Building Material Distributors
Managed Infrastructure
24/7 Support
Private Cloud
About the Company
Founded in 1974, Building Material Distributors (BMD) is a California based distributor of high-end construction materials for commercial and residential projects in the United States. With 13 brands and expanding, their portfolio of services is consonantly growing to deliver best in class engineering, project management and complete supply chain services.
The Business Challenge
Given the size of their portfolio of brands, products and services, BMD's executive team was in dire need for a robust solution for better intelligence on sales to better understand the market in order to help make strategic business decisions. The old reporting process was inefficient as data was dispersed and incoherent. Reports on sales, returns, margin, and other various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that were needed daily by executives to effectively do their jobs was missing or cumbersome to generate. BMD was seeking an competent vendor and cost effective solution that would allow executive and key decision makers to view dashboards prior to 9 A.M. every morning with the fresh data from the previous day. The process of gathering those reports from ERP systems and accounting databases and integrating them into usable reports was a challenge. Lack of automation also resulted in inaccurate data causing frustration.
The Albatross Solution
Albatross provided the server infrastructure to host Power Pivot portal on SharePoint that allowed BMD to upload Excel reports created by their BI teams via a browser. The reports were then consumed directly by any users with valid credentials. Albatross provided an automated solution to deliver the refresh of data nightly. FTP was used to upload the key data from line of business systems, ETL jobs ran on the server to populate and refresh the workbooks. Powershell was used to notify users of issues for quick resolution. Ultimately the executives were able to streamline their BI needs with Albatross for accurate and timely reporting.
Albatross was also able to co-join network infrastructure and systems to enable seamless communication between on-site and cloud workloads.
BMD relies on Albatross's 24/7 support to quickly mitigate issues, provide advise and ensure that all the workloads was running smoothly. As BMD continues to expand their business, they continue to scale out their infrastructure needs with Albatross Cloud.