Harry & David is a specialty foods retailer, vertically integrated.

We started as a mail order catalog company,

in 1934,

selling as our signature gift the Royal Riviera pear -

a variety of

a Comice Pear -

and then it is just growing over the years and

evolved from being a mail order company to largely an eCommerce company now.

We also have a retail presence now,

some retail stores.

We grow the pears,

we make a lot of the products that we sell: Moose Munch,

cheesecakes,

bakery products.

We do all of the packing and fulfillment,

marketing,

merchandising.

The Board application has changed our processes by just really making

us more flexible,

more dynamic,

we are more quickly able to answer questions that arise without having

to invest a lot of time in building a new report.

We can really sort of drag and drop and drill down on an existing report and understand the

drivers of our business and what's going on.

We're able to complete a forecast cycle a lot more quickly than we were able to before.

It used to be that a bottoms-up forecast would take us a full week to complete

and we're really able to do it now in just a couple of days.

I think we've done a good job of getting all of our GL data in and use it for our month end,

for variances, for reforecasts.

But more and more,

we're trying to pull in some of the business drivers and the underlying data behind the

financials, and roll that into the system so that we can use it more on a

driver-based planning. We get package volumes in, so we can look it costs for unit and

manufacturing volumes, and headcount.

We recently rolled out a headcount planning model so it is linked into our payroll

system and we can actually, down at the individual headcount level,

plan vacancy rates and merit increases and things like

that.

The implementation process for users is pretty straightforward.

There was a week long session where Board sent out a

training partner and walked us through it at

a pretty granular level of detail.

How to set up the databases and how the data relationships work, and so

forth.

And then after that,

it largely became hands-on learning.

Especially for the core day-to-day user that isn't actually maintaining the databases or

the data relationship.

They are really just using the data

and trying to build models. It doesn't require a lot of technical expertise.

You just kind of are able to, if you're able to use Excel or any other software tool,

you're pretty much able to just sort of figure it out.

So I think more and more people really dove in and tried to use the tool

to improve their processes.

They would get pretty excited about it and realized like,

"Wow!

Look what I can do."

We have pretty much everybody within our finance division using it,

especially everybody in the FP&A teams,

which is about 12 people and then across the rest of the finance division

there is probably 30. We are additionally

rolling the tool out a little bit more cross functionally today,

implementing an S&OP for our wholesale division, so the sales team

will end up using it, the inventory team,

and some folks in marketing will also be using the tool to understand just the

customer-level data, and order curves, and

response rates, and things like that.

I would recommend Board, definitely, from our experience,

especially the customer service

has been very responsive. They are there when we need them.

If we have a question,

it's pretty quick to

hop on a Skype call and walk us through, or even log in

and help us literally walk through how to accomplish something that we're trying to do. A couple

of projects that we have underway

right now,

we are actually using the consulting services that Board offers too.