Accessible, user-friendly BI drives companywide data-driven decision making

A recommended BI solution

Behler-Young is a member of Heating, Air-conditioning and Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI), a major industry distributor organization. Several members of the organization started using Phocas and shared their experiences with other members.

Following the recommendation of industry peers and the organization, Behler-Young decided to integrate Phocas into its infrastructure. The company rolled out Phocas to all its users in May 2015.

The BI tool contains a significant amount of sales data, providing the Behler-Young sales team with a central location for all their customer and product information.

“Phocas is widely used by our sales team to do customer analysis and reconnaissance,” said Wright. “They like to get an idea of where customers stand and their variances before customer meetings. We also use it to pull contact information for a variety of marketing processes."  

In addition to sales and marketing data, the company has integrated its inventory databases to make inventory management more transparent across the organization. Sales and product managers produce monthly reports for the executive team, while company’s management team and branch leadership use Phocas to monitor company goals, customer activity and product performance. Behler-Young has also loaded budgets into Phocas to compare with progress.

Culture shift to data-driven decisions

“We have a mantra at Behler-Young about having data available at our fingertips. A lot of our initiatives are about getting the data out there so that our people can see it. Because of Phocas, we are starting to see a culture shift where our decision-making processes are becoming more data-driven. This is a big benefit to our company,” added Wright.”

As a result of Phocas, people are seeing things that they would not have expected to see. Wright explains that commonly held beliefs about performance have often been debunked by the data.

“Our team better understands what is actually happening,” he said.
“It was easy for people to disregard our old reports because they believed something so firmly. Fortunately, the data says otherwise. Now that our people have access to data, they are becoming more reliant on the data to make decisions.”

Balance of simplicity and accessibility

The self-serving solution has reduced the amount of time IT spends on BI, while allowing the group to dedicate more time and resources to working on other areas of the business that needed attention.

“Ninety percent of our needs are met with the basic functionality of Phocas,” said Wright. “We haven’t seen many products on the market that do BI in a way that is as user friendly as Phocas. Where Phocas excels is when it gets in the hands of the everyday user. It empowers them to do things they couldn’t do before. It has the perfect balance of simplicity and accessibility.”