2 February 2009

As soon as Faber Blinds acquired Jet Reports, reporting time has reduced dramatically

Faber Group’s IT department is using Jet Reports to meet the company’s requirements for quickly-produced customisable reports from Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

The Faber Group is a large international organisation, which has been in the sunscreening business since 1900. It has its head office in Denmark, and subsidiaries in Europe, USA and Australia. Faber specialises in the design and manufacture of all types of window blinds and solar shading systems and, with many years of expertise and experience in a worldwide market, provides various solar shading solutions demanded by today's exacting environment.

Renato Nappo, the IT manager for Faber Blinds, gave a nickname to the first major report he ran: The Monster. His managers wanted the report to provide numerous details such as how much of each product was sold by subgroup and the value of each model within each model by month. And he needed to take that main report and split it by client and group of blinds. No wonder he called it The Monster.

“The first report I did, I was learning as I went along,” he says. “Totalling up the quantity took me a day and a half, and then I replicated it for other models.”
While the finance, accounting, sales and managing directors were tapping their feet, impatient for results, Nappo had to build his reports in stages, bringing 5,000-10,000 records out of Object Designer into Excel, and then filtering them from there. Slow and difficult was the norm.

The rewards are tremendous. Jet is a great tool that promises a lot of efficiencies to improve business

Renato Nappo, Faber Blinds Faber Blinds had used Microsoft Dynamics NAV since 1997, but Nappo says the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Reports were “very basic, not user friendly, and the cost was prohibitive to get them the way we wanted them.”

Nappo and his colleagues felt they had no choice but to employ a slow, error-prone, meticulous copy-and-paste process. “The manual method had been the accepted norm since a requirement for the report had been identified,” he says.

In reality, the method was not fast at all, plus it left plenty of room for mistakes. Employees went into Microsoft Dynamics NAV Object Designer and copied and pasted into Excel. Nappo says the process – which took many hours and even days – led to mistakes because it was so manually intensive.

As soon as Faber Blinds acquired Jet Reports, The Monster was slayed. Reports that took eight hours now take four minutes with Jet. “The rewards are tremendous,” says Nappo. “Jet is a great tool that promises a lot of efficiencies to improve business.”

Jet saves time, reduces errors and Jet answers questions the company couldn’t address using the old method. “We are instantly keeping tabs on quantity and keeping tabs on progress on a sales or marketing promotion,” Nappo says. “We can answer questions like: what increase in amount of product is needed based on the sales?”

One problem with a cumbersome report process is that few employees learn how to create the reports. Because Jet is so easy, many Faber Blinds employees quickly learned to answer questions and produce new information with Jet Reports.

This article first appeared in issue 15 of Prime magazine.

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