Karmak Embeds Self-Service From Logi Symphony to Empower Customers With Modern BI Capabilities

Background

The Customer: Business management solution provider for the commercial transportation industry

Industry: Transportation

The Challenge: Bolt-on approach for analytics capabilities was not keeping pace with customer demand

The Solution: Logi Symphony

The Results: Users across a range of roles and skill levels can easily analyze data or create their custom dashboards

Customer feedback has been positive, and users

About Karmak

Karmak, Inc. is a leading provider of business management solutions for the commercial transportation industry. With 35 years of experience developing business systems software for the heavy-duty truck market, the company serves more than 1,500 sales, service, and parts locations across North America.

The Challenge

Karmak needed an analytics solution to replace Business Intelligence, the reporting platform built for their legacy business systems. Developed and iterated over the past 13 years, Business Intelligence provides real-time self-service reporting capabilities to Karmak customers at many disparate locations and with a wide range of technical expertise.

As analytics solutions have evolved over the years, Karmak slowly updated Business Intelligence, improving its look and feel and adding new features. However, this “bolt-on” approach proved inadequate for keeping pace with their customers’ demands for next-generation data reporting capabilities.

The Solution

Karmak decided to embed Self-Service from Logi Symphony because it enabled them to offer the same level of functionality and would quickly update the user interface of their tool.

“We were able to take the Logi Symphony solution out of the box without modifying a lot,” Gardner said. “It gave us ease of use and helped to update the look and feel of our reporting solution when compared to Business Intelligence. We didn’t have to go through the process of redesigning the system ourselves.”

The joining capabilities of SSM were a big draw for Karmak because their Legacy solution didn’t allow users to join data objects across components. Additionally, Karmak appreciated Logi Symphony’s out-of-the-box support for multiple web platforms (e.g., Internet Explorer, Firefox).

They were also able to integrate SSM with their business system permission structure so users could continue using their login credentials from the legacy application.

The Results

About 90 Karmak customers are now using the next-generation tool, Fusion Report Writer. These customers encompass a wide range of users, and SSM is easily accessible to all of them, regardless of their role or skill level. For instance, executives and dealership owners may use the tool to view dashboards on high-level accounting data; service managers might want to see the number of open repair orders at their shops and create their dashboards based on this data; and technicians prefer to see this data on an even more granular level so they know what orders to fill next.

“We’re getting a range of feedback so far that the look and feel of the solution and the ease of building dashboards and charts is really a step ahead,” Gardner said.

Gardner explained that certain customers prefer to designate an IT expert to implement the tool and distribute custom reports to their users. However, at the same time, many customers want the ability to give individuals access to build their reports using managed data sets—and that’s exactly what SSM enables them to do.