“I was thrilled”, says Egbert Veit, impressed with DeltaMaster. Within three days he had set up a productive Business Intelligence solution. “I would never have imagined such fast implementation”, he adds.

In 2012, when Veit joined Deuter as commercial director, he encountered a rudimentary BI system that could not meet the needs of the rapidly growing company. Deuter produces rucksacks, sleeping bags and accessories for several thousand customers in Germany, mainly sports equipment sellers, as well as for independent importers in more than 50 countries.

Deuter urgently needed a modern BI system for financial and sales controlling that also facilitated the affiliation of additional companies. What especially mattered to Veit was flexibility when creating reports, as he wanted to set up customer contribution margin accounting by region and product with detailed drill-down, as well as profit-center calculation.

With the previous solution, this was not possible, and many reports had to be created manually in Excel. From his time in another company, Veit already knew the BI solution DeltaMaster that had won a tender against  many other BI providers and served him well.

A small team of two staff members from Bissantz, Deuter and the ERP supplier each, embarked on the pilot project and delivered the first real-data report after only three days. The team devised, for example, a comprehensive invoice table, which not only shows fundamental KPI such as volume and revenue but also detailed rebate nuances, including product and header discounts. Veit relates: “I was impressed that we could implement even our special requirements concerning rebates. The first reports were already delivered the next day.” Most of the reports defined during the pilot project were immediately used in daily business and are still in use.

The project advanced at a high speed mainly thanks to DeltaMaster ETL, a Bissantz tool used in the context  of data takeover to build models and transformational procedures. This almost completely automates the laborious processes related to the creation of OLAP databases and the necessary preparatory work on relational data sources. The conceptional workshop and prototyping could therefore focus on content, as the actual implementation time was reduced to parameterizing the meta data for tables and cubes. DeltaMaster also served as the front end – this time not for businessrelated tasks, but to create and maintain new models.

Following the data-modeling and reportcreation phase, twenty initial report recipients as well as the company management were instantly won over by valid figures and many new possibilities for reporting with DeltaMaster. Veit recalls: “It helped immensely that the figures were correct from the outset and rapidly brought new insights. We immediately generated added value”.

The efficiency of the new system has also paid off in the longer term: “We have faster results, better reports, and we can finally rely on the figures”, he adds. “Some analyses used to take a whole day, now we have them at the push of a button.”

According to Veit, one highlight in DeltaMaster is variance analysis, which was very complicated in the past. “With DeltaMaster, we can now realize variance analyses comfortably and very fast.” In DeltaMaster’s Graphical Tables users can directly examine and drill into variances – within a report – to investigate their causes.

Deuter’s sales team uses this method to understand where sales, broken down by customer or article, are collapsing and to prepare for meetings with customers. Further highlights of the BI solution are profit-center calculations or key-account analyses – for Veit “two of the many useful dimensions of DeltaMaster”.

• Standardized application setup with DeltaMaster ETL
• Fast transition from prototype to productive system
• Interactive variance analysis

• Market leader for sports rucksacks
• Engagement for sustainability (Bluesign System Partner, Fair Wear Foundation, Alliance for Sustainable Textiles/Bündnis für nachhaltige Textilien)
• Founded in Augsburg in 1898
• Part of the Schwan-STABILO Group