SPSS - Customers

Branion GmbH

Situation

In 1999, Büro Actuell eG and Soennecken eG, which were both founded in 1926, joined forces to form one of the world's leading purchasing and marketing cooperatives in the area of office supplies. Today, ranion acts as a full-service hub for more than 800 office supply stores, offering them combined resources in areas such as service, purchasing, sales, logistics, marketing, consulting and IT.

Challenge

Office supplier Branion, based in Overath near Cologne, provides support to business partners, which include more than 800 office supply stores. The company processes three million invoices from member firms, totalling several billion Euros, each year. Revenue is then linked to the respective member and supplier based on various criteria. Branion's existing decentralized statistical methods for product tracking were not suited to the task of providing centralized billing with the type of detailed information the company required.

"The challenge was to establish a common standard for methodology and structures," says Harald Wallukat, the company's head of IT.

The company developed a detailed list of requirements that would have to be met by Branion's future solution. According to Andrea Köhler, the individual responsible for the data warehousing project, these requirements included that the solution be Web-based and offer integration capabilities with Microsoft® Office® products, such as Excel,® which Branion already used. But it also needed to include graphic display capabilities.

Because Branion's primary sources of data and storage media, such as centralized regulation and enterprise resource planning systems, are based on the IBM® eServer iSeries™(AS/400®) computing platform, access to this platform was extremely important. At the same time, Branion was looking for a solution that could accommodate possible migration to a different platform in the future.

Solution

The data warehousing project started in early 2000 with the replacement of an older information system used for centralized regulation. Today, the new solution is being used in all of Branion's departments, with the primary focus on resource planning and centralized payment processing.

Branion extracts data overnight from its ERP system and loads it into the data warehouse. Approximately 30 employees work with the system at Branion's headquarters. However, many other employees, as well as Branion's member firms and customers, benefit from the results of the analysis.

"In sales, we conduct analysis based on specific products so that our salespeople can recognize not only how many invoices and credits a member has been issued across the various revenue categories, but also what products have been sold. In purchasing, we look at the same information, but from a profit perspective. Our management is primarily interested in the total amounts," says Andrea Köhler.

While examining the marketplace, Branion learned about the solutions offered by SPSS Inc. Factors influencing the final selection of SPSS' software included the fact that, although the software was developed specifically for use on the iSeries, it was also suited for use on other platforms. In addition, Harald Wallukat was already experienced in working with IBM and, therefore, had indirect contact with SPSS Inc. Finally, Branion management took time to speak with another company that worked with SPSS, and were pleased with what they learned.

We view SPSS Inc.'s solution as the right choice for us. We're extremely satisfied, and view this software as very useful to our entire company. Had we tackled this project earlier, we would have saved ourselves a lot of hard work developing custom applications to manage IT tasks.
Harald Wallukat, Head of IT, Branion GmbH

Results

With the help of SPSS solutions, Branion has succeeded in creating unified structures and methods that eliminated "islands" of non-related data and met the needs of managers at all levels of the company. Much of the information that was previously available, but on a decentralized basis, is now available centrally and can be viewed by all authorized users.

Branion employees are able to work more independently and more efficiently, requiring less support from the IT department.

"More importantly, SPSS Inc. puts us in a position to review all of our company's resources whenever we want to. We were able to do away with time-consuming statistical methods. In fact, because we can now provide analytical results wherever needed via standard Web browsers, we no longer need to print out reports. We have achieved real improvements in our cost structures," says Wallukat.

Additional applications

The system is continually being expanded to cover additional areas, such as finance, marketing and electronic commerce. Branion now plans to use the information contained in its data warehouse to answer individual questions from members, customers and suppliers over the company's Web site.