Case Study: Echelon Home Products saves 20 hours per week and speeds year-end budgeting with Fortra Automate

Automating Crystal Reports with Automate Saves 20 Hours per Week for Appliance Distributor

Echelon Home Products, a Richmond, B.C.–based wholesale distributor of luxury appliances, managed data across four SAP Business One databases and depended on dozens of Crystal Reports to share information with sales and management. Generating those weekly and monthly reports required at least 20 hours of manual work each week, caused recurring Monday network slowdowns, and led to repeated errors and time-consuming year-end budgeting.

Echelon deployed HelpSystems Automate to schedule and run Crystal Reports and Excel processes after hours using drag-and-drop, plain-English commands—no custom coding required. Automate now runs 110 weekly and 71 monthly reports unattended, saving about 20 hours per week (roughly half an IT salary), improving accuracy, accelerating year-end budgeting from days to under 90 minutes, and delivering timelier, more reliable reports.

Echelon Home Products

David Brown

Systems Analyst