The Perret Group is a distributor of agricultural products (fertilizers, tools, plant protection …) for individuals and professionals. Present throughout the Southeast, the company has 6 subsidiaries. In order to improve the management of its global business and foster collaboration between the subsidiaries, the Perret Group has decided to overhaul its Information System and focus it around business lines. It is in this process that they have equipped the company with a Business Intelligence tool.
Back to the deployment of this project with the testimony of François Baud, Head of Business Information Systems within the Perret Group.
Why did you start this Dashboarding project?
“Today, the Perret Group has 350 employees in the South-East of France in its six subsidiaries. In order to coordinate and drive the Group’s business, we constantly need to produce indicators and dashboards concerning turnover, margin, logistics and inventory management. Until then, each subsidiary produced its statistics with Excel, with its own criteria and interpretation. These data were then used to support the management for decision making and activity management.
During our Information System redesign, we decided to be equipped with a Dashboarding tool. It became essential to refine the steering of our activity. In addition, we set up a business-oriented Data Center, so we wanted to reap the benefits by implementing a dashboard solution. ”
What was your approach?
“We launched a call for bid and selected 4 solutions that met our needs. We finally chose DigDash. It is their responsiveness and the easiness of their solution that has clearly tipped the scales in their favor.
In addition, DigDash teams are very responsive. In order to set up statistics concerning our different subsidiaries, we needed to deploy their cartography module. And all this was done very quickly. Thus, we obtained data already compared, sorted and put into perspective. So, we just have to focus on decision making. For example, we can get a real-time view of stocks for each subsidiary, the indicators are highlighted on the map and we can analyze those results easily. ”
Today, what are the benefits?
“We are seeing a lot of time savings. Indeed, before, the production and reports’ and dashboards’ feeding on Excel and Powerpoint took several days. Today, in one click, everything is ready. The DigDash tool makes it easy to edit Powerpoint presentations in company colors and with the necessary data in just a few minutes.
In addition, we gain in reliability. Indeed, all the statistics of the different subsidiaries are consolidated with the same criteria and schemas, this forces us to use common indicators. Thus, the dashboards obtained are more reliable and qualified. We share all the data of the various subsidiaries, which we can cross or use separately. Finally, we get all the data at D + 1, which allows us to exploit the data in real time and to be as accurate as possible.
For now, the tool is fully operational for branch managers. It could be that we extend its use to other managers in a while … “