Miamisburg, Ohio-based United Wheel Inc. reports a worldwide spike in its online and storefront sales—with brands sold including Huffy, Batch Bicycles, Vaast, Niner, Royce Union and electric Buzz E-Bikes, the latter representing the fastest-growing market segment.
To keep pace with these breakaway sales, UWI’s Director of IT, Daniel Carlascio, will move infrastructure to a cloud-based platform by February 2021. The goal is to integrate the supply chain and track products from the source to the customer distribution hubs using Oracle EnterpriseOne and supporting applications from Salesforce, Magento, ReportsNow and Synapse, among others.
“Everything we do needs to be centered on engaging directly with the consumer,” Carlascio says. “ERP systems are an important piece, but we now have to be able to drive traffic online ourselves. Being able to bring all that data into one ecosystem to understand and engage the consumer is crucial.”
With all the data flowing in, Carlascio says Colorado-based ReportsNow, a global reporting solution provider, lent a hand.
As ReportsNow CTO Basim Kadhim explains, data consolidation, reporting, visualizations, automation and sharing is faster and more on-demand than before. Recognizing UWI needed to analyze its data in a way to make high-value decisions, Kadhim says UWI was able to enhance its reporting and business intelligence capabilities.
By transforming the data and eliminating the uncontrolled use of Excel and pivot tables, Kadhim says now clients can easily access a single solution that consolidates data in the way they need—and can even extend the reach of report results by making them available on the web, mobile devices and through automated email distribution.
“This instant access to data by anyone in an organization has proven to create both a tactical and strategic advantage,” says Kadhim.
For Carlascio it was a beneficial way to unify fractured information.
“Being able to share data professionally with a customer is important to us,” says Carlascio. “Today’s sales are often driven off of ratings and reviews. Timely, accurate reports and alerts enable UWI to quickly respond, closing the loop on quality issues before it affects a product’s rating.”
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