Kinetico Business Intelligence Solution

Kinetico is a manufacturer and distributor of residential, commercial, and industrial water conditioning equipment. Since its inception in 1970, Kinetico has grown and expanded its locations. They now have operations in France, UK, Denmark, and Canada. Because of growth and expansion, Kinetico had many different sales reports being produced by various departments. There was a native report writing tool included within their ERP package, customized RPG programs, and excel spreadsheets that were all utilized for reporting as well.

What Problem Did Kinetico Face?

Until recently, there was no standardized sales reporting tool being used, and this lack of standards caused inconvenience and operational inefficiencies. Kinetico needed a standard template for reporting in order to bring in all their data: including, ERP package information, data from the warranty registration system online, and financials. There was no centralized place for Kinetico employees to create and monitor sales reports. This caused them to search for one main source in which all reporting could be done.

Why Did Kinetico Choose Solutient?

Director of Information Technology, Ned Sherry, states, "We didn't have the resources in-house nor did we have the experience... we wanted to use Microsoft SQL so we said ‘okay, we're looking for people who have that type of skill set and that type of experience.' . . . we didn't have the resources in-house, so we really needed a company that was experienced with Microsoft .NET, and one that had done data warehousing, so that we could bring those resources in to help us build it...As we did our research, we came across Solutient as a possible company, [we] worked with Solutient on what our scope of work was and through the whole process we ended up selecting Solutient as the company of choice for building it. "

Resulting Benefits

The Data Warehousing project was a tremendous success. Kinetico's employees are more self-sufficient, more precise and usable Sales Reports are being generated and the systems is easier to navigate. Ned Sherry expressed his overall enjoyment: "I look at the project now and a lot of times with large projects like this you can go back and say, ‘well if I had to do it all over again.' You can usually come up with a list of a lot of different things that you could do differently. I really don't have a big list on that, other than I would have done it sooner. Looking at the approach we took initially laying out what it was we were trying to achieve, the process we went through in selecting the vendors, I think we selected a vendor that delivered exactly what they said they would deliver."

Detailed Case Study
See the interview with Ned Sherry