The strategy seems to have worked. IMM has grown from only four delivery trucks three years go, to 64 trucks today.

Benitez said that to achieve that level of growth, he had to become an information company. KPI Online was instrumental in helping him achieve this.

Wholesaler as Information Broker

IMM started in 2007 with the goal of introducing Hispanic consumer products from Mexico into the U.S. market.

Various companies in Mexico provided him with the consumer brands, but it was IMM’s responsibility to build the brands and distribute the products. They started in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area with four trucks, delivering snack foods to local gas stations, convenience stores and small grocery stores in Hispanic neighborhoods. They also helped these small retailers with their marketing efforts, with attractive point-of-purchase displays and other promotional ideas.

However, IMM CEO David Benitez had ambitious plans.

Benitez wanted IMM to grow quickly.

Even though IMM was a small company, Benitez realized it had to behave just like a large company, and act within a “supply chain management” paradigm. IMM had to become the coordinator of an extended supply chain that included the Mexico-based manufacturers, IMM as marketer and distributor, and the small retailers.

Benitez saw that the only way to do this was with the strategic use of information.

“We decided to become an information company instead of a bricks-and-mortar company,” Benitez said.

They have now grown to 64 trucks, covering the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, Houston, San Antonio, Austin and Oklahoma City.

How did he achieve this, and what does it mean to become an information-based company?

In order to grow, Benitez had to track and measure data, and report the data back to the manufacturers and the retailers.

IMM did the following:

1. Delivered regular reports on a timely basis to the manufacturers in Mexico with specific information about brand performance, sales by geography and sales by retailer. This enabled the manufacturers to provide feedback and improve planning.
2. IMM sales reps utilized these same reports during regular meetings with retailers to find out why certain stores weren’t selling certain items, correct falling sales before things got out of hand, and help retailers improve sales for slow moving items.
3. Armed their route drivers with hand-held wireless devices to enhance information gathering and on-the-spot invoicing. Information from the hand-helds were downloaded nightly and were included in daily reports so Benitez and management could see, in real-time, how brands, sales reps and retail outlets were doing.

As IMM grew,  their ability to keep up with their increasing reporting needs became more difficult.  They were using spreadsheets, and had to spend hours, even days, building complex reports with pivot tables, data from their QuickBooks accounting system which they later replaced with SAP Business One, and their hand-held system, formulas, dependencies and other complexities.

According to Sales Director Ricardo Villarreal, building reports with Excel became “a pain.”

Subscribing to KPI Online

IMM subscribed to KPI Online’s online service to automate their reporting and data analysis process.

They decided to use KPI Online for the following reasons:

• The ability to connect from their financial systems and hand-held management system for automated nightly uploads so reports could be available in real-time every day.
• The online capabilities of KPI Online, that allowed them to check sales data, inventory data, cost and expense data wherever they were and on any device.
• The ease-of-use that enabled them, with point and click simplicity, to view reports and then drill down into details to see why certain brands weren’t moving as fast, or who the best performing stores were, or which sales reps needed more training.
• The ability to export reports into Excel or PowerPoint, send them via email or share them via web interfaces with their customers as well as their manufacturers in Mexico.

Villarreal and Benitez noticed the difference immediately. What used to take hours or days now took only minutes.

“If I have a meeting with a client in one hour, all I need to do is bring my wireless device, pull up the KPI Online dashboard, and show my customers their sales, what product is moving, what isn’t.”

Benitez said that the ability to track data on a daily basis, measure company performance, and share this data with his suppliers and retailers had a magical effect.

“You can’t improve what you can’t measure,” said Benitez. “Becoming an information-based company helped us grow faster than we could have done if we hadn’t implemented this process.”

“With KPI Onlne, we were able to identify tremendous opportunities that we weren’t able to identify before we had implemented it,” Benitez said.

Becoming an information-based company is not for everybody.  It requires a company culture change, an openness to expose yourself and your company to your employees, customers and suppliers. But just as a person training for a marathon gets better every time she times herself and shares that time with her peers or her coach, this small but growing wholesale distribution companies is doing the same.

I don’t have to tell you, because it’s been repeated countless of times before, that Social Media is NOT the magic antidote if you don’t have a solid marketing strategy, you don’t know your market, and your product is a dog.

But even more fundamental than this is: do you know your company’s key success factors and the metrics behind them? More importantly, are you challenging your current assumptions about what is a key success factor to discover new ones?

