Business Intelligence "Real" World Story #1

Fairly early in my career I worked for a company that sold corporate-logo apparel to customer locations in the United States. Typically these customers were franchisees or retail outlets for large corporations, which were our “clients.” One of my duties, with help from an assistant, was to make sure our sales force got sales reports for the clients and customers in their territories. When I started, it worked like this: each Monday, our corporate head office sent us a sales report for the week just ended. It was sorted by customer location for each client. It was about the size of the USA’s 2010 health care bill, each week. It was printed on wide-ledger computer greenbar paper. Never heard of that? Lucky you. It took the better part of two days to go through this printout and put it in a format that had any meaning for the sales force. That meant that the week was half over (Wednesday) before they saw numbers for the previous week. Apparently this is how it had “always been done.”

I poked around at the process for awhile, and then I found out about a software tool called Monarch. This tool allowed you to take a formatted text or print spool file, and convert the contents into a form that could be easily loaded into a spreadsheet or a database on your PC. I struck a deal with a friend in the corporate IT department to leave the print spool file from the job that printed the sales report on the network for a while after it had finished printing. I would then download it, convert it using Monarch, and load the numbers into a database program called Paradox (all this was before Microsoft Office came to dominate the world). I wrote a report in Paradox that would add up and sort the data by client from highest sales to lowest. It wasn’t totally automated, but we were able to spit out more useful sales figures on the same day as IT put the sales out. And without realizing it, I had begun my BI career several years before it officially started.

Next time: an introduction to the business intelligence life-cycle.