When the executive vice president (EVP) of Southern Cross, Inc. needed to find out why sales were up by only one-half percent in spite of many new accounts, and demanded an analysis across all regions, customers, and products to determine the cause, nothing in the standard reports provided any indication of the problem. Because the information was contained on several different (unintegrated) systems, and the products had been grouped into various categories, there was no way to conduct an automated analysis. After 40 person-hours of effort of using spread-sheet programs and manually backing out products that had switched categories and adjusting inconsistencies between the different systems, the top-level analysts assembled a compatible base of information to answer the EVP's questions. Their analysis indicated that the sales slump was occurring primarily in the old, established, long-time distributorships (an insight that was not apparent from analysis of the non-integrated data). With the problem pinpointed, managers could take appropriate further action (Goodhue, et al., 1992).