:: InSync Technologies LLC
:: Business Intelligence Served Piping Hot to Deli Express

E.A. Sween Company manufactures and distributes Deli Express, the largest selling brand of retail sandwiches in the United States. Every week, Americans purchase more than a million Deli Express sandwiches from a variety of retail locations including convenience stores, delis, drug stores, resorts and vending machines. These million sandwiches are distributed through an efficient and extensive network including direct delivery in many areas.

The E.A. Sween Company was founded in 1955 in Eden Prairie Minnesota and has grown steadily over the years. In 1993, E.A. Sween, in conjunction with Southland Corporation, operator of 7-Eleven convenience stores, established Combined Distribution Centers (CDC) to provide direct distribution of fresh products. CDC has now grown to service nearly 1000 7-Eleven stores daily in a variety of locations.

E.A. Sween’s Direct Store Delivery system covers 26 states in the central United States and services over 15,000 locations. Additionally, Deli Express sandwiches are sold through convenience store wholesalers in all parts of the country, making their sandwiches available from Maine to California.
In 2001, Deli Express was voted Vendor of the Year and inducted into the Convenience Store Industry Hall of Fame. Today, with quality Deli Express sandwiches, smart and aggressive marketing, and the continuing success of CDC, E.A. Sween Company is a major factor in the convenience store industry.

To help E.A. Sween manage their manufacturing, distribution and transactional processes and ensure steady growth, they have long been committed to excellence in information technology. They are long-time users of the JD Edwards World ERP software and regularly record up to 17 million individual transactions per year.

As a family-owned business with a strong focus on accountability, E.A. Sween’s management team is extremely hands-on. While the JD Edwards system was ideal for tracking transactions and managing the financial and human resource sides of the business, it wasn’t able to provide them with the type of overall view of the business that management required.

“We wanted a more flexible way to provide up-to-date information for our management team,” says Ron Myshka, Vice President Information Services at E.A. Sween. “While we had massive amounts of data in our databases, pulling out information and preparing management reports wasn’t an easy task. Even simple reports, such as a breakdown of sales by state and by customer, took too much time and effort. So our department was tasked to find a more responsive business intelligence (BI) solution.”
“We had very specific requirements,” says Myshka. “The system we were looking for had to integrate cleanly with our JD Edwards ERP solution, be cost-effective and be easy enough to operate so that our management team could ? nd the information they were looking for. We investigated some of the BI vendors such as Showcase and Cognos, but for one reason or another none of the solutions we found matched our needs.”

“As we were investigating our BI options,” continues Myshka, “we came into contact with a Chicago-based consulting firm, Strategic Balance, who had a close relationship with BI vendor Q4bis. After a few initial conversations we decided that Q4bis was worth a very serious look.”
“One of the things that really piqued our interest,” explains Myshka, “was that Strategic Balance said that they would be able to demonstrate Q4bis to us using our own data. And not only could they show us the solution, but they said that they could do it in just a few weeks. I’ve been in the IT industry for years and have heard a lot of claims, some true and some not. This was a tall order, but we said, ‘sure, show us’.”

“We received the E.A. Sween data at our California facility,” says Jeremy Dean, Senior Consultant for Q4bis, “and were somewhat taken aback by the sheer volume of the databases. They were really going to test us. But the data itself was well-ordered and clean so we were able to quickly prepare our ‘Proof of Concept’ demonstration. In fact, Q4bis is exceptionally fast so the volume of data, rather than being a challenge, turned out to be a major selling point.”

“The Proof of Concept (POC) demonstration absolutely convinced us that Q4bis was the solution we were looking for,” says Myshka. “I’ve never seen our management team speechless before, but when they saw their own data displayed so quickly and in such a easy-to-understand format, they couldn’t believe it. Needless to say, the POC was a huge success.”

“One of the advantages of a tightly-held business is that decisions can be made very quickly when the opportunity arises,” says Myshka. “Once our management team saw what Q4bis could do, the decision to purchase was made immediately. Strategic Balance made the process that much easier by packaging the sale as a fixed price / fixed time-frame initiative. So from our point of view, implementing Q4bis was a guaranteed, low-risk option.”

“After producing the Proof of Concept demo,” says Dean, “the actual implementation was extremely fast. We had the initial system installed inside of a week and by the end of the second week it was completely validated with all of the distribution mechanisms set up. We had also trained both the technical team and a few key end users. In many ways, E.A. Sween was an ideal customer for us. They had volumes of well-ordered data, they knew exactly what they wanted from the system and they had a team of highly-experienced and motivated IT people who could take immediate ownership of the project.”

“Within one week some of our users had data in their hands,” says Myshka. “And now that we’ve rolled out Q4bis across the organization we are starting to see some very real benefits. Our sales team can now generate reports for their key customers that detail regional sales by time periods with just a few clicks of the mouse. In addition, the marketing department can now track product tests and introductions quickly and easily. We’ve also been able to straighten out some quality issues with our data that we hadn’t noticed before.”

“We’ve been thrilled with the results from Q4bis,” concludes Myshka. “I have one Senior Sales Manager, who has been on the BI Team, that keeps saying ‘this thing is great’ every time he sees me. Now that doesn’t sound like much but he says it over and over and over all with an ear-to-ear grin!

• CEO and Upper Level Management
• Marketing Team from Vice President to Product Managers
• Sales Team from COO to District Managers
• Finance

• Gives upper level management an overall view of company performance
• Enables sales managers, marketing team, finance to analyze their own data
• Provides a flexible and timely reporting mechanism for more than 80 users
• Improves data quality and ensures standardized views across organization

• JD Edwards World Software (ERP)
• IBM BD2 Database
• Microsoft SQL Server

• Proof of Concept demonstration left the management team ‘speechless’
• Guaranteed costs and deliverables from fixed-fee implementation and aggressive site license pricing
• Rapid implementation provided immediate access to both upper level management and sales, marketing and finance
• Delivered the results that other vendors couldn’t provide