UK’s Birch Group Replaces Crystal Reports with Logi Info to Help Lead Channel Marketing Services Market

About The Birch Group

The Birch Group was founded in the UK in 1992 to provide channel marketing services to manufacturing organizations that need to manage their critical marketing partnerships more effectively. The firm’s infrastructure, processes and resources have been developed solely to excel and lead in the channel marketing field. They continue to evolve to meet new demands of the industry enabling organizations to maximize business returns. The Birch Group’s focus is on increasing partner loyalty through channel marketing programs and decreasing client overhead commitments by the application of best practices.

Birch’s services deliver high returns for Channel investments. This success is based on Partner Management & Communication, POS Data Management and Channel Marketing Programs. Their hosted Channel Marketing Programs are typically focused on co-op marketing funds, marketing development, sales incentives, rebate programs, and partner certification programs.

The impressive client base the Birch Group has developed is a direct result of their commitment to providing core services from a stable portfolio with a proven track record and by their discipline of injecting innovative technologies and flexibility into their solution development and implementation.

The Birch Group's Challenge

The Birch Group discovered LogiXML in a search for an alternative reporting platform to Crystal Enterprise, which had become very expensive to use and technically challenging to implement in client applications.

The LogiXML Solution

“We evaluated products from a host of vendors on the basis of product functionality, ease of implementation–a pure Web-based platform was essential–and, very importantly, on cost,” said Birch IT Manager Andy Weir. ”LogiXML not only talked about how capable Logi Info was, they showed us. The demonstration of their “Dashboarding” capability was impressive and we are including that feature in our new projects wherever applicable.”

Weir has been especially impressed with the capabilities of the Analysis Grid feature of Logi Info to add value for their clients and with the report scheduling features, which support delivering data to users exactly when they need it.

New Birch Group projects are incorporating the Dashboarding capability to allow channel partners to quickly evaluate their status along several critical dimensions like: click through traffic; web site visits; accreditation status, marketing funding; revenue generated; certification status; business plan status and many more elements.

The Results

“The Birch Group is a ‘value-added’ services firm that helps organization bring their channel management applications to market quickly,” notes Tony White, Managing Director of the Birch Group. “We typically deliver systems within six months that internal IT groups estimate at 24 months. The ease of use of Logi Info contributes our ability to meet our “time to market” standards and the pure Web-based interface allow us to add more value by supporting outstanding reporting capabilities.”

Tony White adds, “It is difficult to overestimate the value to both parties of a dashboard that instantly provides a snapshot of the status of the relationship of a vendor and a channel partner. The
Web-based LogiXML reporting interface, combined with the data generated by our applications, creates a business bond based on information and trust that is unlikely to break. Executing this class of application sets the Birch Group far apart from any would-be competitor.”