From its Melbourne head office and warehouse facility, Kubota Tractor Australia distributes products all over the country through 190 authorised dealers. Kubota employs 82 staff in Australia and the company turnover was AU$135 million in 2006.

With numbers like these, tracking sales, monitoring stock levels and strategic planning are complex and demanding operations. Until recently, Kubota relied mainly on its proprietary 4GL-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) application as the company’s data repository and Microsoft Excel-based pivot tables for generating reports.

“In a fast moving business such as ours, we need visibility into our databases,” says Paul Barry, General Manager Sales and Marketing at Kubota.

“But our dependence on Excel and pivot tables meant that managers with limited Excel skills couldn’t run reports themselves and had to request them from our IT people,” says Barry.

“As a result reports were typically only compiled once a month. We knew we needed to upgrade our capabilities in order to support our growing operations.”

“We looked at Crystal Reports and that seemed promising but it really didn’t give us the analysis tools we needed. We also looked at a couple of the multi-national business intelligence solutions but they were extremely expensive,” he says.

“When iQ4bis proposed building a ‘proof of concept’ (POC) using our own data, we could hardly say no,” says Barry.

“We extracted some sales history data and sent it over to the iQ4bis team. They came back in a week with a fully-developed sales cube that we could slice, dice, query and report from. The POC was perhaps our biggest reason for selecting iQ4bis, along with the very simple easy-to-use but effective user interface and operational procedures.”

“Paul was great,” says Curtis Williams, business development manager at iQ4bis. “We showed him how to slice and dice his data and within a few minutes he was performing analyses and uncovering sales patterns. We gave him a quick tutorial on some of the more advanced features and he was off. He felt confident enough to turn around and demo iQ4bis to the rest of his management team including the CFO and MD. The presentation was successful and they selected iQ4bis as their business intelligence solution.”

The set-up and support from iQ4bis has been great, says Barry.

“The work done setting up the cubes was at times lengthy but the iQ4bis consultant did a great job understanding our business. In addition the level of ongoing support and contact stands out. In too many cases, after the sale occurs you only hear back from the vendor when maintenance renewal comes around. iQ4bis, however, has been very professional and proactive in ensuring that we are completely satisfied,” he says.

Already iQ4bis has had a positive impact at Kubota. “Our decision-making process has improved as managers are far more empowered with information,” says Barry.

“The sales history views have had the greatest impact so far. The rolling period function for sales history has allowed us to identify trends amongst our distribution network. It has also saved us a lot of time in sourcing information and requesting reports,” he adds.

“All in all iQ4bis has been very beneficial for Kubota. iQ4bis has provided us with our immediate need, better visibility into our data. Additionally, it has empowered our managers to prepare their own reports and improve our decision-making processes. The team at iQ4bis has made a major effort to understand our business and that has helped them build cubes and views that address our very real business requirements.

We are very happy overall with the performance of the software and the support and look forward to a long relationship with iQ4bis.”

Click here to register for free iQ4Bis Proof of Concept

For more information contact

Asj Smith            
General Manager- APAC
iQ4bis Management Software Limited
+64 9 366 2635
Visit our website www.iQ4bis.com

October 2007