Whitepaper: Getting a Handle on Analytics for Strategic Success
Case Study: American Exteriors
Case Study: T3 Information Systems
Customer Success Stories
Chevron Global Lubricants
Graphing Profitability
Chevron needed to chart their profit margin analyses from corporate databases easily and quickly for both sales and management.
NetCharts Applets gave them a fast set-up and interaction with their development tool, allowing users to graphically view a variety of business measurements monthly, daily or yearly.
Now both management and the sales force can easily view and track daily trends and profitably both in house and on the road.
"Chevron Global Lubricants (business unit of Chevron) decided last year to implement "thin clients" over the intranet and internet. We have a mobile force of over 100 laptops. These laptops were beginning to become 'thick' with client software.
"The manageability of upgrades and new software was becoming a very time consuming task. At one point we replaced all the hard drives in the laptops. As a result our business unit has decided to pursue a completely "thin client" solution for most new development.
"In order to access our databases, we purchased NetDynamics as our development tool. The first application built using this environment was a profit margin analysis, drilldown tool for our mobile sales force. It contains 56 levels of drillable profit information. The sales people can see daily what products are profitable and which are not.
"At the highest level, the entire business unit can daily view its profitability. Since this information is very meaningful to the leaders of our business unit, we were asked if we could graph this data for them."
Chevron downloaded the application and "got the java applets working quickly."
Fast set-up and interaction
In order to investigate alternatives, Chevron compared and contrasted Visual Mining solutions with other charting Products, and chose VM.
"The setup and interaction with NetDynamics was easier. We were able to get our production charting implemented very quickly.
"Immediately we exposed our top level management to the daily profitability of our business. They were very enthusiastic. The charts show trends in the business on a day by day basis. They can view monthly, yearly, and daily charts for a variety of business measurements."
Tools for sales force and top management
"Since our top management has access to the data graphically, they have placed the importance of the data within the sales force. Now the sales force uses the tools because they know our management can see and determine why changes are occurring in the profitability of the business. Thus, we are very pleased with our investment.. We have many more internet/intranet projects that will incorporate these "visual graphing" tools to support the underlying data."
Visual Mining solutions "has allowed this to occur while maintaining our 'thin-client' goals."
~ David Reese