"To be able to access and analyze our inventory transactions at will, without programming, is simply amazing," says Shannon. "Monarch has enabled us to gain brand new value from our inventory system at a very low cost in a very short time!"

 

Central Storage & Warehouse Co., Inc. (CSW), based in Madison, WI, offers warehousing space and services to food producers and retailers in the North Central U.S., with over ten million cubic feet of warehousing space. The company has selected Monarch to bring its internal and external reporting to an exciting new level, without new database programming.

"The catalyst for bringing Monarch into CSW was to fulfill a customer request for information," explains Shannon Riley, Vice President of Technology for CSW.

"A major customer requested their inventory data sent as an Excel spreadsheet, not as a plain text report. Previously, we simply ran a canned report from our Maves inventory management system and sent it to the customer. However, the customer wanted the data in a spreadsheet, to facilitate reconciliation between the data in our inventory management system and their own internal system."

"We quickly discovered Monarch as a powerful yet simple solution to mine the data from the report and export the data to Excel. Monarch is a very easy tool for anyone to use. We are also very pleased with how simple it is to run a Monarch job using Monarch's command line options."

The end result was one very satisfied customer. "Our customer knows exactly where their inventory stands, thanks to Monarch mining the data from our system reports," says Shannon.

While it is possible to use a report writer to directly query CSW's inventory database, Shannon is cautious about doing so.

"There are numerous business rules already programmed into our canned reports," explains Shannon. "If we do not incorporate all of those same rules every time we use the report writer, the resulting data will be incorrect or incomplete. Instead, we use our Maves inventory system's library of existing reports as the source, and rely on Monarch to mine this data."

"Monarch ensures three different people working with inventory data do not produce three different sets of results. Instead, they all use Monarch to mine the data from the same reports, and get the same results we know are correct."

"Competitors in our space generally do not have a lot of technology resources at their disposal," Shannon adds. "To have a shortcut data solution like Monarch puts us at a definite advantage."

After CSW used Monarch to quickly satisfy a top customer's informational needs, the company realized Monarch could serve CSW as a simple yet powerful business solution to enable easy access to data, combined with easy analysis. "We are in a new phase of Monarch use, in which we are putting Monarch in use across practically all major departments in the organization," says Shannon.

"We will use Monarch to mine data from our sales reports to analyze and summarize sales by salesperson, account and more; all the kinds of analysis that have previously required a lot of flipping through reports or spending a lot of time and resources trying to work the bugs out of a newly programmed report. We also plan to mine data from reports produced by our Great Plains system to aid in account reconciliations and financial analysis. "

"Perhaps the most compelling Monarch project for CSW is taming our Activity Report from our inventory system. This report contains all of the detail for all of our inventory transactions - receipts, shipments, and adjustments. CSW ships tens of thousands of cases of inventory per day; the Activity Report can easily run over 3,000 pages. Monarch allows us to mine the data into a data table we can easily filter, to view just the inventory receipts, for example."

"To be able to access and analyze our inventory transactions at will, without programming, is simply amazing," says Shannon. "Monarch has enabled us to gain brand new value from our inventory system at a very low cost in a very short time!"

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