Norstan Consulting's Data Warehousing Applications
Streamline Baker & Taylor, Inc. Operations
ACTION ITEMS
New Norstan data warehousing applications are streamlining business operations and enhancing profit potential at Baker & Taylor Inc., one of the world's largest distributors of books, videocassettes and music. Headquartered in Charlotte, NC, with over 50 sales representatives and 14 warehouses nationwide, Baker & Taylor Inc. offers over 400,000 titles for immediate shipment to libraries, universities, schools and retailers such as Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders Books & Music, and other booksellers worldwide.
"Baker & Taylor operates a very successful business, however, profit margins are small so we must pay close attention to costs," said Dan Johnson, Director of IS Development for Baker & Taylor Inc. "We needed a better way to identify our profitable and unprofitable customers and once identified as unprofitable we needed to understand the characteristics that made them such. We decided that the best way to achieve this was by creating a central database warehouse application to collect sales, costs, and expenses allowing us to measure and allocate them accurately to each customer."
To that end, a central database was established at Baker & Taylor's I/S Headquarters in New Jersey to receive daily transaction information from its warehouses. The next step was to select a company to help design the applications to mine the database for the cost information and make precise allocations to each order.
"After evaluating the offerings of several companies," explained Johnson, "we selected Norstan because of their efficient project management approach, highly skilled professionals, and a cost structure that fell within our budget. Norstan took the time to understand our business, our objectives and the solutions we needed to analyze our customers. They also treated their involvement as a partnership and worked effectively as members of our I/S team."
Working with Baker & Taylor I/S staff, Kurt Lueck, Norstan consultant and project manager, and his team designed 17 separate applications for gathering and allocating expenses and costs associated with sales, marketing, stocking, handling and shipping for each customer order. This provided management with a real-time assessment of profitable and unprofitable customers. The Norstan team also designed an "Express" application that allows the sales force to access the database directly to determine current profitability of their customers.
"The new system, which was completed on time and installed last month, is expected to perform exactly the way we envisioned it," said Jo Sims, Baker & Taylor Inc. VP of Customer Services. "It will provide the reports we need to help us manage the business better by concentrating on our profitable customers and transitioning our unprofitable customers back to being profitable again."
Norstan Consulting is a business unit of Norstan Inc., a global leader in technology services providing information technology and communication systems solutions to business clients worldwide. Norstan Consulting provides end-to-end business consulting and technology services to global customers seeking sustained, competitive advantage. Headquartered in the Twin Cities, Norstan's sales and service offices are located in more than 65 locations in North America and Europe. Through its three operating units -- Communications Solutions, Global Services and Financial Services -- Norstan offers leading-edge technology products, world-class technology services and competitive financial offerings as a single-source provider.