Business Intelligence Blossoms at World Flowers

World Flowers is the UK’s largest importer of cut flowers, transporting many tonnes of flowers by air each week. The company employs over 500 people in the UK and has long-established close business relationships with the world’s largest and most technically-advanced flower growers on many farms around the world. The company currently has an annual turnover of £100 million delivering over one billion flowers a year to its customers around the world. 

Crystal Reports & OLAP

World Flowers have worked with Contemporary for a number of years on the implementation of Crystal Reports™. At a recent seminar World Flowers identified OLAP Intelligence™ as a product that might suit their requirements and turned to Contemporary for how best to tackle their issues. 

World Flowers automatically generates thousands of records a day relating to sales, stock levels, deliveries and supplier requirements from Tesco and Sainsbury etc. This data was stored within their vast ERP system and accessed by Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Sales information was no different with each account manager inputting manually via Excel every morning to create the daily reports needed to manage the supply chain. Data Entry via spreadsheet was time consuming, cumbersome and subject to keying errors. 

World Flowers recognised the need to streamline the process, make their data more accessible and speed up the availability of key management information. As part of a much larger group of companies communicating about crop availability and supplier demand, the current process was unwieldy and subject to error.

Upgraded to Business Objects XI

Contemporary agreed with World Flowers that OLAP Intelligence™ from Business Objects would be a suitable tool for manipulating their vast array of data and set about implementing this with the necessary analysis cubes. They also upgraded World Flowers from Crystal Enterprise™ to BusinessObjects XI™. 

Preliminary reports were set up to specifically address the needs of the sales account managers and World Flowers trained in how to create and manipulate the necessary reports. The labour intensive process of using Excel every morning for a daily update has now been replaced with a single view report that is fully automated and mailed to the key stakeholders. It not only allows a daily view on the status of the demand/supply relationship but also allows comparison between weeks and year on year. 

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