Flexxaire reduces data gathering and analysis time by 90% with Zoho Analytics

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    10+Users
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    3Data Sources
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    90%Time Saved

"Zoho Analytics has reduced the time it takes to do analysis by 90%. Earlier we had to download all the data, cleanse it row by row, and finally do analysis. Now we just import, and then drag and drop as required. It takes just 10% of the time that we used to spend on improving our team's productivity."

Simone Drera
VP-Business Development, Flexxaire Inc.

About Flexxaire

Flexxaire, designs and manufactures reversible fans for diesel engines used in forestry, agricultural, mining, earthmoving, recycling, power generation, and waste management machinery. Manufactured at their Canadian plant, and with over 35 years of experience in the industry, Flexxaire reversible fans are appreciated by major companies like Caterpillar, and are sold worldwide through numerous local partnerships or directly from Canada.

Challenges: A simple BI tool for analytics

Simone Drera is the VP of business development at Flexxaire, and wanted to better track the performance of his business.

Flexxaire uses multiple pieces of software, like an MRP for sales data, Zoho CRM for projects, Google Analytics, Google Ads, and more. Simone was looking for a self-service BI platform that's simple, and understands the relationships between data to generate insights quickly.

Simone was using Microsoft Excel but found it extremely limiting for doing advanced analysis.

Flexxaire wanted a solution that could:

  • Import and blend data from multiple sources
  • Get actionable insight through reports and dashboards
  • Provide collaborative analytics with user-based permissions
Flexxaire reduces data gathering and analysis time by 90% with Zoho Analytics

"We wanted a simple BI solution to analyze our sales, project, and quality data. The tool also needed to be capable of integrating multiple tables, creating models to create charts that could be shared seamlessly across teams."

Simone Drera
VP-Business Development, Flexxaire Inc.

Solution: Zoho Analytics, the perfect tool for BI

Simone was already a customer of Zoho and was using products like Zoho CRM and Zoho Expense. He first evaluated Power BI after they decided to go for a BI tool, but since the integration with Zoho and other applications were not supported, they decided to look for alternatives. This brought him to Zoho Analytics.

He liked the simplicity of Zoho Analytics, and was impressed by its easy setup and sharing of reports and dashboards across multiple devices.

His main objective was to analyze sales and projects data. The company downloads their sales data from MRP systems as Excel files and uploads them into Zoho Analytics using automatic scripts for analysis, while Zoho CRM is used for managing projects and for quality reports.

The company uses Zoho Analytics to analyze the following:

  • Sales metrics,  like total sales, revenue by customer, market, or region, comparing sales data with previous years, current year sales vs. previous year sales, customers segmented by geographic regions, etc.
  • Project level metrics, like monthly project status, number of projects being handled at any given time, value of each project, status of the project, project due dates, and more.
  • Quality metrics, like NCR (non-conformance report) NCR reports, total errors/bugs in the product, etc.

"The Unified Business Analytics feature is amazing in Zoho Analytics. I like the way I can manage and merge tables from two different sources and create a more powerful chart. For example, I can have the sales by month with product number in one table and a second table with product type, location, and product number. Now I can analyze how much and what type of product I sell in which region for that month/week. Here Zoho Analytics creates a visualization using the product number as the link."

Analytics' features, like data visualizations, look-up functions, blending of data, the formula engine, interactive reports, and, collaboration, were all of great value for Flexxaire.

With Zoho Analytics, Flexxaire were able to identify and target top customers to focus on their needs and problems, enabling targeted marketing. This was critical in improving the bottom line for the company.

Since most of the analysis work is done through Zoho Analytics, the time taken for performing data analytics dropped by 90%. Now it just takes 10% of the time to perform analysis and get insights.

The dashboards created with Zoho Analytics are shared through user-based access with many users, including senior management, and multiple teams, across devices, anytime, anywhere.

Benefits & results

  • Time taken to perform data analytics dropped by 90%
  • Enabled targeted marketing through insights
  • Facilitated creation of insightful reports and dashboards
  • Enabled easy collaboration of reports across multiple devices, on the go