Plumbing World taps into Yellowfin

Plumbing World taps into Yellowfin

Plumbing World is a plumbing supplies company that serves both the retail and trade sectors including bathroom, laundry, kitchen and gas fittings. With nationwide branches from Whangarei to Invercargill, Plumbing World is part of the NZ Plumbers’ Merchants (NZPM) co-operative which is owned by hundreds of qualified plumbers and allied craftsmen. Each of these shareholders benefits from Plumbing World’s bulk purchasing capabilities and also receives an annual rebate based on their level of purchases as well as an annual dividend based on NZPM net profit for the year.

This structure places a significant financial reporting and transactional burden on Plumbing World’s head office. For the last eight years the organisation has been relying on a Progress Prostix database running under the Solaris operating system as its core financial application. “We keep almost everything in Prostix, from the store POS [Point of Sale] data, financials, day to day reports, you name it,” says IT manager Chris Hocking.

While Hocking was happy with the database, he says he was less than satisfied with a third-party package that was being used to extract reports from it – both in terms of its functionality and the support provided by the local vendor.

“We wanted to do more specialised reporting, and more analysis work with other databases. So we started looking at our options. As 90% of our desktop PCs are Linux-based it had to be something that didn’t tie us into Windows.” Hocking started to get interested in Yellowfin, a web-based analytics and reporting tool specifically designed to provide businesses with rapid access to organisational data for ad hoc and periodic analysis and reporting.

Initially, Hocking was attracted to Yellowfin because it is completely platform-independent, which suited Plumbing World’s mixed platform environment. However, when he began a trial of the software Hocking was impressed by the level of support provided by Yellowfin and its local business partner Team Progress.

“They came over and helped us to get it all set up. Certainly their level support is one of the best I have received from any organisation to date.”

Hocking says installation was straightforward but one teething problem involving technical differences in the handling of Java between the database and Yellowfin were immediately addressed. “If there are any issues with the application then Yellowfin will work through it. They are very responsive.”

Plumbing World soon gained enough confidence in the Yellowfin platform to start transferring applications that had previously been running on the database to Yellowfin. Hocking says Plumbing World will be standardising on Yellowfin for new development in the future.

“It’s very quick to develop reports, there is a lot of flexibility in the output, and it offers ease of use. For example using Yellowfin’s built in dashboard feature we can give the user the ability to manipulate a report. They can decide what information they want, they can email it, put it into a mailmerge, or whatever.”

“Yellowfin is going to be the application that is driving all of our ad hoc reports, and our data mining will also be driven by it quite simply,” says Hocking.

About Yellowfin