Different Key Success Factors

Here are a few examples of key success factors:

1. Store clustering

In the book “From Good to Great,” author Jim Collins profiles Walgreen’s breakthrough strategy: the best, most convenient drugstores with high profit per customer. They implemented a clustering strategy, where stores were clustered in certain urban areas, like San Francisco, New York City, etc. to make it convenient for people to shop often.

They also tried a very simple financial measure to determine their profitability: profit per customer visit.

By providing many convenient services, such one-hour photo developing, and increased shopping frequency due to  many convenient locations, profit and cash flow went through the roof.

2. Brand development

Intelligent Mexican Marketing (IMM), an ethnic snack foods distribution company out of Dallas that delivers consumer goods to the Hispanic market via small supermarkets, convenience stores and gas stations, develops brands.

They only built a distribution network because none existed for their brand category.

IMM has introduced several brands from manufacturers in Mexico into the Texas and Oklahoma markets. They play an active role in generating demand, creating brand awareness, and helping their small retail customers become brand ambassadors.

It’s success factors are based on how each one of their brands are doing, and utilizes cost-effective technology solutions to share sales and inventory data on each of the brands with their manufacturers, retail customers, and sales people. They have grown from only 4 delivery routes in 2007 to 64 delivery routes today.

3. On time deliveries

If your business relies on deliveries of any sort, your success factor might be on time delivery of your services. Domino’s or FedEx are the most famous examples.

But what if your company serves legal papers?

Professional Civil Process, an attorney services firm from Texas, prides itself on deliving legal papers on time, and makes sure it’s process servers are es efficient as possible: taking the most efficient routes to deliver papers, ensuring they maximize the number of deliveries, and ensuring papers get delivered on time.

Vice President Michael Shapiro follows process delivery metrics on a daily basis to ensure the company keeps up with it’s prime success factors.

What are your success factors?

These are just a few success metrics that companies have determined ensure their success.

What are your prime success metrics? Do you have an efficient measurement, analysis and tracking system to make sure you are meeting your success factors on a quarterly, monthly, weekly or even daily basis?

Additionally, are you willing to challenge what your real success factors are? Dean Spitzer, author the book “Transforming Performance Measurement,” said that you might be diligently measuring and keeping track of your key performance indicators, but are they the right key performance indicators?

Spitzer says that most companies rely on a “single-loop learning” process, where they track their key success factors, and continue to improve on them over time. However, in the fast-moving, social media influenced business environment of today, we must challenge these assumptions and look at things through new eyes if we want to continue to stay competitive.

As Spitzer says:

That’s why organizations everywhere are wasting some of their most important sources of value creation – customer relationships, supply chain partners, employees, and knowledge and intellectual capital that is not captured, enhanced, or exploited.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Social Media and think anybody not using it is missing the boat. But if you don’t know what your success factors are, or challenge what they are to discover new ones, and if you don’t track data on your success factors in real time, then no Social Media Strategy can help you except to probably drive your business into the ground faster than you could 5 years ago.

To find out more about how to implement a successful performance measurement system to measure your key success factors, join our free webinar with Dean Spitzer on Transforming Performance Measurement.

And if you’d like a demo on how to implement a cost-effective online software solution to help you track your key success factors in real-time, sign up for our free weekly demos, or see some of our videos.

Ever since my son was 9 years old he diligently collected statistics on players in every major league sport: football players, baseball players, basketball players, and even players from Major League Soccer in the U.S.

By the time he was 11 he was accurately predicting who would be in the Final Four of the NCAA college basketball championships.

We’re crazy about our sports statistics, and can quote them as easily as English majors can quote Shakespeare.

But when it comes to measuring our own performance, and the performance of our companies, we wince. We see efforts to measure our own performance as excuses to criticize us, or if we”re company owners we think it’s too difficult and we’d prefer to rely on our instinct, hard work, passion and vision to take our companies to the next level.

As Dean Spitzer says in his book “Transforming Performance Measurement,”

Too much traditional performance measurement has been seen as “the reward for the few, punishment for the many, and a search for the guilty.”

Even though performance measurement is the single most motivational strategy in sports, Spitzer says that in the corporate environment it has a negative connotation.

His book sets out to change all that, and so does his upcoming webinar on June 29th, at 9am CDT.

