Southern Wine and Spirits Suppliers Toast Crystal Decisions' Scalable Enterprise Reporting SolutionLargest wine and spirits distributor in the U.S. significantly reduces costs and improves supply chain management with Crystal Decisions
PALO ALTO, CA -- October 9, 2002 -- Crystal Decisions, a world leader in information management, today announced that Southern Wine and Spirits of America, Inc. is standardizing on a Crystal Decisions solution that will deliver more than 15,000 sales and distribution reports every month to approximately 2500 suppliers in 11 different states via a single extranet information portal - at significantly reduced costs than its current reporting system. "We had three objectives when we built our Business Partner Xchange," says Bob Burg, Chief Information Officer for Southern Wine and Spirits. "We needed to provide a common centralized reporting system to get sales and marketing information to our supplier partners; the solution needed to be web-enabled, available 24 x 7, and we required that it be intuitive and easy to use. Crystal Enterprise met all of our needs and then some." Acquisitions of distributorships in 11 different states over the years contributed to a proliferation of different reporting tools and processes that left Southern Wine and Spirits without a standard reporting mechanism to provide the same sales information to all its suppliers. Southern Wine and Spirits chose to implement a combination of products from Crystal Decisions and APOS Systems Inc., a certified Crystal Decisions Enterprise Partner, to help it quickly put together a central reporting system with a standard set of reports for all suppliers. Southern Wine and Spirits is using Crystal Decisions to centralize and consolidate reporting across the enterprise. Now, instead of divisions in different states generating their own reports in different formats, a small team of people at Southern Wine and Spirits' central IT department are creating many thousands of reports that are available over the Web. Additionally, Crystal Decisions is helping Southern Wine and Spirits eliminate reporting redundancy, increase IT productivity, and boost customer service and supplier loyalty. It also uses Crystal Decisions internally to generate help-desk reports that capture information that was previously unavailable. This allows executives to monitor open ticket resolution, track problems, and improve project management. "Southern Wine and Spirits is a great example of a company leveraging the scalability of a Crystal Decisions solution to distribute more information at less cost," said Bill Gibson, Chief Operating Officer for Crystal Decisions. "Uniting all players through an efficient enterprise solution that links a company's suppliers, employees, and head office into a more efficient communication network based on accurate, up-to-the-minute information, ultimately works to increase competitive edge." For More Information About Crystal Decisions For Further Information Contact: Kristine Berry, Crystal Decisions Public Relations Lauren Stein, Q Public Relations |