BOARD Solution
Arexons originated in Milan, 1925, at the beginnings of the Italian automobile industry. The first care and maintenance products were an immediate success and quickly became an essential part of vehicle upkeep, for mechanics and motorists alike. The company then diversified its activity over time, breaking into the DIY sector. Today Arexons distributes over 1500 products and is a market leader in Italy, with sales estimated at around 45 000 000 euros per annum and growth averaging 8%. Its products are sold across the length and breadth of Italy, both through traditional channels and in discount and mega stores.
Given that running a company of this kind is a complex operation, the top management at Arexons recognized the need for a simple and effective tool that could handle large quantities of information without difficulty, giving both an overall view and a highly detailed picture of the business.
Above all, the need was for a facility that would be one and the same for all users, able to give dependable results and make it possible once and for all to eliminate the mass of statistics formerly generated on an ad hoc basis. The solution would need to ensure rapid implementation, flexibility, and adaptability to different analysis requirements, and it was for these reasons that Misal Arexons decided to adopt the BOARD Management Intelligence Toolkit. “Right from the presentation of the prototype covering sales (customer/product detail), which was up and running in a day», declares Arexons IT manager Stefano Paganelli, «we were able to see just how easy BOARD would be to use — quite apart from the speed of response — both for navigating data in the company’s own multidimensional database and for generating reports without the need for special programming languages”.
The Management Intelligence project began with sales (orders, turnover, margins) for all specific classifications of Arexons business, analyzing information on the basis of maximum customer and product detail. Thereafter, the scope of the project was extended to include the quality of customer service (internal and external) and with the Web Server version of BOARD it was possible to make certain kinds of information available to users outside the company. Area and Channel Managers connected via their browsers to the BOARD database can keep track of agents, promotions and customers, and consequently benefit from a more detailed view of the business.
The success of having implemented a Management Intelligence project using BOARD will now enable the company to proceed with application of the system to budget-related matters (planning, targets and auditing), and then go on to introduce a more thorough analysis of its accounting operations (customer accounts due and settled) and of the supply chain (stock rotation, inventory, stock out). This is a project that will involve Misal Arexons as well as other companies of Luisa Angelini’s FINAL Group, to which Arexons belongs.