Equipping TXB With an End-to-End Reporting Solution
When Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Rick Tellez joined TXB in 2017, he quickly realized that the organization generated an immense amount of data every day.
Every transaction, whether at the pump, a convenience store, or an on-site restaurant, produced a great deal of information. Multiply that by the number of transactions per store and the number of stores TXB operates, and Rick knew the company needed a solution that would enable them to consolidate, organize, and use all their data to make better business decisions.
TXB’s PDI management system included several basic BI tools, but the rigid, one-dimensional reports weren’t robust enough to meet the retailer’s needs. The new solution had to be compatible with PDI, but Rick explains that there were other vital data sources TXB wanted to integrate as well:
“Not only do we have retail stores and gas stations, but we also have wholesale and transportation operations that use an entirely different ERP system — with worse built-in reporting tools than PDI. So, we really needed an end-to-end solution that could manage all our data in one place.”
Rick and the rest of the TXB team were introduced to TARGIT through another convenience store brand. After a personalized demo with TARGIT's Director of Professional Services, Boe Pedersen, Rick was confident that the end-to-end BI solution was the perfect fit for TXB.
When it came time to implement the new solution, TXB turned to TARGIT’s consulting team for guidance and support. “The consulting team was excellent during the implementation process,” shares Rick. “We didn’t know the tables within our databases very well, but the team was always knowledgeable and patient. They ensured everything went smoothly from the get-go, and their support played a huge role in helping me get comfortable inside TARGIT.”
“Over time, we have added more databases to our solution, and we’ve always been very pleased with the level of service from the consulting team,” says Rick. “TARGIT’s service sets the experience apart from other competitors. They always get the work done the right way.”
Improving Reporting Speed and Accuracy
Rick used to spend an entire day building new reports by hand. Now, he can create most reports in about an hour. "Before TARGIT, we didn't have adequate reporting tools. PDI comes with Focal Point, which is very one-dimensional and not dynamic like TARGIT. I had to build reports one at a time, and we didn't do a lot of detailed financial analysis."
Rick is one of 12 TARGIT developer users at TXB. And he explains that, while he leaves cube building to the IT team or TARGIT’s consultants, he builds many different reports inside the system. He explains that the reports, graphs, and charts TXB can build in TARGIT allow employees to analyze data that was previously hidden inside multiple management systems.
“The insights we uncover through TARGIT enable fact-based decisions across our organization. Now, we can accurately measure customer counts, products purchased together, ticket size, and more. And we can combine multiple figures into reports that help us manage the business.”
Today, Rick and his team use TARGIT to create dynamic reports and dashboards for multiple business areas at TXB. The finance team sends out 15 TARGIT reports each morning, including one that measures overall sales for the past week and another that shows which fuel sells at which price point.
The company also uses TARGIT to track the performance of marketing campaigns, compare campaign performance to sales numbers, and pull sales reports directly from the ERP system in a few minutes, saving marketers and sales reps hours of tedious attempts to track down various sales figures inside multiple systems.
On the wholesale side of the business, TXB uses TARGIT for all financial reporting. The company is also upgrading tables and cubes in TARGIT’s Enterprise database, which has made the solution even more intuitive and easy to use.
Rick explains that one team member at TXB still uses Excel to create reports similar to the ones he builds inside TARGIT. “We have an individual who spends one full day developing similar reports in Excel, pulling some downloads from TARGIT and others from our database. In TARGIT, that same process requires the click of a button, and we can do it any day of the week – which is essential because the data we're analyzing is date-sensitive."
Uncovering New Improvement Opportunities
TXB also generates an array of exception reports to monitor various key performance indicators (KPIs), saving them significant time. Rather than manually parsing through each line of data, employees can review the latest exceptions via TARGIT reports.
“Exception reports help us identify hard-to-find errors like fat-fingering data entry or selling a certain product at a loss. With TARGIT, we can use filters to find these errors daily, which saves us hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
While many of these reports help TXB correct unintentional errors, Rick explains that it's also significantly improved loss prevention efforts. “These reports show us if people are abusing marketing promotions or manually inputting lower prices, both of which are instances of employee theft. We have found and addressed at least $250k in theft since implementing TARGIT.”
Along with keeping employee theft to a minimum, TXB’s leadership team is also focused on ensuring all its stores are properly staffed, and employees' schedules are built according to customer demand.
Rick and his team recently began pulling in transaction counts by time of day, then cross-referenced these counts with payroll and timekeeping data. This allowed them to compare the number of clocked-in employees to the number of customers visiting each store, which highlighted trends and opportunities to better optimize staff schedules at multiple TXB locations.
Getting a Complete Overview of Operations
TXB plans to continue integrating TARGIT with new data sources. Most recently, they’ve done this with their third-party loyalty app.
Rick’s team now pushes data from the loyalty app into the point-of-sale system and then into the ERP database so they can use TARGIT to generate loyalty reports in-house. This new process reduces TXB’s dependency on the app developers to create reports, saving everyone valuable time and allowing them to take more control over their data.
Rick is also working on an all-encompassing dashboard for TXB's CEO, which will give him an overview of the entire business in a single view.
This dashboard will incorporate KPIs from all areas of the organization, including wholesale and retail operations, allowing executives to see the complete picture of operations and easily drill down into detailed insights for various departments, sale types, or even individual transactions.
