XTRA Lease Enterprise Reporting
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Business Needs
XTRA Lease, a Berkshire Hathaway company, manages a fleet of nearly 100,000 over-the-road trailers, renting and leasing them from more than 75 branches in the United States and Canada. Its customers include major manufacturers, retailers and transportation firms that either want to skip the expense of owning trailers or need to temporarily supplement an existing fleet. The company has boosted sales by offering advanced technology such as trailer tracking and trailer inspections using handheld computers that quickly deliver key information to customers.
With three-quarters of its staff working in branches or from the road, XTRA Lease needs technology that fosters collaboration and keeps vital information flowing to and from the St. Louis headquarters. The company recently embarked on a technology overhaul that included adding wireless networking, new desktop and laptop computers, and the Windows Vista® Enterprise operating system.
At the same time, XTRA Lease needed to upgrade its data reporting system. The existing platform was inflexible, a decade old and had no cost-effective upgrade path.
"We needed a fresher, more modern product to keep up with our growth and reporting needs," said XTRA Lease CTO Robert Lambrecht. But replacing it wouldn’t be easy – it generated more than 3,000 ad hoc reports that would have to be converted or replaced.
Solution
XTRA Lease considered solutions using Business Objects, Actuate, Oracle and IBM, Lambrecht said. The company chose a Microsoft® Business Intelligence (BI) solution because it offered easier integration and was cost-neutral with the comparable options -- even after adding in the cost of converting existing reports.
With the guidance and expertise of Covenant Technology Partners, XTRA Lease deployed Microsoft SQL Server®, Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server, and Microsoft Office PerformancePoint® Server (now part of SharePoint Server 2007). Covenant also developed a custom PerformancePoint Server search component to enable sales representatives to quickly access and drill down into a wide variety of key customer data such as rental history, types of equipment, maintenance schedules, payment history, and use of value-added services.
"From day one, we built this system to make our sales team more proficient and prepared," commented Lambrecht. "Having information at a glance takes the guessing game out of the sales process and enables us to make faster decisions, boost sales and retain customers."
Benefits
For XTRA Lease, the improvements have been dramatic and the usage "widley popular" according to Lambrecht.
Simplified, Self-Serve Reports
After training staff for an afternoon, the group capable of pulling reports expanded from three to more than 25, reducing the backlog on IT and putting the power in the hands of the users who need it most.
Now, instead of asking IT to create new versions of reports, users tweak existing reports to their liking. As a result, XTRA Lease was able to reduce its 3,000 ad hoc reports to the most useful ones - approximately 50 standard IT reports. Employees also create specialized reports and share them with other teams.
Increased Sales Efficiency and Performance
Speed has also been an important factor. Reports used to take several minutes to generate. Now, they take only 10 to 15 seconds and allow people to multitask while they are being created.
"Being able to quickly retrieve the information needed to address customer questions is certainly and advantage for us in a competitive market," said Chris Scheele, XTRA Lease's director of business technology.
For example, sales staff can easily access customer data in a dashboard format that helps them immediately spot opportunities that weren't visible before - and to act on them while they're in the field or on the phone with customers.
"Now our sales reps can pull up a dashboard while parked in their car before they meet with a customer and have an up-to-the-minute view of the customer's trailer rental/lease activity alongside other key trend information -- and have complete confidence in it," explains Scheele.
Best Practices Rolled Out to the Branches
With a fluid decentralized business, XTRA Lease relies on the BI solution to be the central repository for corporate documents, from training, forms and procedures, to customer history and sales information.
"This level of visibility and consistency across our branches helps us provide a higher level of service to our customers, large and small. It's like taking our best sales person and allowing their best practices to guide more folks in the field. It has really moved us to providing a higher level of service to our customers."
Moving Forward
XTRA Lease has fulfilled the CEO's top goal - to align sales activity with customer transactions to highlight potential future business opportunities. Scheele adds, "We now have visibility into how sales activities are translating, or not translating, into revenue. Understanding that relationship is critical for us to make sounds business decisions."
And, the company the ready to continue the journey. "If this past year was analogous to going to school and we started in the first grade, I think we probably graduated high school and we moved up to college," Scheele said. "Now we have aspirations for graduate school."