PivotLink | Case Study

SmartWool was founded in 1994 and is now part of the Timberland Company. SmartWool makes a range of outdoor performance apparel made of specially treated merino wool, which is sold direct and through retailers such as REI, Zappos, and Big 5.

Challenge

Smartwool was faced with the immediate need to address a company-wide business intelligence deficiency, including lack of analytical flexibility and the inability to produce interactive "what-if" scenario reports. The company needed reporting capabilities for both internal employees and an external sales force, as well as the ability to provide these users with a "single version of the truth".

Solution

SmartWool's IT Director Ken Lotz did not want SmartWool to be constrained by preaggregated data cubes - so traditional business intelligence (BI) technology was not an option - and he wanted a solution that would empower users across the company to easily run on-demand ad hoc queries. The PivotLink solution met these requirements.

Results

Immediately following implementation, SmartWool began to see measurable benefits:

Ability to generate customized reports, without IT oversight
Easily manipulated sales data that represents a single version of the truth
Increased effectiveness of the sales organization
Improved internal inventory management processes
Superior ability to identify key reports to measure organization effectiveness

SmartWool
"The key factor that drove us to PivotLink's solution was usability. We needed a solution that would easily allow all levels of management, from president to sales managers, access to reports and ad-hoc queries."
- Kevin Lotz, IT Director

Anchor Blue
"There is a tremendous amount of data and it is important to be able to crunch that data all the way down to the item level and all the way up to class level. We never had that kind of visibility before."
- Harrison Kang, IT Director
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Car Toys
"PivotLink is terrific, so flexible. People can use it in whatever way they want. A merchandising clerk may only need it to check one thing a day; the senior VP of merchandising, who does heavy analysis, might look at inventory turns, inventory levels, and gross margin return on investments; and our replenishment team uses PivotLink to track sales trends and demand so they can make better buying decisions."
- Tom Lockwood, CIO
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