Company
Founded in 1994, Computer Gross is the key distributor of computer hardware and software in Italy. Computer Gross distinguishes itself by its high level of service and capacity for innovation. Computer Gross has succeeded in acquiring over 2,800 retailers, growing from 6 million euros to 318 million in 2001 and becoming the number one distributor of IBM products in Italy.
With over 170 well trained and certified employees, Computer Gross ensures widespread coverage of Italy with locations in Empoli, Milan, Ancona, Rome, and Naples.

Business Challenge
Computer Gross Italy was looking for a way to achieve better control over their daily business, to become more agile in their decision making process and to uncover new business opportunities.

As affirmed by Ing. F. Bianchini, General Director of Computer Gross, "the prototype surely gave us the understanding of the capacity of the product, especially regarding the speed of response times, the simplicity of utilization, and above all its flexibility. We were searching for a solution that would finally free our people in charge of product groups to create analyses themselves at will, and to provide them with deeper detail than we believed possible".

BOARD Solution & Business Benefits
One of the reasons that Computer Gross choose BOARD was that it supplied the different Product Managers with a single tool that could easily perform analysis, from simple to extremely complicated, in a single view, with swift response times.

Today Computer Gross is able to monitor daily the course of actual business for over 5,000 products, with a detailed analysis of each product line, geographic area, vendor, and customer. Thanks to the power of BOARD's multidimensional database, detailed analysis can be done in tens of thousands of possible articulations.

"The most surprising thing," underlines Ing. Bianchini, "is that the speed in reply times and the flexibility to give autonomy to end users are accompanied with considerable simplicity of utilization! The user training was really minimal, the IT group responsible, after only 5 days, was able to train all of the users at Computer Gross".
"The success reached with BOARD enabled Computer Gross to extend Management Intelligence to other areas of the business, such as management control, provide attention to specialty products, perform margin analysis by product line, geographic area, and transaction, and then pass the analysis to the warehouse with indicators of rotation and obsolescence, and to combine our Marketing efforts to continue our growth, to become one of the largest distributors in the IT market".