On the fast track

Since the second half of 2002, clothing manufacturer Cutter & Buck has been involved in a company-wide reorganization, aiming to decentralize business functions such as inventory management in order to shift them to Strategic Business Units (SBUs) that target specific markets. This decentralization created a demand for key business data among a wide range of managers within the company who require easy access to business information to gain operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. For this effort to become reality, Cutter & Buck sought the expertise of Business Objects, whose software produced a substantial boost in the company's data analysis and reporting capabilities. Due to the outstanding results, Cutter & Buck earned the SMB Fast Track Award at the 2003 Consumer Goods Technology Conference.

Operational Shift

The goal of the deployment was to assist with a company-wide reorganization that shifted various operational responsibilities to six strategic business units. The firm wanted to make the huge amount of data locked away in its legacy systems available to the SBU leaders and analysts in an easily-accessible environment that allowed them report and derive key information. Cutter & Buck teamed with Business Objects to track bookings, sales, margins and inventory management performance.

Pump Up the Volume

Using BusinessObjects and WebIntelligence, the integrated query, reporting and analysis solutions from Business Objects, the firm is able to analyze large volumes of customer and purchase data, track sales based on multiple dimensions such as channel, sales representative, geography and season, as well as monitor inventory levels to ensure that the right apparel is available to meet multi-channel demand.

Deep Visibility

Analyst capabilities also provide precise sales and operational details such as visibility into all of Cutter & Buck's order cancellations. And for customer returns, sales management has data down to the individual piece level so it can learn where an item was returned and why. Using a Web browser, the Cutter & Buck golf SBU can drill down into quarter-to-quarter bookings data. Executives can move from high-level to very specific data, going from overall bookings, down to region, salesperson and even specific accounts. Before Business Objects, it took about 1,000 hours a year to run, analyze, format and distribute the reporting. Now it only takes about 10 hours. Cutter & Buck recently extended its deployment of Business Objects with Data Integrator software to streamline the integration process with its legacy systems infrastructure.

"Since our initial rollout of Business Objects, we have made continued improvements to unleash more legacy data to our user community," says Rick Davis, manager of IT technology, Cutter & Buck. "Today our users run over 100 reports daily through the Business Objects Broadcast Agent to be distributed and published to various internal and external report consumers.  In the near future we will finish our implementation of Business Objects Data Integrator and Publisher products, allowing us the ability to accommodate the ever increasing need for data from our users," Davis says.