Manufacturing Interests

Real World Carpet Supplier Gets Data Analysis Insight

Mohawk Carpet Corp. Industries of Calhoun, Georgia, is one of the country's leading manufacturers and suppliers of floor coverings, including carpet and hard floor coverings. As with all successful, growing companies, Mohawk Carpet Corp. faces the problem of transforming large amounts of data into information that can be used by decision-makers to improve overall efficiency within the organization. With a large sales force and diverse data-analysis needs, the information has to be timely, customizable, and accurate. These requirements disqualify the purchase of many "canned" data analysis and reporting solutions because they cannot meet the demands that Mohawk Carpet Corp. makes on its data, and report customization is cumbersome, time-consuming, and unnecessarily taxing on valuable human resources. The solution that Mohawk Carpet Corp. ultimately chose to meet its data analysis needs was Dimensional Insight's (DI) DI Solution and DI-WebDiver products.

With more than 3.2 billion in annual revenue, commercial and hard surface divisions, distribution and administrative centers, regional offices across the United States, and an ever-growing sales force, Mohawk Carpet Corp. produces a large of amount of data that must be collected, analyzed, and redistributed to answer key business questions. This data must also be accessible to its employees, retrievable across platforms, and available through the Web.

Laying the Groundwork

Mohawk Carpet Corp. runs DI Solution predominately on an AS/400 machine. This machine is responsible for producing data files that are used to produce extracts, which are imported into the DI Solution model build process. In the past several years, Mohawk Carpet Corp. has made a great effort to take advantage of LAN-based technologies and infrastructure, which has ultimately prompted the use of Web-based applications, including DI-WebDiver.

The MIS team at Mohawk Carpet Corp. and Howard Hughes, IT Project Manager, began to search for a data-analysis solution because they found that, in order to run efficiently, they needed the ability to analyze large amounts of sales data from many different perspectives.

Ultimately, selecting DI-WebDiver was a matter of convenience, cost, seeing the application work on a Mohawk sales analyst's desktop, and seeing what he was able to do with it. It was also a matter of Dimensional Insight being accommodating and easy to work with. Howard Hughes found that Dimensional Insight also had a Web-based tool, which seemed to be a powerful and relatively inexpensive product. "We were also impressed by the way the staff at Dimensional Insight worked with us; they were very accommodating and, quite frankly, as soon as we implemented DI-WebDiver, it was productive," Howard Hughes said.

Implementation of Dimensional Insight's products was a two-phase approach. Howard installed DI-WebDiver from a CD that was sent to him for implementing on the AS/400. During the initial implementation, Howard didn't need to make a single phone call to DI. "I was able to get the product up and running either through a prior conversation to Dimensional Insight's implementation team or through minor tweaking after the software was installed. I was able to complete the installation in an afternoon, and we had it up and running that day. I thought that was pretty impressive," Howard said.

The second phase was an upgrade to a later release, which was a little more painful than the initial implementation. The second phase did require the involvement of DI's technical support team. A DI representative came to Mohawk Carpet Corp., Chatsworth, Tennessee, to ensure that nothing was lost in the process of upgrading to the newest release, and that all the correct decisions were made in the installation process. However, there were a couple of glitches. "We did lose some user configuration information, and some security settings that we had to resolve; but all in all, that second phase was a benefit, and we learned a great deal. Since then, we have installed several patches, which upgraded fairly easily. Along the way we have had a few glitches, but DI has been very accommodating in helping us get those resolved," Howard said. Currently, a junior-level applications developer is responsible for the patch installations that have been done. Mohawk is pleased to be able to avoid using highly senior personnel for basic upgrades.

Rolling Out the Carpet for Mohawk

Users With DI Solution, Dimensional Insight has made a technically complex and robust application usable for employees with all levels of technical expertise. "As a technically savvy user, I was able to use Dimensional Insight's OLAP server product, DI Solution, to extract information from our database and create data models," Howard said. Data models are then viewed from the desktop, using the DI-WebDiver client. Users with varying degrees of technical prowess are able to "dive" into the models and easily retrieve answers to the questions that are critical to their department or region. Although the majority of the models are used for analyzing sales data, Mohawk has also successfully created claim and inventory models.

According to Howard, "The purpose of our sales models is to improve efficiency by helping us make better sales decisions. For example, with just a few clicks of the mouse, we can analyze our data and know what customers we need to contact based on whether their sales are up or down. From our inventory models, we can access the position of warehouse inventory levels by categories and subsets of that inventory data, such as quantity of a particular roll-length, at a specific warehouse. Using the claims model, we are able to look at claims information to determine where the majority of claims are coming from." Mohawk can narrow it down to a regional area that has a majority of claims, or narrow it down to districts. The company can even access how customers are doing from a claims perspective, as opposed to going at it from a regional direction. Detailed reports and graphs are also easily created, all with just a few clicks of the mouse. "In my opinion, this kind of data control is invaluable," Howard said.

Mohawk's territory representatives, district managers, regional vice presidents, and corporate administration use the models extensively. They are happy with the DI-WebDiver product because it allows them to find information and make decisions quickly, which greatly impacts Mohawk's profitability.

The incessant acquisition of data has given competition a push forward and "raw data" a front row seat, and as a successful, growing company, Mohawk Carpet Corp. Industries continually faces the problem of transforming its data into information that can be used to answer who, what, where, and when. "Dimensional Insight's DI Solution and DI-WebDiver are key players in helping us answer those questions correctly," Howard said.