Plug and play reporting for House of Electrical Supplies

When your ERP delivers everything except flexible reporting, what are the options?

For House of Electrical Supplies, a trusted distributor of electrical automation, lighting, cable assembly and distribution boxes across the Greater Toronto area, the solution came through a BI software integration. At a recent Affiliated Distributors event, we spoke with Kala Sivakumaran, IT Manager at House of Electrical, to learn how the business automated its sales reporting.

Kala and her team are deeply satisfied with their Oracle JD Edwards ERP system, but it came with one frustrating limitation.

“We have a great ERP system, but it offers one-dimensional reporting. Getting metrics or multi-dimensional reports with filtering options is not possible,” says Kala.

Instead of settling for limited visibility, the team began looking for a solution that could empower users to explore their own data without constant IT support.

Oracle JD Edwards ERP + Phocas means flexible reporting is available to all

“When a new report is needed or people want to dive into the detail of a standard ERP report, everyone would come to IT to request the report. That’s why we sought out Phocas. We needed to automate multi-dimensional reporting that has built-in metrics and dashboards,” explains Kala.

The choice to bring in Phocas proved to be a smooth one. Integration with their ERP system was straightforward and required minimal effort from the internal team.

“Basically, Phocas was able to get a flat file out of our ERP system and then helped us build a sales database to analyze – the purchasing and inventory databases will be built down the road.”

What the sales team are looking for in the data is any decline in sales or any major impact of margins. The VP of Sales at House of Electrical Supplies has set up alerts in Phocas that email him any significant flags in margins or drops in metrics.

Roll out of Phocas has been staged with the management team getting first access with the rest of the business to follow.

“Setting them up in Phocas was easy and everyone was using the software after a quick meeting,” explains Kala.

Phocas does all the back-end data work and has freed up IT’s time

Since adding Phocas, Kala is pleased to report that IT requests to dive into the detail of sales reports have stopped.

“The sales team now go to the Phocas dashboard to do sales comparisons between periods for customers or suppliers. We don’t get any requests at all,’ confirms Kala.

“Phocas makes my work life really happy. And if I do need any information or the auditors want to know a reason for something. It takes such a short time for me to get into the detail and give them an answer,” says Kala.

The House of Electrical Supplies team can find anomalies much quicker by being able to search and filter the data.

“Phocas does all the heavy lifting of the data in the background and has massively reduced the reporting load in the IT department,” says Kala.