Walsworth Publishing Moves to Head-ofthe-Class Business Intelligence
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- WebFOCUS Developer Studio
- WebFOCUS Professional Server
- WebFOCUS Resource Governor
Tech Stack
- DB2
- Microsoft Access
- Microsoft SQL Server
- ODBC
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Predictive Quality Analytics
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Walsworth Publishing is a renowned publisher of yearbooks and other print materials. The company has been helping students put together cherished books for nearly 80 years. With roughly 3,700 schools as customers, the Marceline, Missouri-based company has learned that rapid turnaround time is the key to keeping its customers happy. The company is accelerating its processes with a WebFOCUS-based reporting portal that allows clients to easily access information. All of their information, including the status of printing jobs, page submissions, proofs, and deadlines (which determine pricing) are now available electronically. Students can monitor page submissions, see a list of items that need attention, and review color-coded proofs.
The Challenge
Walsworth Publishing, a publisher of yearbooks and other print materials, was facing a challenge in providing its clients with quick and easy access to information. The company was undergoing a massive technology overhaul that included deploying a new ERP system called Prism Win, a vertical application suite for the printing industry. This overhaul impacted Walsworth’s customer-facing applications as well as its internal reporting systems. The company needed a single business intelligence (BI) platform that could combine fragmented data created by different programmers using different databases and data management tools. The former reporting capabilities weren’t scalable, they weren’t flexible, and they couldn’t keep up with the company's growth.
The Solution
Walsworth Publishing decided to integrate all the diverse pieces of its data management landscape into a comprehensive BI environment that gave their customers self-service access to account information and streamlined operational reporting for internal sales, manufacturing, and finance personnel. The company chose Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform for its ability to easily gather data from many types of systems – including Lotus Notes, SQL Server, Prism Win, Microsoft Access, and DB2 data from a variety of AS/400 applications. The company used WebFOCUS Developer Studio to create a dashboard for the yearbook salesforce, which includes more than 120 employees. In addition to the sales staff members, managers and executive-level employees now have access to the dashboard as well, bringing the total number of users to roughly 170.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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