Bigelow Tea, distributors of over 50 varieties of traditional, flavored, iced, decaffeinated and herbal teas, always needs accurate and timely figures indicating sales and consumer trends. The introduction of new varieties of tea depends heavily on understanding these patterns.

Bigelow Tea has always recognized the importance of such data but was finding that their IT department was being overwhelmed with frequent and new queries from its sales, marketing and finance people.  It was important to replace their existing analysis tool, which only IT specialists could understand, with a new tool which could be used by the sales, marketing and finance departments to generate their own queries.

Melanie Dower, of Bigelow Tea, knew RapidDecision could help.“We trust Andrews”, says Melanie, “we enjoy working with them and have had success with their recommendations in the past”.

A top requirement was that the analysis software could be learned easily by people who were not technologists.

RapidDecision installed Business Objects Enterprise 6, which appealed to the sales, marketing and finance users because of its similarities to Microsoft’s Excel.

Users are now able to drill deeper into any information, to help them understand the figures behind the business issues.

Bigelow Tea can now compare current trends with those of five years ago, and to monitor the effect of promotional campaigns - activities that were not possible with their previous system.