MITS, a provider of online analytical processing business intelligence and operational reporting solutions, has announced the availability of two completely new OLAP cubes for its Discover analytics solution.
Designed specifically for wholesale distribution enterprises, these OLAP cubes help business users optimize their largest asset - inventory - to increase profitability, ensure customer satisfaction and reduce costs. Users can both analyze and optimize key, inventory-related business metrics and rapidly identify both issues and opportunities when they arise.
"Inventory is a distributor's biggest investment," says Gary Owen, MITS vice president of Software Services. "These new cubes help distributors look at how this asset is performing across a variety of views, each designed to highlight an area that can be improved or optimized."
The data for these cubes is sourced from popular MultiValue-based wholesale distribution management software solutions such as Activant Eclipse. Cube data content can be refreshed using a tiered-frequency strategy - with most data sourced during off-hours - to prevent any performance impact on operational distribution management systems.
According to Owen, every distributor carries some inventory that doesn't perform as it should. Using critical data on inventory values, turns, sales, and gross margins, the new Inventory Return On Assests (ROA) cube lets them pinpoint inventory needing attention among products, product lines, vendors, buyers, and branches.
MITS Discover analysis cubes enable highly interactive reporting, query, drill-down and other analytic techniques. Notable reports included with the ROA cube allow users to easily identify poorly-selling but highly stocked products, top-selling but low-profit products, branches suffering decreasing inventory turns, and scores of other critically important trends. The Inventory ROA cube - also helpful to distributors who want to reclaim warehouse space and catch slowdowns early enough to adjust accordingly - has been in use at key customer sites for several months, says Owen, and is available immediately.
Also new is the Inventory On-Hand cube, designed for everyday tracking of what's in stock, together with its value and status. Business users employ it to spot products with rising stock levels, for example, or to understand a product's overall supply status by matching current stock with sales commitments and quantities on order. Distributors can also use this cube to identify issues associated with defective stock, so they can take action with vendors suffering quality problems.
According to Owen, any MITS Discover solution - including those designed for wholesale distribution businesses - comes complete with software, maintenance and support, so organizations can ensure secure, high-performance data access within their own computing environments. And, because these are turnkey solutions - complete with pre-built reports - business units can quickly begin reaping the benefits.
For more details on these or any other MITS software solutions, contact a MITS representative at info@mits.com, or visit the MITS website.