Data management application saves precious resources for Hannoush Jewelers

From January 2008

By Karen M. Kroll

Just about everyone in the corporate world has access to a great deal of data, from general ledger reports to customer lists to marketing plans. But there’s one hitch – and it’s a big one: Little of the data, at least in its original form, is usable.

“Everyone in an organization needs to get data to do their jobs,” says Mike Urbonas, product marketing manager with Chelmsford, Mass.-based Datawatch, a producer of information management applications. “They have to manipulate, analyze and report.”

Hannoush Jewelers, a family-run company headquartered in West Springfield, Mass., consists of 70 owned and franchised stores. It also manufactures most of the jewelry it sells, through Canadian subsidiary Prestige Jewelers.

Given the number of stores she must monitor, it was difficult for controller Terri Strandberg to “get my arms around the information and look at it in a meaningful way.” That’s because much of Strandberg’s time was spent re-keying into Excel spreadsheets information from reports generated by Hannoush’s enterprise-level reporting system. As a result, there was little time left for analysis of that data.

After completing the three-hour tutorial on her own several years ago, Strandberg began working with Datawatch’s Monarch application. This has eliminated much of the re-keying, says Strandberg, who no longer has to request reports from Hannoush’s IT department.

Datawatch’s Monarch software offers the ability to easily access and work with information, even if users aren’t familiar with database manipulation and business intelligence tools. Monarch transforms existing reports from a variety of enterprise systems, including general ledger, ERP and retail information systems.

“You can leverage existing reports as live sources of data,” Urbonas says, and the data can be transmitted to several spreadsheet applications, including Excel and Access, for further manipulation.

In addition to saving hours of re-keying time, this approach also reduces the likelihood of errors that might be introduced when vast amounts of data are re-keyed.

Suppose, for example. a user wanted to analyze all the items shipped to different customers over a period of one month. Rather than re-keying the information from the shipping report, which is organized by date, and then sorting by customer, the user can automatically mine and sort the data within Monarch so that shipments are grouped by customer, rather than by ship date.

“With report mining, your reports become a proxy for the underlying production database,” Urbonas says. Moreover, all reports can become data sources, including general ledgers, sales and shipping reports, customer listings, invoices and purchase orders. Many users take the process a step further and export some or all of the data to Excel for additional analysis.

Avoid costly mistakes
At Hannoush, for instance, Strandberg runs the accounts receivable, inventory and cash-received reports; she’ll pull the information into Monarch and then into a spreadsheet. That way, she can quickly see if anything looks amiss before the month-end close has been completed.

Sales associates in the stores sometimes enter the purchase order number for a repair in the cost line, rather than entering the cost of the repair itself. The result? What should appear as a repair costing $50 can show up as a $2 million service. With Monarch, Strandberg can catch and correct such mistakes before the month-end close.

Strandberg also uses Monarch to develop summary listings of inventory by location and department each month, as well as weekly sales audit reports. With these, she’ll create a report analyzing each store’s gross margin which she distributes to store managers, along with a report showing the number of service plans they sold in the current reporting period.

In addition, Strandberg relies on Monarch to highlight returned items, as well as those sold below cost. Using this information, she can monitor the transactions, compare them with those from previous years and watch for any patterns that raise questions. She’ll also use the reports when working with mall management, bankers and outside auditors.

While Hannoush’ enterprise software will export information directly to Excel, it is more useful if it’s run through Monarch first. “The end product is better,” Strandberg says. “You can filter and do fields within Monarch,” for which she has about 100 models and reports.

Strandberg can create these reports easily without the aid of a large staff. She estimates that Monarch allows her to handle twice the workload she did before. “Just to be able to take the general ledger distribution reports, export to Monarch, open and export to Excel takes five minutes,” she says. “Before, I would spend hours re-keying information – and that was before we had 55 [company-owned] stores.”

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