Executive Information System (EIS) 
WILCOHESS, located in Winston-Salem, NC, is a leading operator of travel plazas and convenience stores in the Southeastern United States.
Wilco owns and manages 300+ stores that offer first class convenience and value to patrons. Wilco offers a dynamite coffee program, monthly specials on soft drinks, and the best petroleum products available.
Challenge
Wilco needed the ability for their executives to quickly analyze several aspects of its business, including category management, price performance, market-basket analysis and store performance. The reports could not be pre-formatted and run in a batch process. The reports had to be dynamically created based on a multitude of selection criteria. This type of reporting would provide valuable insight into marketing and operations performance for Wilco by allowing corporate users to drill into items of interest.
The Executive Information System (EIS) needed to:
- Incorporate a user-friendly Web graphical user interface accessible through the Wilco Intranet site to allow corporate users to perform analysis.
- Allow users to login once to get to the Wilco Intranet and have the ability to perform analysis on sales dollars, sales quantity, gross margin and gross margin percent.
- Provide filtering, grouping, sorting and drill-down capability on each report.
- Provide the ability to select various types of reports based on Marketing, Operations and Maintenance business areas. Each area would have specific types of reports to choose (for example, Category Comparison, Market Basket, Missing Store Data, etc.).
- Allow users to export and save reports in PDF and Microsoft Excel with the click of a button.
Solution
Stratapult developed an automated EIS Web Reporting solution linked to the Wilco Intranet and utilized the existing SQL Server 2000 database server and ColdFusion Server. Authorized corporate users have access to the EIS reporting through the Intranet site. Wilco uses the EIS application to perform data analysis on Point of Sale (POS) data collected and consolidated daily from each store.
Stratapult built an extract, transformation and load (ETL) process and centralized reporting database to store the transformed POS data into data structures optimized for Wilco's dynamic reporting requirements. The user interface was built with navigation and ease-of-use in mind, allowing for quick clicks to select pertinent filtering criteria and to generate a report.
The following types of reports are available through the EIS application:
1) Stores that did not send POS data by day
2) Top Selling Items
3) Merchandise Category Comparison
4) Market Basket
5) Hourly Sales Analysis
6) Items Sales Performance
7) Sales Trends
Users can select any of these reports and choose to narrow down search results by a variety of criteria, such as product category, organizational unit, timeline, etc. Once the report is displayed, the user has further ability to drill-down into details of a row based on one of the hierarchical values returned.
Impact
Wilco has realized operational efficiencies as a result of cost savings through the automation of the current manual process required to perform the data consolidation and preparation.
In addition, EIS delivers value to the marketing function at Wilco. EIS provides marketing an analytical tool for instant analysis of retail performance at the unit, store, district, and regional levels. An accurate picture of sales and merchandise data offers marketing the leverage to couple data with individual knowledge to identify and react to opportunities to increase profitability, reduce costs and manage promotions. This results in a more timely and relevant response to the market and optimizes retail performance at all levels.
"EIS has become invaluable in giving us the ability to respond proactively to key data and better manage our business. It delivers a speedy and accurate view of our business and allows us to evaluate information so we can make solid business decisions with a profitable edge." — Susan Flynn, WilcoHess
|
