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Star Trac

"As we launch our intranet and get more collaborative, we’ll use BusinessObjects Edge Series to deliver information across the company so everyone can better understand how to execute our strategies for growth."

Jeff Kuckenbaker, senior director, information systems, Star Trac

Challenge

Since introducing its first commercial treadmill in 1987, Star Trac has remained in the fast lane, designing, manufacturing, and marketing its user-focused, quality fitness equipment for a global market. With a 66 percent growth rate over the last two years, today Star Trac has more than 3 million customers in more than 70 countries. Star Trac's world headquarters and manufacturing facility in Irvine, California is a nearly 100,000 square foot facility that represents a continued commitment to raise the benchmark for value and quality in fitness products and customer service that goes the extra mile.

New to Business Intelligence
As a mid-sized, growing company that has set high revenue goals over the next two years, Star Trac executives needed to upgrade the fitness level of its BI resources. According to Jeff Kuckenbaker, senior director of information systems at Star Trac, the company needed to embrace BI across the organization so that management could accurately and with confidence align its key objectives and business processes with standard, aggregate, and reliable data on demand.

“Almost 80 percent of our enterprise-level, business reports are created manually, and these are distributed via e-mail. By the time they arrive in people’s inboxes, they are out of date,” he says. “We have multiple data silos. We also have a custom application to pull data from our ERP system. If anyone wants a different flavor of an existing report, which happens a lot, given our growth, it requires custom code. I wanted to build a grassroots approach to creating an organizational culture that understands BI as a strategic asset so we can drive understanding of the business and make good on our revenue goals.”

Poor Visibility into the Business
Among Star Trac management a pervasive lack of trust in the data meant that people wasted time on number validation and fact checking. Different departments worked with different versions of the same data, forcing people to reconcile numbers as they tried to aggregate data from the ERP or the CRM solution. This added up to lost productivity, increased costs, and poor visibility into the business, which reduces everyone’s ability to make good decisions.

“Management needs reliable, current data to understand profit margins, inventory levels, and revenue projections,” says Kuckenbaker. “Sales folks want assurance that month-end sales expectations are on the mark. The president wants to know what we’ve shipped every month. We had to eliminate the manual burden of custom reporting with a cost-effective business intelligence platform that would provide individuals with self-serve access to information.”

Approach

Kuckenbaker evaluated different BI solutions with the needs of a growing, mid-sized organization in mind. He wanted a foundation for business reporting and analytics that Star Trac management could use to understand and improve profitability in a key growth period. He evaluated Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services and an analytics package from the company’s ERP vendor. He chose BusinessObjects Edge Series for flexible reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, interactive dashboards, and visual analytics--all in one product suite.

“Given the growth of our company and tremendous demand on building our application portfolio, we would not have a BI solution in place if this offering wasn’t available,” he confirms. “It is critical for growing companies to have a ‘pay as you go’ model to reduce the up front investment and reduce the risk of lofty business expectations. For us, BI maturity is just beginning and Business Objects is doing an outstanding job of staying with us through the deployment process.”

Building a Grassroots Acceptance
While Star Trac is in the beginning stages of its BusinessObjects Edge Series deployment, Kuckenbaker is determined to build a grassroots acceptance and understanding of all the capabilities of the product: from reporting to sophisticated analytics and business performance management. Eventually, his goal is to use the new BI platform for all reporting and analytics that are not directly produced out of the ERP system. “Right now, we are primarily using Crystal Reports, given that we are just ramping up our Phase I deployment,” he says. “My goal is to build up reliable, on-demand, enterprise-level operational reporting to regain confidence in our data. Then we can bring in higher levels of complexity, with drill downs for analysts and dashboarding for executives. The fact that BusinessObjects Edge Series provides all these BI capabilities just adds to its ongoing value for us.”

Results

Initially, Star Trac executives are focusing on three business case scenarios for the new BusinessObjects Edge Series platform: improving order fulfillment and customer satisfaction, improving profitability management, and delivering better operational reporting. In the latter case, inventory managers are already using a new cycle counting report to bring finished good inventory levels on target, based on sales volume. “Before BusinessObjects Edge Series, this report didn’t exist and we had no ability to make it,” says Kuckenbaker. “Now, in a matter of days, we delivered reports with built-in parameters and standard business rules that have immediate operational impact in managing inventory, one of our biggest challenges. It was a quick win with the potential to save us a lot of money. Success like that will drive grassroots acceptance of the BI concept across the board.”

Longer term, Star Trac managers will be using Crystal Reports to better understand order management and ensure that the company’s high level of service, like making partial shipments, continues to improve—a top priority in a period of aggressive growth. “Business Objects BI solution is a key enabler for us to reach our growth targets,” confirms Kuckenbaker. “Right now, if we add another 10 or 100 SKU’s the manual production of reports, like the aggregate open order report, breaks down. Instead of throwing more people at the problem, with Business Objects we can change the BI game plan: it’s no longer code and develop, it’s write and deploy. Fast easy business intelligence will save us time, boost productivity, and deliver the data to help us grow the business.”

For Star Trac, just starting out on the BI maturity model, this last point bodes well for the company’s universal adoption of a better way to take advantage of its valuable business data. “Once everyone starts using current, accurate operations reporting, it’s going to drive demand for more complexity, more interactive data visualization, and business performance management for everyone,” concludes Kuckenbaker. “As we launch our intranet and get more collaborative, we’ll use BusinessObjects Edge Series to deliver information across the company so everyone can better understand how to execute our strategies for growth.”

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Quick Facts

• Industry:
  Manufacturing
• Business pain:
  Star Trac management tried to run a growing business with poor access to business data. Inefficient manual report generation and data silos negatively impacted productivity and reduced the ability to make good decisions.
• Why Business Objects?
  BusinessObjects Edge Series offers cost effective yet sophisticated BI capabilities for midsized organizations.
• Business Objects products and services:
  BusinessObjects Edge Series