Replacing Excel Sheets With Automated Reports
Back in 2016, Kirby-Smith relied solely on Excel sheets to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and generate reports for various departments. This approach was tedious and time-consuming for the IT department, and even still, stakeholders struggled to get a complete overview of operational data. Kirby-Smith knew the answer was in regularly updated analytics dashboards. This was the only way they’d be able to truly monitor where all aspects of their business stood at any point in time.
With that in mind, they began their search for a business intelligence (BI) solution with custom analytics capabilities built for heavy equipment dealers. Director of Business Intelligence Andrew Cason explains that this specialization was critical for Kirby-Smith but not necessarily a given in an industry that’s monopolized by a select few vendors that don’t typically offer specialized features or capabilities.
“TARGIT’s presentation was geared toward heavy equipment and all our stakeholders agreed this was important. TARGIT is still a great fit for us today because they have made a great commitment to our industry. Their dedication to evolving along with us makes them the premier solution for dealers.”
The implementation of TARGIT Decision Suite was fast, thorough, and designed to fit the unique needs of Kirby-Smith. “TARGIT’s implementation and support teams are extremely responsive and continually made themselves available throughout and after the implementation process,” says Andrew.
Keeping a Pulse on Company Performance
Kirby-Smith first implemented TARGIT in the Rentals department, where employees gained the ability to track key metrics such as rental revenue, utilization, and repair expenses by model, make, year, category, branch, and more. Daily rental in/out updates, month-over-month rental revenue trends by branch, rental age by equipment category, benchmarks for daily revenue targets by branch, and top current and past customers are all accessible daily.
“TARGIT gives us flexibility and an exceptional end-user viewing experience,” says Bryce Puckett, General Manager of Rentals at Kirby-Smith. “With the ability to integrate automated alerts and user-specific view and edit permissions, we are able to manage our business without the need to be glued to a screen all day long.”
One of Kirby-Smith's favorite TARGIT features is the ability to measure KPIs and set automatic alerts for when measures deviate from the expected. That way users can observe the profitability of certain activities and product categories and quickly track daily month-over-month revenue. Kirby-Smith employees have insight into areas where quick action is necessary, such as which branches are exceeding or falling behind expectations.
TARGIT Decision Suite makes it easy to create and share dashboards, reports, and analyses so decision-makers throughout the company have access to the data they need. Andrew shares, “TARGIT is very efficient in allowing authorized users to create and share relevant, visually digestible analyses, which have been quickly adopted by all levels of the company.”
“We now can make informed decisions based on actionable data versus what we thought or think we know about various aspects of the company’s performance,” says J.D. Young, VP-CFO at Kirby-Smith. “TARGIT helps us know instantly where positive and negative results are being generated so that we can adjust and execute our plans to minimize the areas of performance issues and maximize those areas that enhance our results.”
Comparing TARGIT to a Big-Box BI Vendor
“At one point, one of our stakeholders made a big push to switch from TARGIT to a large-scale vendor,” Andrew recalls. “We did a trial run in our Rental department. We lost so much functionality when we moved from TARGIT to the other tool. Within 4-6 months, we were convinced we needed to stay with TARGIT.”
Andrew shares that TARGIT’s easy-to-use dynamic time period feature was replaced by one that was difficult for IT staff and end-users to understand. From a development perspective, the big-box vendor pushes for tabular models, which are much less robust than the multi-dimensional models Kirby-Smith uses in TARGIT.
Andrew’s team was forced to create a ton of different measures to extract the insights they needed via the tool’s tabular model. A model that took 25 measures in TARGIT took hundreds of measures in the other software.
One of the dealer’s other major challenges was the way this large vendor decided on new development initiatives and features. Features are chosen through community voting, but the provider’s community is so huge that Andrew says he never really felt heard. “Some of our major pain points had been top-voted by users for the past four years but received no attention from the vendor.”
Contrarily, TARGIT’s Community Forum is active, and a place where customers have an impactful voice. “I’ve gotten so much help from other TARGIT users through Community, and I can talk directly to the TARGIT team if we have a concern or request.”
Moving to the Cloud With TARGIT
In 2023, Kirby-Smith was ready to embark on the next phase of its BI journey by migrating from self-hosted, on-premises data warehouses to TARGIT’s cloud solution. “Our CIO is a huge advocate of having solutions hosted for us versus us hosting ourselves,” Andrew shares. “It lowers costs and frees up our time because our IT team doesn’t have to manage the solutions on their own.”
Once Kirby-Smith's IT department worked with TARGIT’s IT team to configure a direct URL to increase report speed, it took just a week to transfer and start testing in the cloud. “I’ve been really impressed by the speed of the cloud solution. Once we set up the direct URL access, the speed was on par with our on-prem server.”
The biggest change Kirby-Smith's team has noticed since migrating to TARGIT Cloud is the automatic access to releases as soon as they come out. Testing large on-premises releases can be time-consuming, so Kirby-Smith was usually one or two iterations behind the newest version of TARGIT Decision Suite. Now, they can immediately start using new features, like Slicer Objects, available right away. Plus, smaller, more frequent cloud releases are much easier for Andrew’s team to test compared to their on-premises counterparts.
Looking Ahead to New BI Projects
Today, TARGIT is an integral part of employees’ daily workflows, and it’s given everyone better visibility into operations: “A lot of eyes were opened to our results from a high-level, big picture, perspective, as well as our strengths and weaknesses on a day-to-day basis,” according to Young.
Kirby-Smith now uses TARGIT in every department. Andrew’s team is currently implementing multi-dimensional models across all TARGIT reports. These models will increase reporting speed by 300-400% compared to tabular models.
