Implementing Zoho Analytics led to a 200% boost in the Pickford's revenue

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    200%increase in revenue
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    2Data Sources

"Using Zoho Analytics was a huge step for us. It helped move the company into the new millennium in terms of how we handle data and reporting."

Steve Plosz
Information Technology Manager,
Pickford Group

The company

Pickford Group Ltd., founded in 1989, is a Canada-based industrial equipment distributor specializing in plant maintenance tools and flow control solutions for heavy industries. The company provides sales, rentals, and specialized equipment servicing for sectors such as oil and gas, petrochemicals, power generation, and mining. They also support customers with equipment supply, maintenance, calibration, and automation solutions to help improve operational efficiency and safety.

The challenge

Steve Plosz, Information Technology Manager at Pickford, was in a need of BI solution to integrate fragmented data, automate reporting, and provide visibility into operations, sales, and financial performance.

The company operated an ERP system known as AIMS ERP. They relied on AIMS for operational data, but its reporting capabilities were very limited. Reports lacked important filters, calculated fields, and customization options. Most reports generated were simply raw data exports. Users had to export multiple tables into Excel. And since it was not originally built on SQL Server, real-time data integration was not supported. The system dumped data into SQL Server twice per day, creating latency in reporting.

The interface and dashboards were outdated and difficult to use, as well, and they didn't provide contextual analysis or summarized insights. As a result, the ERP system mainly acted as a transactional database rather than an analytical tool.

The team also maintained data in multiple systems and formats such as ERP exports, Excel-based quoting, and cloud-hosted spreadsheets. Reporting was largely manual and Excel driven. To generate meaningful reports, the IT team had to manually consolidate data in Excel, relying on macros, index-match, and lookup functions to clean, merge, and restructure datasets before analysis. This process was time consuming, inefficient, error prone, and not scalable as the company grew.

Due to this scattered data, sales teams operating across western Canada often entered customer meetings without visibility into recent orders, rentals, returns, or service activities. This lack of information sometimes led to unexpected surprises in customer interactions, and the Flow Control Division that handles the procurement and distribution of industrial valves didn't have up-to-date insights on the inventory and sales.

As the company expanded its operations in the energy and plant maintenance equipment sector, leadership needed centralized dashboards and automated reporting to monitor performance and make faster, informed decisions.

Despite being a growing company, internal processes were still operating similar to practices from the 1980s. There was no modern analytics environment to transform raw operational data into insights.

Pickford Group case study

"Reporting meant endless Excel manipulation. I knew there had to be a better way than spending half my career copying, pasting, and messing around in Excel"

- Steve Plosz
Information Technology Manager, Pickford

Steve Plosz wanted a solution that:

  • Had advanced reporting and dashboards
  • Could combine and transform datasets into a unified analytical view
  • Automated report generation and supported scheduled reporting
  • Was scalable

The solution

After assessing various tools in the market, Plosz implemented Zoho Analytics. Initially it was implemented in two major divisions of the company: the Plant Maintenance Equipment Division and the Flow Control Division.

Plant Maintenance Equipment Division

This division handles equipment sales, rentals, and servicing. Data related to these was maintained in their ERP. The ERP exported data twice a day into an on-premise SQL Server database. Zoho Analytics then imported this data from SQL Server. This later became the primary data pipeline for core business data for sales orders, rentals, service activities and financial data.

Flow Control Division

This division focuses on valve procurement, sales, and custom valves for gas plants and industrial processes. Unlike the rest of the company, this division initially created quotes in Excel instead of the ERP, which required additional integration work. The Excel quote file was moved to Google Cloud. Through Zoho Analytics' native integration, it was connected to the Google Cloud file, and then data from the spreadsheet was blended with ERP data inside Zoho Analytics.

Once data from multiple sources was imported, Zoho Analytics was used to blend ERP and Excel datasets, clean and transform the data, build structured data models, and create automated dashboards and reports.

An extensive set of dashboards were created:

  • Sales & order pipeline dashboard: Tracked quotations, confirmed orders, listed open orders, and showed order status
  • Customer activity dashboard: Provided visibility into customer purchase history, quotations, and account performance
  • Order aging & fulfillment dashboard: Identified delayed orders and tracked fulfillment timelines
  • Sales rep performance dashboard: Showed sales activity, revenue contribution, and pipeline by representative
  • Asset & equipment tracking dashboard: Monitored equipment inventory, asset details, and usage history
  • Service & maintenance dashboard: Tracked service requests, work orders, and service performance
  • Project monitoring dashboard: Provided oversight for large service projects and equipment deployments
  • Transaction & asset history dashboard: Combined asset master data with transaction records for deeper analysis

With the insights from these dashboards, outside and inside sales teams were in sync. Outside sales team gained near real-time access to customer data before visiting clients, inside sales teams reduced time spent manually pulling data for the field team, and the sales managers could monitor pipeline performance and sales activity.

After seeing the benefits achieved by these two divisions, the adoption of Zoho Analytics evolved gradually within the organization.

Zoho Analytics facilitated smarter warehouse and service operations. The company created priority-based repair reports for warehouse work. The reports identified which tools should be repaired first, highlighted tools not ready for rent, and helped teams focus on high-priority assets. This ensured rental equipment availability remained high, teams worked on the most critical items first, and nothing fell through the cracks.

To optimize the rental fleet, they built rental utilization dashboards that tracked how often equipment is rented, identified high-performing product lines, and highlighted underutilized assets. This gave them insight on which equipment to invest more in and which assets were underperforming.

He also created dashboards for project and contract monitoring. This enabled the team to track large customer contracts and projects. This dashboard gave insight into project-wise order tracking, equipment status, shipment status, and order status.

The finance team uses Zoho Analytics to forecast vendor payments, track future cash flow obligations, and plan finances based on incoming orders and purchase commitments. This facilitated better financial visibility and planning accuracy.

Insights from these dashboards and reports are distributed through multiple mechanisms within Zoho Analytics to department managers, teams, and ground-level users. Some receive automated email reports, some are delivered as PDFs, and some are scheduled daily, weekly, or monthly.

Plosz mentions data interaction and collaboration features as his favorites. Previously, inside sales teams CC'd every quote via email to outside sales reps. This created hundreds of unnecessary emails, and tracking important opportunities was cumbersome. After Zoho Analytics, quotes were tracked in interactive dashboards. This made it effortless for sales teams to focus only on high-value opportunities.

Pickford Group case study

"Zoho seemed like the right fit, and it’s actually proven to be the right fit for us. It gave us a way to finally bring all of our data together and automate the reporting we rely on to run the business. Before Zoho Analytics, we were really running the business like it was the 1980s."

- Steve Plosz
Information Technology Manager, Pickford Group

Benefits and ROI

By implementing Zoho Analytics, Pickford transformed BI from simple reporting into a central operational intelligence platform by automating reporting, improving decision-making, optimizing asset utilization, and giving every department near real-time visibility into business performance. After adopting Zoho Analytics, the company experienced a dramatic 200% surge in revenue.