There’s no shortage of data at Mayline, a Wisconsin-based manufacturer of office furniture and storage products. But Mayline’s leaders had a problem: they needed a way to turn their data into actionable knowledge.
They found it with Sequel, an enterprise data access tool and reporting solution from Fortra.
Query/400 Wasn’t Enough
Mayline was using Query/400 for IBM i data access. However, the number of employees with Query/400 skills was on the decline—and the IT department was receiving more requests for data than ever before. Keeping up was a struggle. Plus, users were requesting access to data in Microsoft Excel at an increasing rate. And Query/400 made that a challenge.
When it came to reporting, Mayline was also plagued with many printed reports—despite efforts to automate some of those reports. RPG programming was required to create them, and that took too much time. IT needed a way to simplify reporting while delivering the results Mayline leaders count on.
User-Friendly Data Access and Reporting
With Sequel, Mayline got exactly what they were looking for: a powerful data access and reporting solution that works on their IBM i.
Business intelligence dashboards in Sequel make it easy for anyone to access information they need. All Mayline employees need to do is open the dashboard in Sequel’s user-friendly interface. Then, they can see information at a glance and zoom in on the level of detail they want via dynamic drill-down. Getting data results in Microsoft Excel takes just a click.
Sequel’s browser interface—Sequel Web Interface—also made it easy for Mayline to keep up with the demands having multiple locations. With Sequel, they can standardize their queries and share both queries and reports from headquarters in Wisconsin to their facility in Arkansas—and beyond.
Plus, Sequel maximizes on the existing SQL skills of Mayline staff to make reporting efficient.
We were very fortunate that our IT staff has very good SQL skills. That led to them readily adopting the tool and making us productive very, very quickly.
Eric Bushman, VP Information Technology, Mayline
Small Investment, Big Pay-Off
Mayline’s relatively small investment in Sequel paid off big time in process efficiency.
Today, everyone at Mayline counts on Sequel. That’s because Sequel is easy-to-use and takes care of the heavy lifting for them.
“Every user touches something from Sequel. It might be the shipping department using a printed document, supervisors using Sequel to monitor functions, or executives using it to analyze sales and profitability. We’re even using it for certain quick maintenance applications, such as reopening a shop order.”—Systems Development Manager at Mayline
Since Sequel has a browser interface, there’s not much of a learning curve for Mayline’s less technical users. The browser is intuitive and offers the same simple look and feel of all the other software Mayline users interface with every day.
Plus, by using Sequel instead of RPG programming, Mayline reduced the time spent on reports by 75 percent. A high-quality report can be turned out virtually automatically. Now the IT department can be more agile in responding to user needs.
For a relatively small investment, we gave a refresh to our capabilities to view our data—to the point where people now use these tools to make better decisions.
Eric Bushman, VP Information Technology, Mayline
Move on from Query/400 with Sequel
Sequel Data Access makes it easy to move on from Query/400 with data access and reporting on iSeries. Try it today and let the software speak for itself.