Pulse LLC saves thousands of hours with embedded Zoho Analytics

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    700+Users
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    2Data Sources
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    1000's of hoursTime Saved

"Zoho Analytics gives us a superior edge over Power BI and Tableau, when it comes to the aesthetics of visualization. ‌Also, the 5.0 features are a big step forward for an already robust Zoho Analytics platform. ‌With Zoho DataPrep, we're now looking to streamline our ETL processes and move towards a leaner ETL framework. We're very happy with Zoho’s capability."

Connor Nobert
Director of Analytics and Technology, Pulse LLC

About Pulse LLC

Pulse LLC, is a retail service provider. For nearly a decade, Pulse has been helping retailers and manufacturers to increase profitable sales growth. They specialize in retail environments where a meaningful connection between staff and customers is required to deliver remarkable customer experiences. They have positively impacted more than 1.5 million retail associates and 70,000+ retail outlets globally. They work directly with 50 of the world's top 200 consumer electronics, liquor, and appliance brands. The company provides proprietary technology, go-to-market strategy, and brand-content development, targeting direct and indirect sales channels for its customers.

The challenge: Data from multiple sources

Pulse LLC wanted to offer analytics within its product, because they run behavioral analytics of employees and customers in retail stores, and then help those stores grow their sales. They needed to analyze different data, like sales data, field team visit data, store location data, and inventory data, all in one place. This was in order to help their clients understand the ROI from their sales and marketing efforts.

Secondly, they wanted a BI app which could seamlessly be embedded within their product.

Pulse LLC wanted a solution that could:

  • Import and blend data from multiple applications
  • Analyze and create insightful departmental and organization-wide reports
  • Embed seamlessly within their product
  • Enable secure sharing of reports with user-based permissions
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"Ultimately, profitable sales growth is a critical KPI for nearly every organization. We help our clients optimize the drivers behind profitable sales growth while reducing overhead. To achieve these goals, we collect a large variety of data for our clients (sales data, sales team activity, customer data and more). All these metrics are analyzed and presented to the client in various formats to enable decision making and action. For this, we wanted a powerful BI solution that could be embedded within our product seamlessly and securely."

Connor Nobert
Director of Analytics and Technology, Pulse LLC

The solution: Embedded analytics

Nobert tried all the industry-leading BI tools, but still wasn't satisfied. In 2017, he evaluated Qlik and Tableau, but chose embedded Zoho Analytics because it allowed them to white label seamlessly within their product, and also securely deliver dashboards to their users. Other vendors had a licensing fee to enable secure collaboration features like this.

The company also did a buy vs build study, and found out the cost involved in buying Zoho Analytics over weighs the build option. Given its value for money, frequent product updates, and innovative and robust features, the company decided to go with Zoho Analytics.

Though other teams in the company were using Power BI and Tableau, Nobert always felt that the data visualizations provided by Zoho Analytics were top notch and ranked above these two competitors.

Pulse LLC brings in data from Microsoft SQL Server, their main DB, and Microsoft Azure. They have pipelines that feed data through emails, API, and FTP data into SQL, and then into Zoho. Now the company is looking forward to leveraging the new Zoho DataPrep to consolidate their pipeline.‌ Zoho DataPrep will allow them to reduce manual data cleansing and cut down on clunky, additional scripts used for transforming the data.

Since implementing Zoho, they've gone on to generate a wide range of key reports for their clients, including:

  • Sales analytics:  Sales by period, by product, by location, field visit information, etc.
  • All-in-one scorecards: Robust dashboards for clients
  • Inventory metrics: Product inventory status, overall stock levels, and much more

"Zoho Analytics is definitely a critical part of the value add we deliver to our customers. It's crucial for our analytics operation, as we use Zoho Analytics for almost all our data visualization and analysis. Our clients are very impressed by the high-quality visualizations and the insights they are able to quickly glean from them. The key takeaways are that it's easy for our clients to see and take action. This BI tool has allowed our engineers to focus on our core competencies while providing constant insights for optimization."

Nobert and his team appreciate features like the many visualization options, tabbed dashboards, query tables, aggregate formulas, and more.

All the reports and dashboards are embedded in the company's application seamlessly, and sometimes shared through URLs. The company often leverages collaboration features like email schedulers and alerts to inform clients of any unexpected failures.

According to Nobert, the main benefit in Zoho Analytics is that he's now able to track not only the day-to-day operations, but also the performance of his clients, like ROI.

Another benefit for Nobert is that, with Zoho Analytics, the company has saved thousands of hours of labor which would have been spent on building a BI solution internally. Now with the Zoho Analytics embedded solution, he can focus on his core product.

Benefits & results

  • Saved thousands of hours in building a BI solution in house
  • Enabled the tracking of strategic sales growth of clients at the click of a button
  • Offers seamless embedding within existing solutions
  • Enabled secure sharing of dashboards across locations and devices