Rossignol Builds a Standard Information Structure

Rossignol Ski Company is the U.S. and Canadian distributor for 100-year-old Rossignol Skis, the world's leading manufacturer of winter sports equipment, which was acquired by Quiksilver in 2005. In addition to distributing the Rossignol, Dynastar, Lange, Look and Kerma brands, the company operates snowboard manufacturer Mervin Manufacturing, distributor of the Lib Tech, Gnu and Roxy snowboard brands. The company has 60 sales representatives across North America.

 

As a consolidation of multiple companies, the Rossignol distributor lacked consistency in their information structure and was using a "really ancient" core system that was actually multiple systems cobbled together. It was impossible to link inventory, sales and other information across brands. Only staff that knew the individual systems well could extract the information needed to make important business decisions, and even then the information was inconsistent. Users also had to maintain separate logins for looking up information in each system.

 

"We needed an affordable way to standardize our informational structure and facilitate access to it," says Jim Hunter, CFO and vice president of operations for the company. "We were very quickly drawn to PivotLink because it's so intuitive and easy to use."

 

The PivotLink solution that Hunter mentions streamlined information access across the company's separate systems, so business users could quickly and easily run queries and create customized reports. Because PivotLink was so easy to use the company president was an early adopter, and the solution quickly became "the information standard" across the organization.

 

"It's just so easy to teach people how to use PivotLink and adopt it," says Hunter. "You don't call IT and ask them to run a report and then get it tomorrow. You get it now, and you do it yourself. This also really helped spread the use of the solution throughout our entire organization very rapidly."

 

Ease-of-use was a critical requirement, as the technological sophistication of the sales forces varied widely. With PivotLink, it was quick and easy to train even the least sophisticated users to access the information they needed. Hunter says that in addition to using the core reports first deployed by the company seven years ago, users continue to evolve and expand their own portfolio of reports as their business demands and needs have changed over the last three years.

 

In addition to the clear benefits for the sales reps, the distributor soon found PivotLink critical in helping meet the new reporting requirements that it faced when it became part of a public company.

 

"Everything used to be on a 12-month cycle," says Hunter. "Now we're public and it's all about the quarter, which is a much greater burden from a reporting and analytical standpoint -- basically we now have to go through the old year-end process on a quarterly basis. That's reinforced for us the value of the PivotLink tool. What we need, we can get."

 

The clearest advantages for Rossignol were ease of use and flexibility. "We have people all over the world all of the time, and they all have access to the same information anywhere and anytime," reports Hunter. Before deploying PivotLink, Hunter says the company could spend a week gathering the information needed to make a decision or risk making a decision without critical information. With PivotLink, the information is always at their fingertips, enabling the company to make decisions in real time.

 

In addition to rapid adoption of the service inside Rossignol, the PivotLink solution helped the company to reduce costs and improve operations in two key areas:

 

- Decreased burden on IT, as overall IT budgets have decreased -- today the core systems IT staff is 25 percent smaller. It has also allowed the company to add network support and other additional functions at no incremental cost.

 

- The vast improvement to information access resulted in the company making better, more informed decisions, which has led to a significant reduction in season-end inventory.

 

"PivotLink has changed the way we do business, and it has changed the way we approach our business. People have greater access to more information than they had before and something like that becomes addictive operationally. You get used to having that and you want more," closes Hunter.