Custom Data Desk Tool Paves the Way to Product Launch

When Glenn Kutschera was hired to launch a new product for a medical device company last spring, he found himself with lots of sales data but no way to get the market information he needed.

His company develops and markets devices and drugs for local diseases and for complications of surgery and implantations. There are myriad shapes and styles of the particular device about to be launched, and when Glenn began to do homework for the product launch, he found sales data galore. But the data was not structured in a way that made it conducive for analysis, and it was missing information on the type and style of the device. So Glenn could not use it to define the market for the new product. "What I needed was a tool that could load up the sales data and give me answers to questions like Who is the competition? How much are they selling? And, What is the value of this segment of the market?"

Enter Data Description. After approaching several companies that provide custom data analytics, Glenn arranged with Data Description to create a tool that would help him classify his sales data according to the product's specifications. The result was a simple software solution built with Data Desk technology that combined charts and tables with point-and-click interactivity. The user can focus on vendors or time periods, and then use buttons to quickly build a filter for restricting the plot and tables to specific types of the device. The tool was an excellent fit with what Glenn was looking for. "It was almost dead-on what I had envisioned," Glenn reports, "I think that's because I was able to work extensively with Data Description during the development phase and because they paid a lot of attention to the details of the questions I had set for myself."

Although Glenn says he uses the custom tool on a daily basis, neither he nor John Sammis, president of Data Description, has a name for it. And Glenn is not sure he has reached the limits of its capabilities. "There's so much the tool can do—it can analyze the data any which way you want. I've done some pretty remarkable things with it."

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