When I got here three and a half years ago, the budgeting and planning process had reached its breaking point in Excel, and needed to be revamped. We had hundreds of Excel-linked spreadsheets so that made going deep into the data for our sales planning difficult. I considered the bigger players like SAP, but we don't have a large IT group. So I looked at options that wouldn't take up a lot of their time. It was clear finance would be administering this tool so we chose Host Analytics' SaaS approach vs. an in-house product.

We wanted to be able to dig down into the information based on three dimensions: channel/customer; product category/SKU; and direct store delivery operations. We needed to be able to examine details such as how our fundraising and catering were doing; how pastries and bagels were selling; and the intricacies of running our 50 mini-warehouses. We couldn't do this in Excel.

Also, we needed a reliable data repository. No matter how good someone is at keeping up a spreadsheet, having that information siloed causes problems. We wanted a solution that would allow for broader participation in the process and enable the appropriate people to directly input data.

For instance, we wanted the regional sales managers, who are on the road a lot, to be able to update the company's [centralized] sales models. That's hard to do without a Web interface.