Swiftwick designs, engineers and builds performance socks for endurance athletes, featuring advanced moisture wicking, optimal compression, and contoured performance fit. Proudly based in Tennessee and manufactured 100% in the USA, their products are worn by athletes worldwide - from couch-to-5K beginners to professional marathoners, cyclists, and hikers.
As Director of Operations, Mike faced significant challenges with their ERP system’s antiquated reporting capabilities that left him “flying blind.” Creating or editing reports took hours to days, with no ability to drill down into data or easily export to CSV for further analysis.
After implementing Zing Data in just an afternoon, Swiftwick now has real-time dashboards tracking KPIs, the ability to answer complex business questions in minutes rather than days, and empowered team members who can create their own reports through simple drag-and-drop functionality. The platform has not only accelerated their analytics capabilities but also helped them better understand the full potential of their data, discovering new ways to combine and analyze information they never imagined before.
Zack (Zing Data): Hi, Mike. Thanks for taking the time. Maybe you could start off with describing what Swiftwick is and what you do there.
Mike (Swiftwick): Swiftwick designs, engineers and builds performance socks for endurance athletes featuring advanced moisture wicking, optimal compression, and contoured performance. We’re proudly based in Tennessee, manufactured 100% in the USA, but worn the world over. And I am Director of Operations here at Swiftwick.
Zack: And are these folks marathoners or triathletes or maybe just weekend warriors who want great gear?
Mike: Everything from couch-to-5K athletes to professional runners. Anybody from a cyclist to hiking runner to a marathoner.
Zack: What business challenge did you have that led you to look for an analytics solution or find Zing?
Mike: Our ERP system that we have here featured some really antiquated and limited reporting capabilities. Really difficult to create reports, to edit reports, and to manage those reports. Making changes took hours at best, days at worst, and those reports looked good on the screen, but there was no ability to drill down into the data, and there was really limited ability to export that to CSV that you could manipulate in Excel or Google Sheets or anything like that.
Zack: So that was making your life as Director of Operations a little bit harder, to just have the right information, get it to the right people, run a different variant, stuff like that.
Mike: That’s right. I felt like I was flying blind.
Zack: And what did rolling out Zing look like for you and Swiftwick?
Mike: It was basically done in an afternoon. The rollout was really easy. Once we got connected to our Microsoft SQL database, the Zing team was there throughout the entire process. And over the next several days, they helped us create some critical reports that we really wanted and allowed us to watch the creation of those. So we were learning as we were creating actually important enterprise reports for Swiftwick. And also one of the things I was pleasantly surprised by is as I was learning the product and communicating with the Zing team, they even incorporated some of our suggestions into the product, which was amazing.
Zack: You had a lot of good suggestions. So you were giving us good product ideas to improve it. And then how does your team use Zing on a day in, day out basis?
Mike: I’d say two main ways. Zing offers really nice dashboards that you can get a feel for how the business is doing at a glance. Literally, almost like the dashboard in your car - you know how much gas you’ve got, you know how fast you’re going, et cetera. So we’ll put our key performance indicators on those dashboards and everybody can have a different one depending on what your role in the business is, which is kind of neat. Being able to see that dashboard in real time, understand how the business is functioning, is fantastic.
Secondly, we use it a ton just to help answer questions and help us make better decisions during the decision making process. It may be, what are our best sellers and what are our worst sellers and what do we need to do to optimize that? Or where in the country are we selling running socks, where are we selling hiking socks? All of that becomes available to us and really helps us guide our decision making, which is incredibly helpful.
Zack: How has Zing enabled or accelerated what you can do with analytics? You talked about the ERP that was kind of slow and clunky and hard to get stuff out of. What can you do now that you couldn’t really do before?
Mike: We get answers to our questions in minutes, not hours or days. Even complex questions. We can do it ourselves. I’m not a data analyst, but Zing gives me the ability to create my own reports. Instead of using a report that somebody else thought I may want, I could create my own report by just dragging and dropping database fields into the report builder. And it’s really quick.
We can visualize our data so not just a spreadsheet, but bring it to life via different kinds of graphs and pie charts and whatnot. So it helps us really see what’s going on in our business. The ability to export the data into CSV and work it in Excel has been a godsend. That was something we couldn’t do before, at least not easily. Being able to do it and slice it however we want in Excel has been fantastic as well.
I would say the last thing - this was kind of a surprising learning for me - but Zing actually allowed us to better understand what data we even had. Because being able to see it and manipulate it and work with it, you start learning the commonalities between the data and you say, oh, I can assemble it like this or like this in ways that we never even imagined before.
Zack: Really cool. I hadn’t even thought about that. And I know as you’ve been using it, you’ve had some feature ideas. Can you just talk a little bit about the support or the help that you’ve gotten if you did bump up against features that you wanted or issues that you were trying to work through?
Mike: One of the things that we had wanted fairly early on was the ability to really group data together. Almost like a pivot table, except a little bit different. A little more user friendly than a pivot table. And get subtotals by category. I talked to you, Zack, about that and within a couple of days it was available, which was amazing. We’ve also added things like for longer complex reports, we can use pagination on those or turn it off if we don’t want.
Zack: Thanks for walking us through a little bit about Swiftwick and how you use Zing. And thanks for taking the time.
Mike: Thanks, Zack.
Available on iOS, Android, and the web
Learn how Zing can help you and your organization collaborate with data
Schedule Demo
