Project Spotlight: Bush Hog’s Business Intelligence System 

Bush Hog is an industry leader in the manufacturing of finishing mowers, rotary cutters and other landscaping tools that are relied on heavily by customers in the agricultural market on a daily basis. They are one of the premiere providers of these types of products and services in North America and have been in business since the 1950s. As technology continued to advance throughout the company’s existence, however, employees began to realize that they had a problem on their hands. 

Bush Hog’s team depended on a business intelligence (BI) system that was running on an outdated mainframe. Data was stored in the VSAM file format, which required outdated COBOL programs to access the information they needed to make actionable information about their business and their customers each day. It was adding a huge amount of time, effort and even money to a process that should be relatively straightforward, causing issues in the production line at the same time. 

Instead of embracing industry trends like automation, Bush Hog’s employees had to manually enter all relevant data into a series of spreadsheets. To make matters worse, they actually had to be on-site in sales areas to retrieve and handle that information. Modifying a legacy system such as this one was not only slow, but expensive – to say nothing of the unnecessary cost required to maintain such old hardware and software. The system also didn’t allow Bush Hog employees to do what they needed to the most – remotely access and update information contained within the systems from any location as the need arises.

With these end goals in mind, The Proven Method was able to implement a BI system that was entirely web-based, allowing it to be accessed from any computer or even mobile device with an active Internet connection in an easy and secure fashion. All legacy data was migrated into the web platform, allowing Bush Hog employees to view projections, track sales and securely access the aforementioned information at a moment’s notice regardless of location.

The end result was that Bush Hog’s Sales Teams were able to increase both efficiency and productivity at the same time through the remote access of sales history. This allowed them to use timely and dynamic sales metrics to make more informed decisions about where their business should be going and how it should be getting there in today’s modern digital environment.