Hillcrest Foods Increases Efficiency Using InetSoft's Style Intelligence for Supply Chain Optimization
February 18, 2014 (PRLEAP.COM) Technology News
Piscataway, NJ - February 18, 2014 – InetSoft Technology, an innovator in mash-up driven business intelligence solutions, reports that a customer, Hillcrest Foodservice, is enjoying significant benefits from its pervasive use of InetSoft's Style Intelligence application. In one usage scenario alone, Hillcrest estimates it saves over 500 man hours annually from the automation of data collation and analysis.Hillcrest Foodservice is a distributor of food products and supplies to restaurants, schools, and stores across northern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Since Hillcrest is known for providing excellent customer service at competitive prices, increasing supply chain efficiency is always a top priority. Hillcrest has used InetSoft's Style Intelligence to create a companywide reporting system that mashes up data sources across multiple locations and operational systems.
In another usage case, Hillcrest uses Style Intelligence to solve the problem of coordinating inventory management across multiple warehouses. The company had found that the canned reporting that came with their enterprise system was not user friendly and did not provide a way of unifying multiple external data stores.
Style Intelligence's data mashup capability solved that problem. Style Intelligence is used to connect databases from multiple locations to create reports that optimize product transfers. Hillcrest's fully automated reporting process determines whether there are large enough inventories in one location or if certain items need to be transferred between locations.
With the increased efficiency of this one reporting process, Hillcrest began to realize how many other improvements automated reporting and data mashup could bring to their business. Hillcrest has now also used the software to create dashboards for tracking sales and daily delivery routes, as well as for creating shipment reports. Their most recent creation was an automated report which calculates the most efficient way of filling custom box printing orders. If needed inventories drop below a certain level, a second report, called the "hot print", also runs, specifying immediate production needs.
"Prior to this report, it took one person 10 hours a week to create this information manually," exclaims Jim Schnurr, Director of Customer Solutions at Hillcrest. "With Style Intelligence, not only do we save 500 man hours every year, but the previous overseer of this process is allowed to manage other segments of business. This better time utilization is spent on projects that are more profitable for the company."
These improvements in efficiency are quite typical of organizations that adopt Style Intelligence as their BI solution. "Hillcrest Foods is a great example of how making BI pervasive can generate efficiency gains that more than pay back the initial software investment," explains Mark Flaherty, Chief Marketing Officer at InetSoft Technology. "When users see examples of how a dashboard or report saves them time and effort, ideas for new ones mushroom."
Style Intelligence is a full-featured business intelligence solution for dashboards and reporting that includes a powerful data mashup engine. End-users get visually compelling, highly interactive access to data, and IT gets a highly customizable, easy to learn and quick to deploy business intelligence toolset and information delivery platform.
To learn more about InetSoft's Style Intelligence, view a demo, or read customer reviews please visit http:www.inetsoft.com/evaluate.
About Hillcrest
Hillcrest Foodservice is a foodservice distributor offering fresh and frozen meats, seafood, dairy and groceries, as well as specialty items, gourmet food products, disposables and cleaning supplies. Hillcrest delivers to restaurants, daycares, schools, caterers and retail stores with a focus on pizzerias, fast casual and white table cloth restaurants throughout northern and central Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Hillcrest's success today can be directly linked to hard work and its owner's "customer first" approach to doing business. Hillcrest achieved success and solid growth through careful selection of both employees and business partners, earning a great reputation within the industry. Today, Hillcrest continues to seek out business opportunities to partner with organizations that are in need of quality products, excellent service, and competitive prices.
About InetSoft Technology
Since 1996 InetSoft has been delivering easy, agile, and robust business intelligence software that makes it possible for organizations and solution providers of all sizes to quickly deploy or embed visually-compelling, interactive dashboards, analytical data visualizations, and pixel-perfect report publishing. InetSoft's data access platform includes a unique approach to in-memory database technology to meet big data and high performance needs and a patent pending Data Block™ technology that enables data mashups of almost any data source. A unique capability for end-user defined data mashup combined with InetSoft's visual analysis technologies allow maximum self-service that benefits the average business user, the IT administrator, and the developer. InetSoft solutions have been deployed at over 3,000 organizations worldwide, including 25% of Fortune 500 companies, spanning all types of industries.