Case Study: Staples Promotional Products achieves lower enterprise reporting costs and a unified reporting standard with Information Builders' WebFOCUS

Staples Promotional Products Adopts WebFOCUS as Its Corporate Standard

Staples Promotional Products, a division of Staples that creates and distributes branded merchandise for roughly 350 Fortune 1000 companies and many smaller clients, faced a fragmented reporting environment: IT teams and business users were creating reports in multiple tools (DB2, Cognos Impromptu, Access, Excel, custom web forms), which kept the IT department constantly writing and maintaining reports and drove up costs. With 22 IT staff supporting about 1,000 employees and hundreds of hosted sites, Staples needed a consistent, easy-to-use reporting platform that would enable broader self-service and lower reporting overhead.

Staples implemented Information Builders’ WebFOCUS (with Professional Services and training), built a SQL Server data warehouse and ETL processes, and trained developers and power users to create parameterized, distributable reports using ReportCaster. The result was a common enterprise reporting standard that empowered end users to run and customize reports, reduced the IT reporting burden, enabled automated report distribution and external customer access, and positioned WebFOCUS as the company’s corporate reporting platform with ongoing ROI as adoption grows.

Staples Promotional Products

Mark Sullivan

IT Director