Case Study: ReaderLink achieves faster, accurate self-service BI and a Publisher Portal with Information Builders' WebFOCUS

ReaderLink Turns a New Page With WebFOCUS

ReaderLink, the nation’s premier paperback and hardcover book distributor with roughly $600 million in annual sales, was hindered by disparate legacy AS/400 systems that produced inconsistent numbers and slow, manual reporting. The company needed a way to share, analyze, and distribute reliable, timely information across sales, marketing, warehouse teams and external partners—without the time and cost of building a full enterprise data warehouse.

ReaderLink implemented Information Builders’ WebFOCUS with a federated “no-warehouse” approach, creating SQL Server staging areas, self-service dashboards, and a Publisher Portal for external partners, with Professional Services and training to accelerate deployment. The project delivered six BI dashboards in six months, gave hundreds of publishers instant visibility into sales and inventory, reclaimed analyst time (formerly ~40 hours/week), and improved decision-making, supply-chain efficiency and partner relationships across the organization.

ReaderLink

Kyle Marx

Director of Business Analytics