Exemplis Corporation Business Intelligence and Mentoring

Company Background

Exemplis Corp. is a leading U.S. manufacturer of contract furniture for commercial, healthcare, hospitality and office markets. Its trusted brands include market share leaders SitOnIt Seating and Instant Seating. Customer driven innovations is what led Exemplis to introduce its on-demand business model delivering highly customized, high-quality products to our customers quickly and affordably.

Managing Automation magazine named SitOnIt Seating to its Progressive 50 list, recognizing Exemplis’ on-demand model as a core strategic advantage of the company. Exemplis develops brands that provide customers with compelling value propositions for their unique markets. The company is headquartered in Cypress, California.

Project Background

Exemplis asked Laminar Consulting Services to provide assistance in the mentoring and development of a Business Intelligence Sales Reporting Application. The goal of the application is to provide Exemplis’s Finance and Sales department with tools to make better decisions and to provide the finance department with a clearer picture of the actual costs throughout the ordering, manufacturing, and shipping process.

Finance needed a way to analyze these costs in order to assist in negotiating contracts with suppliers and shipping companies. At the time their older process was very manual and it could take up to a week to consolidate and it was prone to errors. By leveraging Business Intelligence, reporting time has been significantly reduced and it illustrated their process and applications lacked other desired detail.

The secondary goal of the project was to illustrate to the business the need for such tools and technologies across the enterprise and to provide the existing IT staff with some basic BI implementation skills moving forward.

Solution

Laminar’s approach was to mentor and coach Exemplis’s IT staff through the creation of the new Data Model, the creation of the SSIS packages, Cube Development and reports development. Laminar was also asked to develop those areas where they felt skills should be augmented. Laminar was responsible for building a data mart and the merging of sales and financial data together using SQL Server Integration Services (ETL).

The finance department was already familiar with pivot tables and had currently used them to analyze data dumps that IT had provided to do the analysis. Mentoring was focused on the areas of data mart design, SSIS and SSAS development. The application is live and in production. Exemplis is now starting to explore other areas of the business where BI can be leveraged.