SRK Case Study

Our experience has shown that clients in business areas, including Sales Operations, Risk Management, Manufacturing and Retail, where their operations are distributed, collaborative, complex, and dynamic are not satisfied with the status quo and are demanding more flexible analytical capabilities to meet their operational metrics and decision making requirements.

In the past, businesses have had to use spreadsheets to provide extreme flexibility to accomplish highly dynamic analysis. However, the disadvantages of spreadsheets are visible from the start – error prone, single user, no access control, and diminished productivity.

Today, DrivenBI’s SRK cloud-based solution offers them high value improvement at a reasonable cost to ensure higher accuracy, managed access, collaboration and better productivity.

SRK in the Garment Industry

To illustrate how SRK achieves this, let’s look at the example of a SRK client in the garment industry who has distributed operations across the US for design, manufacturing, sales, and distribution of their sportswear collections to major retailers.

Before SRK

Before using SRK, they tried to manage many complicated spreadsheets to perform their business analysis against operational data which was provided from their ERP system. To answer even the basic business intelligence question of which mens polo shirt was sold the most or the least and in which retail store in which city – analysis they needed in order to adjust the design for the next season, inventory control, and expectations with the retailer – was tedious and time-consuming.

But it wasn’t just the time and effort that was required that caused them frustration. The results often had to be checked and rechecked for errors which were common since they used many manual spreadsheet reporting processes throughout their business. The mistakes were also difficult if not impossible to find, hidden in layers of spreadsheet calculations on multiple desktops. Oversights in their old reporting process were just unavoidable. There was also other bad news, the manually produced intelligence would go into another manual process for distributing and sharing among responsible organizations located in different offices. The flexibility of spreadsheet systems actually delivered untrustworthy data analysis with no collaboration capability.

After SRK

With SRK, they had an intuitive and responsive development tool for their business users to create their desired SRK reports. The nature of the development was focused on configuration rather than programming. With the users’ familiarity with their business requirements for reporting and analysis, and knowledge of spreadsheet design and data manipulations, they were quickly able to see how SRK could be a very friendly and powerful solution for them.

SRK helped them remove the painful processes and replaced them with a reliable accurate solution. Since deploying their SRK-based reporting system in the cloud, the client now has trustworthy intelligence right at their fingertips, 7X24, and access from anywhere.

Furthermore, SRK requires no software and hardware investment for the client. Essentially they are getting their real-time, just -in-time analytical systems at a fraction of the cost of a traditional BI software implementation.

SRK for Your Business

In fact, businesses of all sizes, small, medium, and large, can benefit from SRK simply because SRK’s uses are business-driven. SRK users can be business users from business units in a large organization, or from operational areas in a medium size firm, or from multi-functional areas in a small company.

Meanwhile, IT’s help is a plus but not necessary. SRK users require only a minimum of  training to learn SRK.  And as a cloud-based solution, SRK does not require IT to install and maintain the software. DrivenBI handles all of that. The infrastructure is prepared for use as part of the subscription, adding no extra work to IT for business users to acquire a simple, automated solution to address their ever-changing business intelligence needs.