Dial needed a solution that would: improve sales performance, establish more effective sales promotions and product distribution strategies, reduce IT support and increase agility, and lower costs: new requirements for data were expensive and slow to turn around.

Ace tracked which products retailers ordered, when they were ordered and shipped. However, the company could not track or forecast actual sales. Data used for reporting was up to a one-week old, owing to performance and data cleansing issues. Requirement to integrate wholesale and inventory data with POS data to help drive key business decisions, improve category management, lower inventory costs and optimize pricing. Reliance on custom coding to integrate POS data was excessively resource intensive and led to major performance constraints.