Company
Puma Australia Pty Ltd is responsible for the distribution of the famous Puma product brand in Australia and New Zealand. The central objective of Pumas corporate strategy is to build on its rich heritage of sporting achievement and become the most desirable Sport lifestyle brand in the world. As Puma evolves from a pure sports goods company to a Sports lifestyle brand I.T has to facilitate systems to ensure Puma stays ahead of the competition by analyzing consumer trends, market dynamics and assisting opportunities through proper planning.

Business Challenges
The challenges facing Puma Australia were in the areas of Budgeting and Planning. The existing process required a great deal of data transposition between various systems including the AS400. Much of this data was extracted and consolidated manually, which was very labor intensive and time consuming. The process of collecting budgets from various sales managers and consolidating them into a company view was not easy. It involved a complex series of reporting hierarchies, made even more challenging by the codes and categories required for local and international reporting.

BOARD Solution
After months of evaluating software to address these challenges, and only days away from selecting a vendor, Puma Australia agreed to let ISI (BOARDs local reseller) submit a BOARD Proof of Concept. There were however, some strict criteria for consideration this late in the decision making process. One of which was the delivery timeframe. The POC needed to be delivered within one week. ISI met this challenge by delivering a successful POC in a few days. A strong testament to the strength of BOARDs rapid application development environment and ISIs customer focus.
During the POC presentation, ISI was able to further customize the application by adding and changing screens on the fly. This ability to quickly change the application clearly demonstrated the flexibility of the BOARD zero code interface.

Business Benefit
Ben Dallenger IT Director of Puma Australia says, It was the rapid application development and flexibility of the product that made BOARD a clear winner over the other offerings.
Puma Australia purchased BOARD during the following week. After completing a four day course conducted by ISI, Puma took just two weeks to rollout their customized Sales Analytics Application and a further three weeks to implement distributed Budgeting and Planning to the Sales Managers. Just one person at Puma was able to complete the development and implementation of both applications, without help from any external consultants.
The Puma team have continued to develop many more applications integrating data from a variety of existing systems. These applications provide strategic analytic functionality to Puma management both here in Australia and the parent company in Germany.
Some of the functional benefits realized since the introduction of the system have been:

• The ability to carry out simulations
• What if analysis Slice and Dice of the sales data
• Predictive modeling by historical data analysis
• Significant reduction in reporting time and effort

The time necessary to produce retail sales data in the format required by PumaInternational every month has been reduced literally from days to a few minutes. Puma is looking forward to this year when finance and sales directors will make full use of BOARDs flexibility and capability for planning their sales and costs budgets.
BOARD is a comprehensive solution for advanced Business Intelligence implementations. The BOARD Toolkit includes extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities, a high performance multidimensional database capable of handling extremely large amounts of data without suffering from the typical limitations of traditional M-OLAP engines, a relational database engine (R-OLAP) and a powerful yet simple front end development environment for building applications that range from simple reporting to complex planning and simulation. It has all the features and functionality needed to build a complete and custom solution. BOARD is also the first and only Corporate Performance Management (CPM) tool to deliver integrated collaboration capability using Peer-to-Peer technology.