClarity as the front-end, the users at Peters Papers will be empowered to extract and analyse data themselves," adds Bormann. "The speed and success of the first phase has resulted in buy-in from all stakeholders, which means we will be building and delivering more data cubes over the next few months, initially in the areas of finance, payroll and accounts receivable."
"ProfitBase is a fantastic tool, easy to use and understand," concludes Godleman, "even for a person from a non-IT background."
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