When sales reps interact with customers, they need quick access to the latest reports and product information or they risk frustrating their clients. But for sales reps at Peavey Electronics, it could take 15 minutes or more to get a single report. “They had to take hours out of their days to create and link reports. We needed to cut that down to minutes,” said Robert Muirhead, manager of enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Plus, when sales reps were out in the field, they couldn't access information on many mobile devices.

Peavey needed to upgrade its existing SAP solution and its operating system to improve speed and performance and allow mobile access. It chose an SAP business intelligence solution and in-memory database platform, along with a complementary operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA. “We’ll be able to tell people, ‘Yes, we can build that report for you,’ rather than, ‘No, that will shut our system down.’ … We’re going to give them more flexibility and more reporting than they’ve ever seen,” said Muirhead.

With Peavey’s new analytical platform, sales reps have much faster access to reports—they have seen a 300-times improvement in processing performance. And mobile users now have expanded reporting capabilities. Not surprisingly, productivity and satisfaction are up, and customers are happier. In addition, Peavey’s integrated environment has reduced capital hardware costs by about US$100,000. And improved business intelligence has opened up new possibilities, such as a dashboard for management reporting and predictive analysis for inventory planning.