How Datacom overhauled Olympus’ sales pipeline reporting system

When the local arm of optical and digital precision technology maker Olympus needed a new system for sales pipeline reporting, Datacom stepped in with a fresh solution built around Power BI and Azure.

Olympus was previously using Microsoft Excel to create many of its sales reports before developing the new system's architecture in partnership with Datacom.

However, Excel wasn't designed to manage commercial quantities of data in a single document, as Olympus' sales team discovered. The company's sales success history report, for example, held six years' worth of data in a file over 100MB in size and it wasn't uncommon for it to crash on opening.  

A new system clearly needed to be developed.  

Teaming up with Datacom, Olympus created data architecture that has since transformed the company's reporting, delivering more accessible and timelier reports to enable better business decisions.

The platform that was implemented by Datacom for Olympus' sales reporting uses Microsoft's Power BI data visualisation software on top of an underlying Azure data lake, which automates data intake from SAP and NetSuite.  

The new system was designed to be scalable, flexible and able to be continuously improved.

While the initial project to design and deploy the new system kicked off a number of years ago, the platform continues to be constantly improved and developed in partnership with Datacom, whose team constantly works alongside its customer to introduce new solutions.

Today, the same six-year report that was over 100MB in size and prone to crashing is around 3MB and mobile-enabled.

"You can see the reports on your phone, which wasn't possible before," said Jay Raichura, business intelligence and analytics manager for Olympus. "It means sales specialists who used to carry around a laptop can now just pull their phones out - this is another big advantage.

"The new system also means sales specialists can see where orders are immediately. When a customer wants to know where their order is, we can issue a report on the spot. The new system is easy to use and it's saving a lot of time," he added.

More than a quarter of the 400-plus team members at Olympus across Australia and New Zealand typically access the company's sales reports, with 8,000 hits in an ordinary month and higher rates at year-end.

According to Olympus, sales reports are now dramatically more up to date than they once were.  

Previously, Olympus' initial sales pipeline reports were only refreshed monthly. Now, the report is refreshed every 30 minutes.  

"Sales specialists can now input their data in Salesforce and see the impact in half an hour, which is a big plus," Raichura said. "And the overall data refresh that used to take six hours to refresh now takes around an hour - we're really happy with these results."

Moreover, the scalability of the new system means that Olympus can see potential to use it for supply chain, customer operations and service centre data, to name just a few possibilities.  

"The benefit of building this has far outweighed the cost," Raichura said. "We recently sent out a survey asking people if they would prefer to go back to the old system and the answer was unanimously 'no'. Even among the sales specialists who had been there since the dial-up days; they're all really happy with the results."

Not only has the project impressed the local Olympus team in Australia, but has taken the global team by surprise as well.

"Around eight months ago the global team came to us with a proposal for a new system and we were able to say, ‘Before you start your pitch, let us show you what we have,'" Raichura said.

"Once they saw what we had, they said, without hesitation, that it was among the best data architecture in Asia Pacific. 'Gold standard' was the phrase they used."

In November last year, Datacom was one of a handful of local IT suppliers that were added to the South Australian government’s $180 million personal computer and server equipment panel.

Datacom, along with ASI Solutions, Computers Now and national distributor Leader, now sit alongside vendors including Acer, Dell, Dynabook, HP, HPE and Lenovo on the panel.