Measurement as Motivation

In the introduction to his book, Spitzer asks business owners and managers some very pointed questions about performance measurement. Here are a few examples:

• Are you confident that the most important factors for the present and future success of the organization are being effectively measured?
• Do people in the organization proactively seek and welcome measurement based feedback?
• Is performance measurement information in the organization timely and easy to understand?
• Is there frequent interactivity and positive dialogues about performance measurement in staff and management meetings?

And much more…

To read all the questions buy the book…at the end of the introduction you get a chance to tally up your score to the 20 questions he asks and see how your company “measures up” on the Transformational Measurement Quotient.

And by the way, did you know that there are now no excuses for a company not to implement a performance measurement system? Read here to find out how Business Intelligence systems have come down in price and have become easier for small businesses to implement and use.

3 Steps to Increase Sales Now- Average Sale per Customer

In the last couple of posts, we discussed how you can increase sales by examining your data using a dashboard or analytical tool, to become familiar with two key measures:

1. The number of customers you have (current, new, lost), and
2. The frequency with which they purchase.

The third measure, increasing sales per customer, is probably one of the biggest opportunities you have to increase sales.

However, few companies recognize this and focus on it.

But you should focus on it.  The cost of sale is much higher when acquiring new customers, as much as 10 times more, than it is to sell more to your current customers.

The average sale per customer is calculated by dividing net sales by number of customers. A very simple calculation.

Focus on your Market Basket

To increase sales to current customers, you’ve got to focus on your industry market  basket. This refers to the particular items you sell, and all the related items needed to make that item function properly or more effectively.

For example the painting industry market basket consists of:

• Brushes
• Rollers
• Sand blasters
• Paint scrapers
• Steel wool
• Putty knife
• etc.

One of our retail customers noticed, by analyzing data from their analyticall dashboard, that average sales per customer were not where they’d like it to be.

However, they were able to increase sales by up to 15% by focusing on increasing the average sale per customer, or increasing the size of the customers’ market baskets for various categories.

They recognized that marketing would get their customers through the shop door, but once inside they had to implement different strategies to increase the average sale per customer.

Some of these tactics included placing products in more highly trafficked areas of the store, training sales associates to offer complete solutions instead of isolated product purchases, and offering commissions to department heads for increasing sales of non-key items or complimentary products.

What do your Numbers Tell You?

I’ve just scratched the surface here regarding how you can measure and analyze sales data using a Business Intelligence tool. But the main thing I wanted to communicate to you is:

Before deciding to implement the latest sales techniques or a new commission program, look at your data first.

You’ve got a ton of it (excuse me, gigabytes or even terabytes of it) in your accounting, ERP, CRM, POS or other systems. You’ve just got to get it out of there and into an easy-to-use analytical tool,

Once you are able to see your sales data visually, and analyze your sales by number of customers, frequency of purchase, and average sale per customer (different ways of slicing and dicing data is known as viewing different dimensions of your data), your eyes will be opened to the opportunities.

As one of our customers recently said: “There are tremendous opportunities in your organization,” if you can analyze your data using a Business Intelligence Tool.

Next Steps

If you’d like to learn more about how KPI Online can help you analyze your data, attend one of our weekly webinars. by CLICKING HERE.

3 Steps to Increase Sales Now – Purchasing Frequency

In the last post on The Smart Way to Increase Sales, we established that:

1. You don’t necessarily need to implement new sales training or strategies to help your sales people become more effective at selling, and

2. You DO need easy access to analytical dashboards in order to see what the sales data tells you about new customers vs.  current customers, and how you need a good balance of sales between each group to grow revenues.

The next data point you need to become intimately familiar with is purchasing frequency.

Why purchasing frequency?

If you’re able to increase the frequency with which a customer buys from you, you increase sales!

To measure frequency, look at a month. If you want to measure frequency in days, take the number 30, and divide it by the number of times each customer bought from you.

So for example, if a customer bought from you 3 times in one month, the formula is: 30/3 = 10. That customer buys from you every 10 days.

To get a more accurate picture of frequency it’s best to look at the last 3 months.

Use this data to find out how to increase purchasing frequency: special promotions? Better marketing to your customer database? If you’re a retail outlet, in-store events?

One of our local supermarkets has live music by local bands on a regular basis, a great way to increase shopping frequency. Your customers are there in the patio listening to music, they might as well go into the air-conditioned store to see what they can buy, right?

Frequency as a Predictor of Customer Attrition

Following the Key Performance Indicator of buying frequency can also help you predict and take preventive measures to keep customers from leaving you.

