Headquartered in San Diego, WD-40 Company is a global marketing organization dedicated to creating positive lasting memories by developing and selling products that solve problems in workshops, factories and homes in more than 176 countries around the world.
“Today, it’s hard to imagine running the business without the help of IBM Analytics and Aviana.”
— Renee Loya | Business Intelligence / Database Manager, WD-40 Company
Need for financial insight
As a supplier of leading industrial and consumer product brands to retailers across the globe, WD-40 Company has a complex internal financial landscape, with multiple international subsidiaries, and customer and SKU data stored at different levels of granularity.
In the past, this made it extremely challenging to analyze P&L in different parts of the business. Gaining an overview of the profitability of a particular customer, region or SKU was a laborious, manual process – and in most cases, it was simply too time-consuming to perform this kind of analysis on a regular basis.
Following a project that structured its global general ledger data into a single chart of accounts, WD-40 Company realized that it had an opportunity to solve this problem by bringing its P&L data together – but it needed a partner to help it solve the technical challenge.
Building enterprise-wide business intelligence
WD-40 Company engaged Aviana, an IBM Premier Business Partner, to help develop a solution. The Aviana team built a data mart that centralized the P&L data into a single source of truth, enabling rapid analysis and reporting using IBM Cognos Business Intelligence.
“Aviana did exactly what they said they would do, with no overruns and no extra costs,” says Renee Loya, Business Intelligence / Database Manager at WD-40 Company. “That was a huge benefit for our organization. ‘Do the right thing’ is a WD-40 Company value, and there were occasions on the project where Aviana took responsibility and kept their promises. We really appreciated that.”
Saving time and driving better decisions
The IBM Analytics solution helps WD-40 Company’s finance teams understand business performance at a much deeper level than was previously possible – providing insight into profitability by SKU and customer, as well as by region and sales groups, and at different levels of aggregation. It also enables users to analyze gross margin, contribution and cost of goods sold (COGS).
Renee Loya concludes: “IBM Analytics software makes data-gathering and reporting much more efficient, and provides a level of visibility that we didn’t have before. It also provides a single source of truth that gives us confidence that the answers we get are consistent and accurate. With IBM Analytics accelerating our financial processes, we can spend more time analyzing the data – helping our business stakeholders make smarter, more informed decisions. The time-savings have definitely helped us achieve a return on investment, and it’s hard to imagine running the business today without the capabilities that our IBM Analytics solution provides.”