Allied Office Products Thrives in Competitive Market Using Ascential Software to Profit from Intelligent Information
Monday October 20, 11:26 am ET
Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite is the One Data Integration Platform Used by the 'OneSolution' Office Products Company
WESTBORO, Mass., Oct. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Allied Office Products, the largest independent dealer of office goods and services in the United States, has increased sales and improved customer service by using solutions from Ascential Software (Nasdaq: ASCL - News), the enterprise data integration leader. Allied Office Products can now effectively mine its enterprise systems for customer information and implement solutions that offer better connectivity and new services for its customer base.
To enable these new capabilities, the Ascential(TM) Enterprise Integration Suite and Ascential Real-Time Integration Services (RTI Services) provide the underlying infrastructure for OneSolution, Allied Office Products' innovative business management system. OneSolution links customer service, supply chain and order processing solutions in real-time to maximize cost saving, efficiency and customer satisfaction in a competitive, fragmented market.
The Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite profiles, cleanses and transforms customer data from disparate enterprise systems and consolidates it in a central data warehouse. The company is using Ascential ProfileStage(TM) and QualityStage(TM) to identify and eliminate duplicate records, incomplete fields, and other anomalies in its OneSolution system. Employees get on-the- fly error reports that identify redundant entries and notify sales and service representatives of missing data. This master data management approach yields consistent, reliable information and deeper insights into its customer base and sales trends.
Ascential Real-Time Integration Services allow Allied Office Products to offer real-time customer service, order processing and supply chain management. For instance, Allied Office Products is exploiting the Web services capabilities of Ascential RTI Services to let customers rapidly process returns online. The Ascential Software solution plays a pivotal role in deploying and managing these services by creating a link back to the company's enterprise systems and integrating the data, according to Ken DesRochers, senior vice president of information technology at Allied Office Products.
"Ascential Software helped us gain the elusive 360-degree view of our customer that many companies strive for but too few achieve," said DesRochers. "This is helping us significantly improve our responsiveness, customer intimacy and product and service offerings. This is how we differentiate and succeed in an aggressive market populated with many competitors ranging from small operations to national office supply superstores."
DesRochers explains that the challenge in achieving one cohesive view of the customer was that customer data was dispersed among three disparate systems, including Oracle 9i, running on a Solaris SPARC system and supporting Allied's e-commerce Web site; Salesforce.com, the company's Web-based customer-relationship management (CRM) system; and, for financials, a custom- built legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, running on an IBM AIX RS/6000 system with a UniData database.
After evaluating various data integration point products, Allied Office Products selected the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite for the completeness of its solution, its interoperability with the company's heterogeneous existing IT systems, and its Web services capabilities. "Having access to a complete, fully integrated solution from one vendor was a major plus in terms of managing our risk," said DesRochers. "I had confidence that the data profiling, quality, and transformation solutions were fully integrated and optimized. This reduces the cost and potential pitfalls of assembling point products from multiple vendors, and that's important.
"Allied Office Products is a clear example of the strategic role IT should play within an organization," said Mark Register, vice president and chief marketing officer at Ascential Software. "Ken and his team have fundamentally changed the way their company operates and created measurable business value using innovative data integration solutions from Ascential Software. This linkage between the board room and back room objectives and initiatives is critical. We applaud Allied for its imaginative application of our technology."
About Allied Office Products
Founded in 1947 and based in Clifton, N.J., Allied provides office supplies, furniture, coffee and beverage, print and promotional products to clients of varying size and across a range of industries. Operating primarily in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, the company has 17 sales offices throughout the United States. Allied has acquired 29 companies since 1998, and the company's strategy of acquisitions and organic growth has yielded a robust 60 percent annual revenue growth rate, reaching sales of about $300 million in 2001.
About Ascential Software
Ascential Software Corporation is the leading provider of enterprise data integration solutions to organizations worldwide. Customers use the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite to integrate and leverage data across all transactional, operational, and analytical applications with confidence in the accuracy, completeness and timeliness of critical information. Ascential Software's powerful data profiling, data quality, data transformation, parallel processing, meta data and connectivity solutions enable customers to reduce total cost of ownership and increase return on IT investment. Headquartered in Westboro, Mass., Ascential Software has offices worldwide and supports more than 3,000 customers in such industries as financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, consumer goods, retail, and government. More information on Ascential Software can be found on the Web at www.ascential.com.
Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This release contains forward-looking statements based on current expectations or beliefs, as well as a number of assumptions about future events, and these statements are subject to important factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements in this release address a variety of subjects including, for example, the functionality, characteristics and performance capabilities of Ascential's products and technology, including but not limited to the ability of Ascential's products to profile, clean and transform customer data from disparate enterprise systems for centralized consolidation and the ability of Ascential's customers to improve performance by offering real-time customer services, order processing and supply chain management. The following factors, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in these forward-looking statements: risks relating to the ability of Ascential to expand its market share, growth rates for the enterprise data integration software market, the scope and frequency of data integration projects, the ability of customers to improve performance utilizing Ascential's products, integration/divestiture issues resulting from merger/acquisition activities, general business conditions in the software industry, the technology sector, and in the domestic and international economies, rapid technological change in the markets served by Ascential, dependence on international operations, and difficulties that Ascential may experience integrating technologies, operations and personnel of completed or future acquisitions. For a detailed discussion of these and other cautionary statements, please refer to the filings made by Ascential with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including, without limitation, the most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. Ascential disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statements made herein to reflect any change in Ascential's expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions, or circumstances on which such statements are based.
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Source: Ascential Software |
