BPM: Can you give me some examples of decisions that are affected by those sorts of analyses?
Walsh: We plan our year using information coming out of Cognos. We have three rounds of budget forecasting process: We have the budget, which is normally done in August the previous year; and LE1 (LE stands for latest estimate) say April; and then LE2 in September/October. Basically we rerun the numbers, based on the economy, based on performance; come up with our new target; and measure the total in terms of sales and orders against the LE2. We take the total company number and break it down to the 50-plus markets.

BPM: You use the depletion information to look at product turnover, basically? And you budget based on that?
Walsh: We take the total company depletion number and break that out by market, based on who can deplete the most, who’s got strong business going. We try and put the volume targets in the right place. Then, based on that, we arrive at the annual sales target, taking into account the number of days that we are trying to plan the distributors out in terms of inventory, apply that against the depletion number, and give them each a sales target by market.

BPM: Any decisions that you’ve made differently because you’ve had access to this information?
Walsh: All our decisions are based on this. It’s a critical tool in our company.

BPM: Before you implemented Cognos, were you able to look at depletions in this way?
Schechter: The planning tool has only been around for a few years. And I think what I heard was that the reporting used to take several weeks to get all the information to Excel.
Walsh: It was very manual, requiring updates in Excel daily. And obviously with Excel there’s opportunity for errors and files changes. Cognos is just a very stable platform to share information across the company.
Schechter: And everybody can run reports whenever they want because the information is available to everyone. So now, when we get the data to load, it only takes a matter of an hour or so to load it, and then the reports are ready to go. Whereas, as Wayne said, before it was a very manual process. There was a higher margin for error. And that was true also for the distribution — it had to be manually e-mailed to people or put on a shared drive and people had to find it. Now it’s just right on our internal Web portal.

BPM: Who has access to information on depletions? Does everyone?
Walsh: Everyone in the company, yes. It’s the key performance indicator for the business.

BPM: Does that drive employee action and employee performance? Is compensation tied to it?
Walsh: Part of the sales force bonus is based on depletions. There are other elements, obviously: personal achievement and the total company hitting the global target. But a large part of the sales bonus is based on depletions in the market.

BPM: I believe you mentioned you have 50-plus markets. How are those broken down?
Schechter: It’s by state, each state having its own regulations for wines & spirits. In addition, California is broken up into Northern and Southern, and New York broken into Upstate New York and Metro New York.