Daily Reports Straighten Out Sales At Toni & GuyDaily Reports Straighten Out Sales At Toni & Guy

Ever-shifting sales trends can get any company's inventory into a tangle. That's especially true for Tigi Linea/Toni & Guy, a maker of hair gel, shampoo and styling products, whose consumers' fickle tastes are a regular hazard of doing business.

Dallas-based Toni & Guy uses reporting and analytics software from Business Objects to tell managers which products are selling well so they can keep distributors stocked up with hot items. Its reports also tell executives which products aren't selling, so they don't have a lot of palmade, for example, wasting inside a warehouse. Such dead inventory needs to be written off, and ultimately it subtracts from the company's bottom line.

Before Business Objects, Toni & Guy used the basic Oracle report-writing and query-building features, and IT created the reports manually. "People couldn't get a handle on what was going on," says Wade Peddy, the company's chief information officer. Sales trends were difficult to spot because of the delay in getting information. "It was like being on a boat without a rudder."

As the system is currently configured, a daily static report goes out via e-mail to select managers, sales people and distributors, though the report is tweaked depending on the end user. Some sales information is shared on a need-to-know basis only. Among the challenges for Peddy, therefore, was figuring out which numbers each individual user required -- and which he or she didn't -- in order to get an accurate portrait of those sales trends.

The basic report indicates how much product shipped the previous day by dollar amount and by quantity. These numbers, in turn, are broken down according to product type and customer. (In the U.S., the company sells its stuff to distributors, who in turn sell it to salons. In the U.K. and Germany, it sells directly to stylists.) There's also a year-to-date running total on everything.

Peddy's IT group runs the Business Objects package on a single Compaq box with two gigabytes of ram and four Intel Xeon 1.4 processors. The operating platform is Windows 2000. The raw sales data is fished out of an Oracle database running on a Sun Microsystems Solaris server -- the same system that performs and tracks all of Toni & Guy's transactions across its businesses, from product sales to inventory to payroll.

As for ad hoc analysis, Peddy lets only the 10 most computer-savvy business users go directly into the data source to manipulate information and create their own reports. IT doesn't yet have a data warehouse, and if someone should make a query full of redundancies, it could slow down (or worse, shut down) the company's whole transaction system, Peddy says. "If I let people go hog wild, and it slows up transactions, then I'm fired."

Business Objects' support staff took longer than Peddy had anticipated to install version 5.0 of its software at Toni & Guy -- almost five days. That was in March 2003. Seven months later, Peddy took it upon himself to upgrade to Business Objects version 6.0, but found the going no easier. "Usually Windows applications are fairly easy to install. But this, I'd say, was fairly nasty," he says. "And unlike some IT guys in managerial positions, I'm pretty technical. When I tell you that something is difficult to install, you can believe it."

Business Objects admits there was a problem with its installation procedure -- a number of customers complained about it -- but the company says it has now fixed the snag with its latest version, 6.5, released in June. "We probably made the installation more complex than it needed to be," says Lance Walter, a vice president of product marketing at Business Objects. "But it's much more automated now."

When it was all said and done, Peddy sacrificed nearly two days of reports because he was working not on a development system, but on the real deal, which he had to pull offline while he labored with the upgrade. (His company lacks the extra equipment for such a development system.) Still, the installation has been worth it, he says. "The benefits of the software far outweigh the pain. I wouldn't not implement it just because we had this problem with the installation."

The total Business Objects reporting and analytics package cost Toni & Guy around $120,000, Peddy says -- about $60,000 for 50 user licenses and $61,500 for the IT bundle as well as a broadcast-agent scheduler and publisher, which is used to email reports. The company will pay Business Objects 20% maintenance annually.

Looking ahead, Peddy's next goal is to build a data warehouse that will let him give more users access to the raw data. He's already shopping, and has spoken to Business Objects about their warehouse-construction tool. He plans to investigate his product options both within and without Business Objects, which quoted him a price of almost a quarter-million dollars for the software, he says.