For example, if you notice a downward trend in shopping frequency by a particular group of customers, that might mean they’re starting to buy from the competition. What preventive measures can you take to avoid this?

A supermarket chain was able to increase sales by following this indicator.

Most families will make a major shopping trip for their household once a week. However, supermarket management noticed that many families did major shopping trips every two weeks, and some only once a month.

They decided to survey their customers and found some interesting factors that led to decreases in shopping frequency:

• Unfavorable pricing for key food items
• Quality of service issues
• Inconvenient store locations

The supermarket chain decided to undertake measures to correct these issues.

What about in a B2B scenario? That’s easier. You have the customers’ names, phone numbers and email addresses. Sales managers can create call lists for their sales reps to call customers buying from you less frequently to find out what’s going on.

It’s all in the data.

Next, we’ll explore the role of average sale per customer.

Stay tuned…

Not another sales motivational blog post

By now everybody’s heard the term “coffee is for closers,” made famous by Alec Baldwin’s “in-your-face” speech in the movie Glengarry Glenn Ross. Baldwin’s scientific method for motivating the sales guys at this hard-sell investment real estate company? He used pure macho bravado to appeal to their competitive instincts and desire to avoid the humiliation of being fired, or even winning a set of steak knives as the “second prize” in sales.

In real life there are obviously more effective, positive and proven methods to teach sales people to increase sales.

But most companies completely ignore another method for increasing sales: analyzing their own data stored in their accounting, CRM or other operational systems.

What follows are three ways you, as a business owner or sales manager, can use analytical tools to analyze your company’s data to increase sales without having to pay for an expensive sales trainer to come in for a 3 day “rev ‘em up” sales training.

Three Steps to Increase Sales Now

Your transactional systems, whether it’s an accounting system like QuickBooks, MS Dynamics or SAP Business One, or a CRM such as BatchBlue, Salesforce.com, or NetSuite, contains lots of data that can help you increase sales revenues. But first you have to get that data into a reporting and dashboard tool, also known as a Business Intelligence tool.

Once you do that you can then analyze the data in many different ways. Three of the most important ways have a direct impact on how you can immediately increase sales revenues:

1. The number of customers you currently have
2. Their purchasing frequency, and
3. Average sale per customer

Your Number of Current Customers

Most companies analyze sales based on revenues, but ignore their customer count.

• Do you know your total number of customers?
• The customers that have generated sales?
• Customers that haven’t bought from you lately?
• Lost customers?
• New customers?

If you don’t know these counts, you should. But why is this important? I’ll get into that in a minute.

The total number of customers are your active customers. Depending on the period of time you’re analyzing, your active customers are those that have bought from you within that time period.

So for example, if you analyze sales on a monthly basis, if a customer bought from you that month, they’re an active customer.

Lost customers are customers that haven’t bought anything from you in X period. X period is what your company uses for bookkeeping purposes.

New customers are those we have invoiced for the first time during the period we are evaluating.

Two Different but Similar Examples

For example, a services company we worked with was almost entirely focused on acquiring new customers. When we presented them with the data on the previous year’s sales using our dashboards, they were shocked to learn that 78% of their sales came from new customer acquisitions, and only 22% from current customers.  In other words, 86% of their customers never made a repeat purchase.

By continuing to follow these indicators closely, the company was able to double their sales quickly, making decisions on how to keep selling to their current customer base.

One of our wholesale distribution customers suffered from the exact opposite effect. They were not acquiring any new customers, and they had a customer attrition rate of 2% per month.

Since sales per customer were going up, the CEO was satisfied with sales growth.

Little did he know that for the medium term, his customer attrition would reach a point where sales would actually decrease, and profitability would also decline.

Of course this CEO immediately started focusing on acquiring new customers.

These examples show that it’s not healthy to keep the same number of customers month over month, or to only increase the number of customers without selling more to your current customer base. To maintain a healthy growth in sales you must increase your sales per customer, and increase your number of customers.

In the next post in this series, we’ll examine the role of purchasing frequency, and finally in our last post we’ll examine the role of average sale per customer.

We had asked you to tell us: What is the biggest, hairiest spreadsheet report you had to build, and why was it so difficult?

You did so and we received some great stories, which I’ll get into later.

First, here’s the video of the live raffle drawing broadcast we did today in Houston:

You can see on the video what our winner described as his largest spreadsheet reporting headache.

