Robbie Shaw, Commercial Manager Shared Services – Steel Group, Fletcher Building
When we decided to implement the Cognos Business Information System into Dimond four years ago, we quickly realised that the scale and complexity of the implementation was well beyond our own skills and capabilities. We were fortunate in deed to secure the services of Brox to develop our reporting requirements, and have used their resources ever since.
Brox not only brings technical know how and skills to the table. By being commercial and intuitive, they have gained an intimate understanding of our business drivers and processes, and in doing so provided solutions beyond our expectations.
The sales and debtors reporting developed has no doubt added value to Dimond as the information is crisp, accurate and timely. The information delivered daily to our Sales Team and Management has provided a level of visibility that has greatly enhanced our understanding of the business and improved the speed and quality of decision making. Brox listened to our needs, and quickly tailored solutions to meet those, including advice on functionality that made the reports more user friendly and relevant.
Over the last five years Brox has also implemented an array of inventory, freight, DIFOTIS and Price Book reporting for Dimond. Most Recently Brox has developed sophisticated Customer Profitability Management Systems and daily branch ranking and dash board reporting. On top of this Brox has, through understanding our business needs, built a remedial action system to reduce the level of credits and errors in the business. In affect Brox has assisted our evolution from simple reporting tools, to business information that drives behavioural change and value adding initiatives.
Brox are positive, friendly and professional, with a can do attitude. In a nutshell, Brox delivers.
I highly recommend Brox, and thank them for their support to Dimond and the wider Steel Group.
Paul Martin, IS Manager for Golden Bay Cement
Golden Bay Cement’s decision to implement Cognos Reporting Suite has been a success story and some of that credit must go to the efforts of Brox Limited. From ideas, Brox resources have shown the ability to help our business identify and build solutions to meet our needs now and for the future.
We identified early in the project that the value from Brox Limited would be in three forms. Design and Build was our first milestone for the project. Each section had to be designed well and Brox worked with GBC people to build the foundation of the reporting environment. We saw Brox as key to our expectation of having GBC people trained as report writers rather than relying on Brox resource to hold our hand. Where that special reporting need was required, we had Brox resource come in, and write the report or guide our fledgling report writers to the preferred result.
From designing our Data Warehouse, training our people and writing our more complex reports, we have been very pleased with the outcome. In these times of using limited funding carefully, we have been appreciative of Brox’s willingness to work with us to stretch that precious development dollar further. We have confidence in our report writers ability to grow with the product, and we have continued to build on our initial investment.
The introduction of our Sales Dashboard, coupled with our daily SMS TXT Sales Flash have become key tools for GBC people. Our Capital Projects Management tool has been rewritten to use the best features of Cognos Planning and the Cognos 8 Suite. We have produced a tool that is easy to use, easy to update and able to produce results in a third of the time.
We look forward to more successes in the future.
