Applied Industrial Technologies

Applied Industrial Technologies (NYSE: AIT), with $1.9 billion in annual sales in 2006, is one of the largest industrial distributors in North America. Because Applied is a publicly traded company, its executives need an effective way to review operational and financial performance with stockholders and investment analysts throughout the year. It is critical that the presentations Applied executives use for these meetings be accurate and up-to-date. Xignite solved that problem by helping Applied streamline the process of updating financial data in its Investor Relations presentation.

The Applied team developed a custom presentation using Macromedia® Authorware® that generates content from multiple sources, including four sets of information pulled from Xignite Web Services:

1. Statistics - updated economic indicators for the manufacturing sector such as Purchasing Manager Index (PMI) and Manufacturing Capacity Utilization (MCU);
2. Market Focus Report - comparison of stock price performances between AIT and its major competitors;
3. Historical Quotes - comparison of financial performance between AIT stock price and major indices;
4. Fundamentals - other relevant financial data such as AIT dividend and EPS growth rates.

To ease the development of that presentation, Xignite provided Applied with a custom “wrapper” web service that presents data in a way readily usable by the program. The overall solution reduces the tedious manual work needed to update the financial information for those very important presentations. The wrapper also reduces the amount and complexity of programming required to retrieve the relevant data. Xignite’s solution makes Applied’s Investor Presentation process more streamlined and efficient, and Applied executives now have the ability to retrieve information on-demand.