Articles

Twinings - Case Study

Twinings of London are world famous tea makers with a history of over 300 years producing high quality beverages. Twinings use QAD’s MFG/PRO software to manage its business processes.

DataPA provided Twinings with a business intelligence solution that has enabled employees to access information they previously found difficult to extract. Twinings believes it has seen an increase in productivity as a result of the introduction of DataPA.

Benefits for Twinings

DataPA has provided Twinings with a return on their investment in the first few months with the following benefits:
> Increase in the accessibility of business data for end users
> A reduction in the time involved to complete certain financial activities.
> A reduction in the time involved in extracting data at remote sites.
> DataPA is being used to complete data cleansing projects to correct data within the MFG/PRO database.
> The IT Department are using DataPA in one off exercises to identify and resolve problems.

Twinings Requirements

Twinings use QAD’s manufacturing software MFG/PRO which is widelyrecognised as being best-in-class.
QAD Manufacturing solutions use advanced planning and scheduling capabilities to help companies plan, schedule and track products to reduce cost and increase throughput.
The existing business intelligence solution used by Twinings to gain information from MFG/PRO was a combination of Monarch, Crystal Reports and Business Objects.
A requirement was identified to improve on this solution and a project was initiated to address this. The projects original scope was to replace the existing solution with a single package that was especially easy for end users to use.
DataPA was selected by Twinings after a positive business response during the evaluation process with users eager to use it straight away.

Rapid Implementation

Twinings are using the DataPA client installed on user desktops to quickly and easily retrieve information to DataPA Reports, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access and PDF's.
Licensing and security settings based on MFG/PRO user groups are controlled centrally and applied to the DataPA client as the user logs in. This has saved setting up each client individually and updates can be easily rolled out.
DataPA was implemented to two types of user. Super-users who design the reports and queries and end users who simply run the reports and queries created for them by the super-users.
Super-users were split into two groups and trained in 1/2 a day. End users were then trained by the super-users and there have been no issues to date with end users finding DataPA very simple to use.

“I have had managers thank me for enabling their users to get information they had dreamt about and had been waiting years for”
Mike Whelan, Twinings

"Solving the problem of sluggish reporting over WAN's and the Internet has become more urgent. DataPA we believe is the first to make the breakthrough"
Frank McIlroy, Vice President EMEA, Progress Software

Maxima Partnership

Twinings were assisted on the project by Maxima who have provided them with a wealth of expertise on QAD software for many years. Maxima are a DataPA reseller for MFG/PRO customers in the UK and Ireland and demonstrated DataPA to Twinings.
With its powerful complexity management engine uniquely suited to the QAD architecture and an emphasis on end user reporting, DataPA provides the ideal solution for day to day reporting and high level business intelligence for QAD.
Working together DataPA and Maxima have created a preconfigured solution for MFG/PRO giving QAD customers a product that can be used ‘out the box’.

If you would like to find out more about DataPA please contact us.