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Meade Instruments
BOARD Provides Sharpened View for Meade

Company
Founded in 1972 and public since 1997 (NASDAQ: MEAD), Meade Instruments Corp. is a world leader in the design, manufacture and distribution of telescopes, binoculars and riflescopes for the serious amateur astronomer or sports enthusiast to the general sports optics consumer.
With the acquisition of binocular manufacturer Bresser Optik in 1999, Meade became a significant distributor of binoculars in Europe (under the Bresser brand) and is now the second-largest distributor of binoculars in the world. In October of 2002 Meade acquired Simmons Outdoor Corp. (Thomasville, GA), firmly establishing itself as a leading branded consumer optics company. Simmons brings with it a comprehensive and competitive line of binoculars and riflescopes that are anticipated to add as much as $40 million to revenues for the fiscal year ending February 29, 2004.
Meade’s brings its products to market through a distribution model that includes an internal sales force, manufacturers’ reps, mail-order dealers, specialty retailers, distributors and mass merchandisers, with thousands of locations throughout the United States. Internationally, Meade’s sales are conducted through its operating subsidiary in Germany (Meade Europe) and foreign distributors. The Company's innovative and technologically advanced products are recognized to be among the best in the world.

Business Challenges
“One of our biggest challenges”, describes Meade CFO, Brent Christensen, “was our inability to mine data in our ERP system. Especially challenging was timely, accurate, comparative reporting of sales details, whether by product, territory, customer or sales manager.” This was the focal point for the beginning of the BOARD project.

While sales information stored within their MANMAN system was voluminous, there did not exist an easy way to get to it and use it to increase visibility and improve performance. Because of the difficulty of the data extraction process, care was not always taken to make sure categorization data in the agent master, ship-to and bill-to files was accurate or complete. This complicated the task of providing meaningful sales reports and analysis that Meade needed. “BOARD has driven us to assure that the ancillary sales data we have is correct,” said Christensen.
Another related challenge was being able to provide Meade sales managers a single view of all relevant product sales – a critical measure considering that Meade’s two-tiered sales structure gives a sales manager responsibility for both house accounts and rep accounts. Sales for these two groups reside in two different places within MANMAN, making it tough for a manager to see a combined view of all sales for their territory and customers.
Also critical to Meade’s senior management and sales managers was a thorough understanding of the difference between gross and net sales. As is typical, gross sales are offset by credits for returns, price adjustments, defects, out of stock, etc. MANMAN’s structure makes it extremely difficult to aggregate sales offsets by reason, to apply offsets by customer, territory or rep group for example. According to Christensen, “It was close to impossible to quickly and easily understand the nature of the differences between our net and gross sales numbers.”

BOARD Solution
Business Systems Consulting’s (BSC) wealth of experience with both BOARD and Meade’s core system – MANMAN – provided a perfect environment for them to approach, design and implement the project using their proven methodology.
The methodology can be divided into three (3) core phases that allows Meade to fully understand what they could expect from BSC, what would be required of them, and the time-frame for each step. The methodology includes the following phases:



The purpose of the project was to deliver analysis of the OMAR module of MANMAN, which would provide the capability to dynamically access and analyze sales information. Once defined, BSC was able to leverage one of the key strengths of BOARD – its support for iterative development. As opposed to the traditional “waterfall” approach, this approach increases development speed and organizational fit, without compromising the overall effectiveness of the solution. In practice, it is BOARD’s programming-free toolset that helped BSC keep any “re-work” to a minimum. Once resources were identified, the work-plan was signed off.

Unlike many BI tools, BOARD does not require a consolidated view of all information stored in the source systems or datawarehouse. Rather, it requires only the information needed for analysis. To that end, the Analysis phase considered the specific business issues that would be addressed, the information required to solve those issues, where that information resided (one system, multiple systems, etc) and who would use the analysis. Areas such as allocations, shipments, backlog, margins and profitability were key areas that Meade decision makers expressed interest in.
Meade also wanted to improve the content and delivery of their information. This was easily addressed using some of BOARD’s native features - a customizable interface, drill-anywhere, data/graph synchronization, interactive data selection and support for endless navigation and analysis. Once completed, BSC defined the measures and modelled the BOARD database to maximize efficiency (speed, storage and requests), flexibility (structured to provide a broad range of analysis) and versatility (analysis for multiple users of different organization level and sophistication).



The final phase, Design, considered the infrastructure needed to run BOARD, the final database design/load, and the Capsule (front-end) development. With BOARD’s small footprint, low bandwidth requirements and database compression, the infrastructure required was minimal. With the key measures and analysis already modelled in the BOARD database, a simple mapping process was performed to make the field connection between the source data and the BOARD database. The last step, developing the Capsules, was done free form completely from scratch (versus pre-packaged templates with rigid functionality). This fast, easy drag-and-drop process was efficient and allowed all constituents to have access to only the analysis they needed, presented to them in a format that made sense.

Business Benefit
Since the implementation of BOARD, Meade has quickly realized some powerful business benefits that have affected not only their business today, but also their ability to understand and drive their business into the future. These benefits are directly related to the usability, distribution and integration of their corporate information.
While Meade has a wealth of information about their company, products, customers and sales, BOARD provided them with a tool to efficiently unlock this information and make it vastly more timely and usable. Reports and analysis that once took days or weeks or that were, for practical purposes, impossible to get are now available online through BOARD on a daily basis. This increased ability to use their information has also come with a major improvement in the quality of data they collect, improving the overall quality of reporting.
Since the availability of valuable information became easily accessible at Meade, they have extended it to other interested constituents. A prime example of this is the distribution of all sales information to their sales managers who can now more efficiently and effectively manage both their house accounts and rep accounts, by looking at each in terms of what they bought, sold, returned and what is backordered or cancelled. Another example is the distribution of sales information to accounting, who now have a more accurate and effective means of determining how product quality (improvements, defects, damage, etc) and decisions on price adjustments affect the final sales numbers. This information becomes an invaluable source of analysis that can be used at the executive level for making the best possible decisions as they relate to sales and profitability.
A final benefit is the impact at Meade of having an easier way to integrate their departmental information to drive decision-making. Meade will start by integrating their sales budget with the company’s forecast to track actuals versus targets each month for their core products.
By comparing the sales forecast with shipments and backorders, Meade can instantly see if there is a delta between their actuals and their plan, and determine what the most common reason(s) for the delta are. Timely, comparative analytics simply allow management to make better business decisions. One particularly interesting future-planned application at Meade is an application to manage the top 25-30 excess and obsolete inventory items. This visibility will allow Meade to lower its overall on-hand inventory and reduce operating/inventory costs.

"BOARD enables the right people - from the executive team to sales and accounting - to get timely, accurate comparative reporting of our sales detail. It also provides us a platform to integrate this information with data we have in our other business systems.”
“Because of the difficulty of the data extraction process, care was not always taken to make sure categorization data in the agent master, ship-to and bill-to files was accurate or complete. BOARD has driven us to assure the ancillary sales data we have is correct."

Brent Christensen
CFO, Meade


Industry
Manufacturing and Distribution


Application Area
Sales Analysis