Here are some other  really interesting ones.

The sheer complexity of some reports got people down. An owner of an apparel company reported:

“I had to create a matrix style spreadsheet for my bra inventory. Bra style, band size, cup size, color or fabric for over 3 dozen patterns. The sheer number of bra combinations for my size run 28A-52N made the creation of just what we had in stock a HUGE task!”

We also noticed many people complaining about the sheer time it took to create reports with many different variables. The CFO at a professional ceiling, painting and sheetrock contracting company wrote:

“My job costing report (is the hardest report).  I have to manually import the data from QuickBooks to an Excel spreadsheet each month. It consists of pulling the estimate vs. actual numbers from QB for about 200 jobs, one by one. It takes easily a solid 8-10 hours a month to do, minimum.”

A big complaint that seemed to be reported over and over was the difficulty in pulling data from different systems. For example, the owner of an outsourced CFO service said:

“(The biggest problem I had) was probably a utilization reort that was a combination of data from a variety of courses, all data was repeatedly entered into the different systems in different formats and had to be cleansed and merged on a regular basis. This was further compounded by ‘too many cooks’ having their hands on the spreadsheets.”

Don’t we all just want one version of the truth?

However, some of the biggest business pains we noticed were the difficulty in predicting cash flow with spreadsheet reports, or the difficulty in determining if they were profitable. The owner of a gaming company told us:

“I have to run at least 20 reports in QuickBooks, clean them up in Excel, and send it back to QB and then see if the company actually made money or not. I’d like to see something automatic that gives me good, accurate data all the time.”

In a future post I’ll discuss how some of these spreadsheet headaches can be alleviated, and we may choose another lucky winner to receive a free account to KPI Online as a solution to their spreadsheet nightmares!

The Fashion Industry: Innovative by Necessity

The apparel industry is one of the oldest on the planet. The earliest possible sewing needles have been dated to about 40,000 years ago.

But despite its age, it is one of the most technologically advanced non-techie industries today. Why? Everybody’s trying to figure out how to invent a fashion industry crystal ball.

Fashion changes constantly; every season is different.  The continuous color and style changes related to the various collections throughout the year are mind-numbing. To stay competitive industry executives need to create new trends that resonate with current tastes, and get them in the stores before their competitors do.

However, every fashion executive’s nightmare is dedicating a whole production line to a particular design, getting their inventory to the stores, and then the design bombs.

They’re stuck with millions of dollars of unsold inventory nobody wants.

This has led to incredible innovation and development of strategies to enable rapid business response. However, the technology tools available to do this have typically been very expensive and accessible to only the largest apparel manufactures.

What about the smaller apparel companies?

Easy and Flexible Access to Information

I think everyone can agree that information is vital to a company’s operational success, but with one important caveat: you need to have access to this data in a well-organized, easily accessible way that allows anybody, not just an MBA, to analyze the data and make decisions to solve critical business issues.

First, where is this data?

Your company has probably gathered terabytes of data in your accounting system, your ERP system, and/or other proprietary operational systems over time through daily transactions and data entry efforts by your staff.

Most of this data can be easily organized into very basic lists, documents or reports that you need daily just to run your business.

But this barely scratches the surface of what you need as a fashion industry executive, and falls short of what you can actually do with all that data locked away in your systems.

The unique data needs of the apparel industry adds an additional level of complexity.

Here’s a particularly daunting example: in the case of inventory turnover analysis, not only must you identify your stock, but you have to identify individual product attributes such as season, make, model, collection, family, product line, fabric composition, size, color and so on.

But with accurate, detailed historical and current information on all the attributes mentioned above, available in-real time (and not after-the-fact), you can begin to accurately predict where demand is heading and what to bet your production line on.

But how do you make sense of all that data locked away in your operational systems?

Business Intelligence for the Fashion Industry: No Crystal Ball, but…

What if there was a way to organize all that raw data visually, and in a way that allows you the flexibility to easily create different views, analyze the data in many different ways depending on your needs, and accurately predict demand with near statistical certainty?

Well there is a way. It’s called Business Intelligence (BI).

For example, with BI you can organize your data by operational area, so you can view inventory turnover or sales.

In the case of inventory turnover, you can identify individual product attributes, as mentioned above, such as season, make, model, collection, family, product line, fabric composition, size, color and so on.

You can easily perform historical trend analysis and predictive analysis in order to avoid costly errors such as shipping large amounts of inventory that will sit in a warehouse somewhere.

