Information Builders Helps Retailers Grow Business, Boost Revenue

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Jan 13, 2014) - and NRF Show Floor -- Information Builders, a leader in business intelligence (BI) and analytics, information integrity, and integration solutions, announced today that it would be demonstrating its solutions for retail at the 103rd National Retail Federation (NRF) Conference and Expo. The company will show how its customers achieve a significant return on investment as a result of leveraging its products and solutions. By effectively integrating in-house data analysis and sharing, as well as streamlined communication between geographically dispersed locations and corporate headquarters, these retailers are able to better cater to current and prospective customers -- and fuel revenue and corporate growth.

Given the distributed nature of the retail industry, ensuring that data is collected, analyzed, and shared efficiently and effectively can pose a significant challenge for organizations. Advanced BI solutions allow retailers to easily integrate and analyze data from numerous sources to deliver an accurate, comprehensive, real-time view of the organization. This in turn allows them to identify where growth potential lies and how it can be converted into additional sales and revenue. Information Builders has numerous retail customers who use its solutions to enable the real-time analysis and sharing of critical information needed to boost the bottom line and promote growth. These customers include:

• Bata, a global provider of footwear and fashion accessories with more than 5,000 retail locations in over 60 countries. Bata needed to provide its area managers with a tool that enabled mobile access to clear, accurate, and updated data and reports. Previously, the company relied on paper reports that were difficult to keep current and effectively glean information from outside of an office environment. To remedy this, Bata turned to Information Builders' WebFOCUS Mobile solution, which lets managers compile reports directly from their mobile devices at dispersed store locations, allowing them to leave behind the paper reports on which they once relied. With WebFOCUS, Bata's data are automatically stored in the central database and can be accessed instantly for analysis as needed. Bata area managers now have mobile devices that provide them with real-time progress updates for sales, inventory, and other KPIs for each individual store. The additional insight and real-time business snap shots give area managers the ability to analyze specific areas of the business in real-time -- such as shop visitors versus sales -- and make more informed decisions about staffing, inventory, and store expansion.
  
  
• Wendy's, the world's third largest quick-service hamburger company, sought to re-image the brand to promote growth of sales, transactions, and deliver "A Cut Above" experience for its customers. As part of this goal, the company needed to translate data from point-of-sale and back-office systems into actionable information that could aid decision-making for the management team. At the time, Wendy's enterprise reporting was largely a batch process that consumed numerous mainframe computing cycles, not to mention time and resources. To address these issues, Wendy's used Information Builders' WebFOCUS platform, which enabled users to drill down into the data and view everything from high-level summaries that reflect all of North America and International to transactional-level detail reports on one particular restaurant. This type of insight allows Wendy's to make more informed decisions, increase its ability to identify areas of improvement, provide training and education where needed, and enjoy measurable profit and margin improvements at both company-owned restaurants across North America as well as its franchise partners, both domestic and international.
  
  
• Lipari Foods, a regional wholesale food distributor managing a wide range of quality deli, bakery, and grocery products across 12 Midwestern states. Lipari needed a self-reporting tool that would give employees and customers better access to transactional data and a self-service BI environment that could provide visibility into every step of the reporting process. Prior to investing in BI technology, Lipari's reporting practices consisted of manual "one-off" processes in which specific reports were created in response to specific business requests. There were also no self-service reporting tools for non-technical workers to access and use the massive amount of data available. To address this issue, Lipari standardized on Information Builders' WebFOCUS platform, putting ad hoc reporting into the hands of team members. Managers can now easily access vital company data in real-time from both desktop and mobile devices. The reporting process is enormously enhanced -- what once required up to 100 reports can now be accomplished in one hour with WebFOCUS. This frees up significant time for managers and helps them make more informed and timely business decisions.
  
  

"Today's competitive and fast-paced retail environment produces an astounding amount of data on products, employees, customers, traffic, sales, and more every day," said Gerald Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders. "Companies must utilize that data and learn from it to drive effective, informed growth strategies and increase revenue. Information Builders is proud to equip our retail clients with advanced BI tools that help them capitalize on company data and grow in a competitive environment, and we congratulate Bata, Wendy's and Lipari for their ongoing success in this area."

To learn more about the benefits of BI in the retail sector, please visit Information Builders at booth 2444 at the NRF Conference and Expo.

About Information Builders
Information Builders helps organizations transform data into business value. Our software solutions for business intelligence and analytics, integration, and data integrity empower people to make smarter decisions, strengthen customer relationships, and drive growth. Our dedication to customer success is unmatched in the industry. That's why tens of thousands of leading organizations rely on Information Builders to be their trusted partner. Founded in 1975, Information Builders is headquartered in New York, NY, with offices around the world, and remains one of the largest independent, privately held companies in the industry. Visit us at informationbuilders.com, follow us on Twitter at @infobldrs, like us on Facebook, and visit our LinkedIn page.