Natura World sleeps easy with analytics

NAV analytics add to competitive advantage, help manage growth

Natura World is a company that does things differently, and it’s paying off. This Canadian mattress manufacturer is growing exponentially through constant innovation and its fun approach. Product development is bringing gel mattresses used by hospitals for pain relief to the mass market. The boss’s job title is ‘head honcho’, and the IT guy is the ‘tech xprt’. And the company engages with its ‘fans’ using an array of social media to educate and interact with consumers who share its vision of a healthy night’s sleep. On the serious side, the company has recently tripled its staff, expanded its manufacturing facilities from 40,000 to 150,000 square feet, while also acquiring two new companies in the height of a recession.

Aims
Behind the scenes, Natura relies on Microsoft Dynamics NAV as its primary business system. Around 20 staff use NAV to handle financials, sales, purchasing, manufacturing, administration, and inventory. The company’s Tech Xprt, Blair Fleming, explains the reporting challenges that Natura faced. “We had five daily NAV reports to monitor the business, but due to our growth, our NAV data was changing constantly,” Blair said. “Every time a new product was added or a new category was set up, it became difficult to work with NAV reports, including having reports fail. Developers had to make constant adjustments, and when a new report was required, that was an instant $1,500. What we really needed was a more dynamic way to report and analyze our data that could keep pace with our fast growing company."

Solution
After some home-grown experiments, the company’s appetite grew for a Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics solution that could cover all the modules in NAV. “I knew the power of analysis in SQL Server – I call it the `silent tiger’ that not many people know how to harness – but I wanted a user friendly interface," explained Blair. "When I saw Zap’s Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics, I kept asking ‘what’s the catch’, ‘what’s the security in the back end’, ‘what am I restricted from doing’, and ‘when would I have to rely on the vendor to make changes’? After some due diligence, I discovered it truly was transparent and everything it was made out to be, so we decided to go ahead and implement it. The case for return on investment was strong, as we could gain a quick win by turning on the comprehensive analytic reports, dashboards and scorecards versus investing in building and maintaining reports with other technologies, as we’d done previously.”

Results
Asked about deployment time for the solution, Blair didn’t have to think long. “Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics was set up in an afternoon,” he said. The first priority was sales analysis to provide senior management with highly flexible analytics, such as sales by item category, product category, and measuring profitability and margins over time. “Previously we’d been quite restricted in what we could analyze, and how we could analyze it, but Zap’s Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics gave us the freedom to analyze by any piece of data, and slice-and-dice the business from any angle.” The next priority is inventory analysis, to provide valuable insight for production planning. As for having executive support, Blair explained that Natura’s ‘head honcho’ had a vision of having Zap scorecards on a 65 inch screen in his office, to monitor key performance indicators daily, such as shipments going out on time, and incoming sales by number, value, product, and other dimensions.

As for longer term plans, Blair said that Zap’s product roadmap was another factor in his solution choice, and that he is already excited about future functionality that Natura could use to become smarter and more streamlined in its use of information.