Red Horizon - Press Release

Contact: Tricia Farin
Jantris Marketing Services
P. 203-426-9193
F. 203-426-9278

Lisa Pecunia
Red Horizon, LLC
P. 203-270-3363
F. 203-270-3366

Leading Field Merchandising Company Selects Red Horizon as Their Employee Intranet Development Partner

SANDY HOOK, Conn., August 2, 2001 - Red Horizon, LLC has been contracted to develop an employee intranet for BRANN NRS, a national field merchandising organization headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut. The employee intranet will be used by office-based managers and field-based supervisors to get real-time project-related information from over 1,700 US-based field representatives. This intranet is one of three major new technological components of the BRANN NRS data management system and is scheduled to be rolled out in September of this year.

BRANN NRS field representatives conduct store-level merchandising and market research and use the BRANN NRS Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to phone-in merchandising reports, project-specific data, and daily progress reports. The employee intranet will pull this data from the IVR database and use it to generate various reports accessible to managers and field supervisors. Corporate managers will review executive reports summarizing overall project status, while field supervisors will access detail-level reports to manage employee productivity and project schedules. The employee intranet will integrate with their in-house chart server to provide graphical chart displays of the data. In addition, it provides various tools for their supervisors to make employee information changes, submit sales leads to the sales organization, and get technical help from the IT staff. The intranet will have the capabilities of allowing the company to self-administer their users, groups and permission structure to control security within the application, manage/provide timely group or project-specific bulletins on their home page, and manage various application settings. The Human Resources department will be able to electronically manage the process of approving and effecting employee change requests from the managers and field supervisors.

Vincent Shea, Vice President of Technology for BRANN NRS, sees the employee intranet as a means of organizing the internal resources of their data collection process. He states, "This system will help us to manage our field representatives better. With 100,000 plus store visits each month, we need to have real-time accessibility to our task list, completion data, and available resources. The employee intranet keeps our managers and field supervisors in touch with the activity of over 1,700 BRANN NRS field representatives on a real-time basis. This kind of communication can help us serve our clients quickly and efficiently."

BRANN NRS, part of the Brann Worldwide group of companies, provides merchandising and data collection services for manufacturers. BRANN NRS maintains its corporate headquarters and a distribution center in Danbury, Connecticut and operates two sales and six regional field offices. Operating for 23 years, BRANN NRS employs over 1900 employees nationwide.

Red Horizon, LLC (www.redhorizon.com) is an application development firm specializing in web-based software applications and database-driven web sites. Serving large and small organizations which span many industries, Red Horizon consistently delivers organized, self-maintaining applications that exceed customer expectations on time and within budget.

# # #

[ back to release menu ]