ABC Supply Harnesses Progress OpenEdge Pro2 Replication to Boost Business Intelligence Efforts with Near Real-Time Reporting
Industries:
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OpenEdgeChallenge
With a new ERP in place and aggressive plans for future growth and a desire for increased functionality, ABC set out to find a modern reporting solution to boost its business intelligence efforts.
Solution
Deploy Progress® OpenEdge® Pro2TM data replication solution for near real-time access to ERP data for reporting and analytics.
Result
Pro2 delivers up-to-date data to ABC’s user base, enabling data teams to create reports and dashboards that boost better informed decision-making.
Full Story
Challenge
ABC Supply had essentially operated as two businesses. One for exterior materials like roofing and related products, and one for interior materials, including drywall and related products. Both had operated successfully under two separate legacy ERPs for many years and had external reporting capabilities that required time-consuming nightly data exports and ETL processes that were prone to issues and required significant maintenance and support. Also, the data to create reports was always a day old.
“Given our plans for future growth and our desire for additional functional capabilities, the decision was made to consolidate to a single new and modern ERP,” explained John Colbert, IT Application Development Manager, ABC Supply. “The selected ERP offered much growth potential in many tech areas, but its native custom reporting feature lacked the advanced security required by ABC.”
John and his team set out to find a modern reporting solution that would meet ABC’s growing needs.
The bottom line for us at ABC is that Pro2 has been a huge benefit to our user base and developers.
John Colbert
IT Application Development Manager at ABC Supply
Solution
With its single, modern ERP in place, it was time to tackle the reporting issue. After evaluating a number of solutions, ABC made the decision to offload transactional data in near real time to an external database utilizing the Progress® OpenEdge® Pro2TM data replication solution. Pro2 provides near real-time replication to OpenEdge users to get access to data outside of the application, process it and then load it into Oracle, SQL Server or another OpenEdge database for reporting and analytics.
“Since our new ERP was itself Progress-based and we had existing internal resources with extensive Pro2 skill sets from prior jobs, Pro2SQL seemed like the best fit,” Colbert said. “The other solutions we looked at had a few downsides and we figured with the experts we had on staff, it would be a lot easier for us to get up to speed, and it turned out to be a good decision for us.”
Result
With Pro2, up-to-date data is now available to the user base, enabling data teams to create reports and dashboards with the required security. Colbert said Pro2 has had a number of positive effects on the business.
“The replicated data has become a valuable resource to many of our departments,” he said. “We had originally assumed our analytics team would be the primary consumer, but as other teams saw the value in the data that was replicated, they jumped right in. Our data science team, for example, has made considerable progress with the data. It’s had a large positive effect on our bottom line.”
An invoice verification report created by the ABC team using data from Pro2 has proven critical to the business.
“Invoice verification is very important to our accounting backend team to make sure everything is working correctly,” Colbert said. “So, having that data in near real time is a great benefit. Prior to that, it was always a day old, so accounting didn’t know there were issues until they got out to the customers. That is probably one of our best uses of near real-time data.”
In addition to enabling ABC with powerful reporting capabilities, Pro2 has also had some positive effects on other areas of the business.
“An additional benefit is the ability to use this near real-time replicated data to communicate to external vendor applications when an existing API was not available or was under development,” Colbert explained. “This allowed us to provide valuable functionality like delivery and distribution tools to our user base at an accelerated pace.”
The replicated data has become a valuable resource to many of our departments...but as other teams saw the value in the data that was replicated, they jumped right in.
John Colbert
IT Application Development Manager at ABC Supply