In the case of sales analysis, we could also identify and analyze attributes related to sales in order to maximize your revenues, such as: customers, customer groups, territories or customer areas, invoice amounts, product quantities invoiced, and the ability to express this information in their original currency.

You can also analyze data by sales channel.

BI: Not just for the Big Boys (or Girls)

There seems to be an explosion of domestic apparel entrepreneurship recently. Companies such as Sew Sister, Mullins Square, Bluebonnet Cut & Sew, and Good & Fair Clothing, have started to dot the landscape with innovative designs and a re-birth of personalized care and service.

Sew Sister is a typical apparel designer: dozens and dozens of different variations, based on lingerie category (bras, bustiers, pantys), and in the case of bras in particular: bra styles, band sizes, cup sizes, color, fabric and over 3 dozen patterns.

Most small companies like Sew Sister are mired in complex spreadsheet reporting projects that take hours, days and even weeks. By the time the reports are available in any meaningful way the data may be too old to take timely action on.

The good news is that the kind of power available to large apparel companies is now available for a very reasonable financial outlay.

And when I say very reasonable, I mean reasonable on several different fronts:

• Low monthly rental vs. high up-front costs
• No software installation or configuration costs because they’re available online as a service
• No training costs because training is now provided via online videos
• No costly data integration costs because these solutions are usually joined by easy-to-use automated connectors to the most commonly used ERP or accounting systems

As a small or mid-sized apparel industry executive, you know it’s not just data that’s key to successful company operations and competitive performance, but easily accessible, flexible, configurable and user-friendly data.

To learn more about BI for the small fashion company, view some of our videos, or sign-up for our weekly Thursday webinar, or visit ITS-Dynamics for fashion industry specific solutions.

When Lotus 1-2-3 came out on January 26, 1983, it was one of the first spreadsheet’s to become hugely popular because of the great productivity gains businesses obtained from it.

Now spreadsheets have become a staple of everyday business life (with Microsoft Excel as the dominant spreadsheet), but more and more companies are discovering that in order to really see how their business is performing in a timely fashion, spreadsheets are a real pain.

That’s what I’ve been discovering over the last few months as I embarked on a quest to find out, from our customers’ mouths, what was it  that really made them decide to become customers of KPI Online.

I interviewed dozens of our customers, mostly small and mid-sized businesses with at least $5 million in annual revenues, and asked various questions such as:

1. Why did you choose KPI Online?
2. Were you looking for a Business Intelligence tool?
3. What have been the biggest benefits of using KPI Online?

First, we discovered that NOBODY (with one exception) was actually looking for a Business Intelligence tool. They were looking for better reporting, or a way to make sense out of the data that was locked away in their accounting or ERP systems.

Second, we discovered that once they started using KPI Online’s dashboards and reports, they realized how much time they wasted spending time creating reports and dashboards using spreadsheets.

Some of the key customer quotes we recorded:

“It took me about 2 weeks to create the reports I needed for my quarterly management reviews.”

“In one hour I could create only 3 reports in Excel, but I could create 50 reports using KPI Online.”

“Before the reports I created in Excel where done with data after we closed the books on the quarter. Today with KPI Online’s real-time integration to our ERP s ystem, I can see real-time reports instead of having to wait until after every quarter.”

You can see some of the clients themselves talking about spreadsheets, on this video and this video.

QuickBooks Users are Sick of Spreadsheets Too

I just came back from a QuickBooks event in Houston last week. I found the same story there. Most QuickBooks users use Excel to create reports they can’t get from the reports available in the program, but it takes them a really long time to get the reports they really need, and then they have to email the report to different people for their input, and then they don’t know if the people they emailed the spreadsheets too “manipulated” the data in some way to suit their purposes.

It was with this in mind that we decided to launch a little contest

What’s your Biggest Spreadsheet Reporting Nightmare?

We decided to launch a contest. with Apple’s new iPad as the winning prize. The contest? Tell us your biggest reporting nightmare using spreadsheets. Tell us how long ti took, why it took so long, what was involved, and what you’d like to see as a solution instead.

We”re doing the drawing to find the winner June 1st. We hope to film the drawing live using Ustream. Stay tuned for more information on where and how to tune in.

We’re also going to use some of the entries in a future blog post, a part 2 if you will, on why spreadsheets have become the bane of existence for companies wanting to get more out of their data than spreadsheet reports can provide.