Commercial Printer Japs-Olson Transforms Reporting with arcplan

Japs-Olson Company was founded in 1907 as a small Minnesota printer, but has since grown to be a worldwide leader in direct mail services and commercial printing. Today, the company employs more than 700 people and provides services to clients nationwide.

Churning out paper reports has never been a challenge for Japs-Olson. But even a printing company should not have to produce a ream and a half of paper every morning just to keep departments up-to-date on the previous day's transactions. Japs-Olson needed a more viable business intelligence strategy, so CFO Gary Petrangelo took the reins and sought a software solution that could automate the company's massive reports without involvement from IT.

arcplan proved to be the ideal solution, with its affordability, ease of use for business people, and dynamic reports and dashboards that connect to multiple data sources. The first success came when arcplan dashboards were deployed to Japs-Olson's 8 executive shareholders.

"Before deploying arcplan, I spent a week and a half generating a multitude of different reports, trying to get to the bottom of a category that looked off compared to last year. I just kept thinking, 'Oh, I wish we had all these reports set up in arcplan already so we could have generated this report at a push of a button.'"

Gary Petrangelo, CFO, Japs-Olson Company

Japs-Olson's BI system based on arcplan Enterprise provides the company with:

  • Dynamic reports & dashboards that allow users to explore real time data and receive alerts when there is a discrepancy

  • Drill-down, data delivery, and data export for additional analyses - or printing, if someone really needs a paper report!

Click here to read an article from SearchCIO about the Japs-Olson story [PDF].