INDUSTRY WATCH: January/February 2016
ECRS has announced the release of Briefcase, an online analytical processing decision support system. This is designed to solve the problem when a retailer has a surplus of data, but no timely way to quickly transform the data into useful information.
Briefcase is available to all Catapult 5.3 or higher retail customers. It complements Catapult’s existing backoffice functionalities, including centralized, bidirectional multistore data synchronization and Catapult Web Office, which comes standard with over 300 best-practice reports, and Catapult Dash, a built-in business inteligence visualization dashboard.
“To run at optimal levels, modern businesses need digestible information from different perspectives within the organization,” explains ECRS President and CEO Pete Catoe. “Catapult Web Office already has powerful analytic capability with its transactional and visual business intelligence reporting tools. Briefcase adds another layer of sophistication for power users who want to extract, pivot, and dive deeper into their extensive Catapult transactional data, empowering them to make more informed, impactful business decisions.”
The company also launched CATAPULT (CAT-U) University Online. This is a self-paced training program that prepares retail employees to properly use the CATAPULT system. Online basic, advanced, and power course categories build on each other in complexity, with completion times varying based on the topic and ranging anywhere from 10 minutes to one hour. All coursework takes an average of 22 to 24 hours to complete. Managers can monitor and manage employee- assigned courses and view earned grades. The online program avoids having to pay to get new hires trained on the system.
CAT-U Online is available at no additional charge to all ECRS customers who maintain an active support and customer care package.