Infor > Case Studies > Pilot Flying J refuels its analytics with Infor Birst

Pilot Flying J refuels its analytics with Infor Birst

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Infor Birst
Infor CloudSuite Financials
Infor CloudSuite HCM
Infor CloudSuite Workforce Management
Infor CloudSuite Distribution

Tech Stack

Cloud-based applications
Mobile analytics
Data integration

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings
Customer Satisfaction

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics

Applicable Industries

Retail

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing
Business Operation

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Inventory Management
Predictive Quality Analytics

Services

Data Science Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Pilot Flying J, a Berkshire company, is the largest operator of travel centers in North America with more than 750 locations in 44 states and six Canadian provinces. Headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, the company employs more than 28,000 people. CEO Jimmy Haslam has embraced technology and moved Pilot Flying J in new directions, leading the company's growth from 1.1 billion fuel gallons sold in 1996 to more than 7 billion sold annually today. Pilot Flying J serves more than 1.6 million guests a day and is committed to connecting people and places with comfort, care, and a smile at every stop.

The Challenge

Pilot Flying J, the largest operator of travel centers in North America, embarked on an IT modernization program to replace 25 different IT systems. The company wanted to replace its existing disparate systems with a suite of cloud-based Infor applications. The goal was to spend more time with its guests and for team members to spend less time on administrative or infrastructure-related activities. Once many of the Infor applications were live, Pilot Flying J turned its attention to analytics. The company wanted to replace a large and complex landscape of old, difficult-to-use legacy analytics tools, which had previously caused data analysis to be performed in silos. Pilot Flying J also wanted to integrate all of its Infor data with non-Infor sourced data to provide a more complete view of business performance and share that information with all 28,000 employees via a company portal called “PFJ Today”.

The Solution

Pilot Flying J implemented Infor Birst to transform its analytical capabilities. This provided joined-up analytics across all of its operational systems including financials, HCM, workforce management, and asset management. This enabled all of Pilot Flying J’s 28,000 employees to easily see the performance of the company and its travel center in real-time. The company also rolled out Birst mobile analytics to its store, restaurant, and regional executives so they can make data-driven decisions, while on the floor where they can ensure key products are on the shelves, talk to customers, and help everything run smoothly. Employees can access store sales reports as well as profit and loss data on Apple® iPads® and mobile phones. Birst’s consumer-grade user interface enables users of all skill levels to understand their contribution to sales and make immediate changes when required—without leaving the store front.

Operational Impact

Pilot Flying J has seen a dramatic improvement in the time taken to run the monthly close reports. A report is run for all 750 stores in the company. Before Birst, that process took over twelve hours, making it hard to re-run when changes happened. With Birst, the same workload takes five minutes.
The functionality in the Birst dashboards and reports not only provides a great deal of flexibility in enabling employees to understand how their store is performing and where they can focus their efforts, but it has also enabled Pilot Flying J to retire hundreds of legacy reports and reduce a considerable amount of technical debt.
One innovation of the new Birst dashboards is that Pilot Flying J has embedded sales best practices into the dashboards themselves to act as a coach to less experienced employees. If an employee notices that a product line is falling behind its sales target, the dashboard will advise key tips for achieving sales success.

Quantitative Benefit