BUSINESS INTELLINGENCE Looking Fora Data In Too Many Places

摘要

When Jeff Daly joined Norwood Promotional Products last year as CIO, he found the same situation that many technology executives confront: Too much data scattered in too many places. Four years before his arrival, Norwood had gone on a pre-Millennium buying spree, snapping up a dozen companies. That turned Indianapolis-based Norwood into a $400-million powerhouse supplier of promotional products. But it also left the company with six separate enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems containing millions of pieces of data that couldn't be easily shared. In many ways, Norwood was not so much the nation's leading supplier of promotional products as a company with 16 separate product lines. A Norwood salesperson might know, for example, how many of the company's Tee Off golf products a customer had bought, but have no idea if that customer also purchased mugs, calendars and plaques from Norwood. "We couldn't understand what customers' buying habits were, so we couldn't entice them to buy more from us," Daly says.