White Cross Uniforms
Read how Namtek’s Business Intelligence Service helped White Cross produce detailed analyses to turn their raw business data into real insights, without the use of Excel Spreadsheets and printed reports.
Client
White Cross Uniforms is a third-generation family business based out of Montreal, Quebec, distributing uniforms across North and Latin America, as well as other parts of the world. White Cross has grown its reputation over its many years of existence and has maintained its standard for high-quality materials, uniqueness, and creativity. To learn more about White Cross Uniforms, visit their website here.
Challenges
The challenge that White Cross faced was one that many companies struggle with today. They lacked the capability of quickly and efficiently analyzing their data, in order to get company insights, statistics and reports that can be easily shared with the rest of the team. In order to analyze their data, they were printing reports from their ERP Management System and creating spreadsheets with tables and graphs. There are three main problems with this approach;
- It lacks collaboration and feedback capabilities; It is very difficult to get an accurate and truly up-to-date view of information with spreadsheets, as they do not enable real-time data sharing and updating.
- It takes time and effort to properly maintain; You have to continuously ‘manually’ update your spreadsheets, to ensure you are analyzing the most recent data, consolidate multiple spreadsheets, if necessary, and collect information from various reports. All of this is time consuming and labor intensive.
- Spreadsheets are error prone; Many managers aren’t aware that 20% to 40% of all spreadsheets contain errors. This rate only increases as the amount of information increases and your spreadsheets become more and more complex.
Bottom line, this method of analysis and reporting is inadequate and White Cross reached their limits. It was too time consuming and labor intensive and management did not want to base their decisions on inaccurate information. Their amount of data kept growing, making it more and more difficult to analyze by printing reports and maintain spreadsheets.
The BI – Integration
The Business Intelligence service, provided by Namtek Consulting Services, allows businesses to transform their raw business data into actionable insights to drive growth. This is the perfect solution for companies that don’t have the capability of easily and quickly analyzing and reading all of their data, stored in their management system. This full service, integrates a company’s management system with the popular Tableau Software’s Business Intelligence solution, enabling them to make quick, informed decisions, spot areas for cost savings, identify new business opportunities, avoid obstacles and find emerging trends way before competitors.
Without having to print reports or create multiple Excel spreadsheets, decision-makers can use the latest analytics tool to produce detailed analyses with customized drillable dashboards and create interactive visualizations using the company’s real-time data and share detailed reports in one-click.
With BI, Businesses can employ analytics to track performance, identify hidden trends and strategic information, easily manage and define KPIs and turn raw data into visual graphs, tables, diagrams, and more.
Implementation
Implementation consisted of the following;
establishing a real-time connection between White Cross’ platform and Namtek Consulting Services’ private Cloud platform.
defining the frequency of the updates from the customer’s database to Namtek’s Cloud. This could be hourly or daily, at end of the day.
once the process to sync all the necessary information from White Cross to Namtek’s Cloud is built and complete, it was time to create the Business Intelligence dashboards, specific to White Cross’ needs and wants.
Mr. Lutfy was eager to explain and present his various spreadsheets with all the key information he needed to make decisions and track sales figures, inventory, revenue, etc. He was excited to finally have more time on his hands and eliminate the need to continuously manage all of his spreadsheets.
Once the Namtek team clearly understood what Mr. Lutfy and his team truly needed to see in their BI tool, it was easy to create the necessary dashboards and visualizations specific to their requirements. A couple of months later, White Cross’ real-time data was nicely displayed in visualizations, which wowed the management team.
Results
White Cross is no longer swimming in a sea of reports. They are now in a position where they can easily and quickly identify key measures that can provide vital information on the company’s progress, in order to always stay ahead of the competition. They can make well-informed decisions based on real-time data, without spending time on printing endless reports as well as gathering data and building spreadsheets.
Looking forward, Richard Lutfy, President, and CFO at White Cross Uniforms sees great potential using Namtek Consulting Services’ Business Intelligence service and would definitely recommend the solutions and services offered by the Namtek team to any business looking to improve efficiency and simplify processes at an affordable cost. He truly feels like a valued Partner and finally has a dedicated IT team to help solve business challenges and improve efficiency.
