Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Weiler Corporation - A Featured Success Story!

A great success story coming from the WEDnetPA partner - East Stroudsburg University featuring participating company: Weiler Corporation .

Weiler Corporation had many issues with their original data warehouse.  Performance was very poor and data was inaccurate.  Most users developed some type of workaround to satisfy their information needs. This involved running production reports and mining some data from the data warehouse through predefined reports.  In order to produce the required information, the user would manually consolidate the data and use MS Access or MS Excel to present the information.  This involved many non-value added hours to produce limited information.
Approximately two years ago, Weiler made a decision to invest in a more robust data warehouse/business intelligence solution to mine and provide critical management information.  MicroStrategy was selected for business intelligence because of its robust ad hoc reporting capabilities.  When I joined Weiler in June 2011, the team was still working on the project without any implementations.  After reviewing the status and strategy, it became very clear that the team needed more formal training to move this project forward.
In August 2011, we abandoned the two year effort and engaged MicroStrategy.edu, to train the technical and user teams.  The skills taught by MicroStrategy.edu included architecting a data warehouse, MicroStrategy configuration, MicroStrategy administration, data modeling, project management, ETL (extract, transfer, load), best practices strategies, dashboard creation, power user training and web user training.  I am happy to report that we completed our first implementation November 5, 2011.  Users are already reporting tremendous time savings and more accurate information.  In addition to the user reports, we have one dashboard created.  WEDnetPA funds for training were critical in the education of our team and rapid achievement of our goals.
This success story was provided by: Donna Piccirilli