Blue Agave's applications are designed to be rapidly and easily deployed, with minimal IT or business user resources and zero impact to your existing IT infrastructure. The flexible design of the software, coupled with our phased implementation approach ensures that your organization is up-and-running and realizing measurable business benefit within 45-60 days.

Each application is built with pre-enabled business rules and parameters, which are easily adapted to your organization's specific business practices during implementation. With a targeted data model, applications draw only the information necessary from the data sources to which they are connected. And, with a read-only integration approach, Blue Agave does not interfere in anyway with the investments you've already made in your IT infrastructure.

Depending on your organization's needs, Blue Agave can be deployed on a server inside your firewall or hosted remotely on Blue Agave servers. With a browser-based interface, Blue Agave is accessed by users via Internet Explorer.

The Implementation Process

Scoping » Configuration » Refine

Scoping

Blue Agave's client services team meets with your business users and designated IT representatives for a 2-day scoping session in which your business rules and best practices are determined. For example, how your team generally addresses a store-level stock-out or the thresholds that determine excess weeks of supply. Appropriate data sources are determined — including internal systems and external systems like retailer point-of-sale systems — and access is mapped out. In addition, a benchmark is established, so benefit can be measured once the software is running.

Configuration

Using the information discovered in the scoping phase, our technical team then configures the software to meet the unique requirements of your business. The system is thoroughly tested to ensure user configuration and thresholds are set correctly. Once test and user acceptance is completed, the system is pointed to live transactional data for production use.

Refine

Blue Agave's intuitive, web-based applications ensure that users are quickly brought up-to-speed. As users begin to utilize Blue Agave to tackle daily retail execution issues, parameters and thresholds can be easily adjusted to meet any new needs of the business. Four to eight weeks after going live, Blue Agave works with users to complete an effectiveness assessment and value audit to analyze business benefits.