1. What are the business benefits of BI deployments such as those implemented by Avnet and Quaker Chemical? What roles do data and business processes play in achieving those benefits?
2. What are the main challenges to the change of mindset required to extend BI tools beyond mere reporting? What can companies do to overcome them? Use examples from the case to illustrate your answer.
3. Both Avnet and Quaker Chemical implemented systems and processes that affect the practices of their salespeople. In which ways did the latter benefit from these new implementations? How important was their buy-in to the success of these projects? Discuss alternative strategies for companies to foster adoption of new systems like these.

Jim Honerkamp, CIO of Hillman Group, is proud of his new business intelligence (BI) system. Why not? It is much better than what came before. In the bad old days, executives looking for sales information, for example, had to ask one of Honerkamp’s programmers to make a manual database query to pull the numbers from the company’s legacy systems. The lag time made the charts “stale the minute they came out,” according to Honerkamp, whose company is a $380 million manufacturer and distributor of engraving technologies and hardware, such as keys and signs.