ZAP CUSTOMER SUCCESS

BACKGROUND

TradeGlobal is an end-to-end e-commerce provider, offering a full range of services, solutions and systems tailored to meet clients’ specific needs. They partner with leading brands in the e-commerce community, absorb-ing the technical and logistical aspects of managing a business online and leveraging their experience to create efficiencies of time and cost for their clients. Their best-in-class services include: Demandware website development, content management, photography and design, strategy and analytics within all areas of e-commerce marketing—supported by domestic and global fulfillment, logistics and customer care.

TRADEGLOBALOne Embarcadero Center, Suite 730 San Francisco, CA 94111+1 415 889 5740

www.zapbi.com

• INDUSTRY

E-commerce Fulfillment• NO. OF EMPLOYEES

501-1000• LOCATION

Cincinnati, Ohio• PRODUCT

MS Dynamics AX• WEBSITE

tradeglobal.com

BUSINESS PROBLEM

Prior to their adoption of ZAP BI TradeGlobal could only provide subscription based reports to clients via email. Clients expected a web-based reporting platform that was much easier for self-ser-vice BI. They needed standard reporting and a way to provide security and authentication to isolate external clients’ data in a multi-tenant environment. They also wanted a platform that would speed up their development time and ZAP’s close ties to AX was an incentive as well.

TECHNICAL SITUATION

TradeGlobal had limited reporting resources with the technical under-standing of both AX and how best to design reports. While internal personnel had OLTP experience there was little OLAP management experience. ZAP was a welcome answer to be able to build an AX cube with inherent relationship detection and enumerations built in for the AOS instances.

SOLUTION

ZAP was the answer for Trade-Global as their complete solution was intuitive and allowed for rapid report development. ZAP’s inte-gration to their Active Directory security groups allowed for secure external client authorization in a multi-tenant environment. This was imperative for a solution and it was made very easy through the manage permissions feature with internal security groups. The AX version was 2009.

TradeGlobal were able to embed ZAP into client portals they built on Sharepoint 2010. ZAP made the cube building an easy process on Analysis Services 2008 R2.

Clients could log into the portal with existing user names and al-lowed for a single sign on between existing internal infrastructure, Sharepoint, and ZAP.

The reporting they developed allowed clients to be able to get insight into Sales/Returns revenue, Inventory, Shipping Stats, monitor KPI’s, and obtain insights about Demand and Customer Behavior.

With newer versions of ZAP BI, they will be implementing some functionality that has been built-in and allow for more complex statisti-cal computations.

TradeGlobal also purchased an En-terprise license to be able to scale out users and charge clients on a per seat basis to cover costs.

BENEFITS

■ Speed of development for reporting. When on-board-ing new clients, all existing reporting is instantaneously available and clients are able to monitor and manage KPI’s from the moment they have production data.

■ Self-Service BI. With a us-er-friendly interface and easy access using TradeGlobal’s Single Sign On, clients could now log into the portal to obtain rapid insight into busi-ness-critical data.

■ Overall Savings. TradeGlobal anticipates that by buying their BI versus having a custom solution built, they will see a costs savings of $230,000 for the first two years, with an on-going savings of $90,000 per year after that.

“ZAP has quickly become heavily relied upon by our internal users as well as external clients.” Eric Skidmore, Data Analyst