QlikView Boosting Epicor for Supply Chain Analytics: Less Is

1. QlikView Boosting Epicor for Supply Chain Analytics: Less Is More Inside Info

2. You’d be amazed how many times I see 100’s of packaged reports and data cubes put forward as an effective solution for managing performance across the supply chain or business in general, with companies still wondering why these business intelligence solutions aren’t widely used, service levels aren’t where they should be and business visibility is blurred. In short – it’s too hard, too costly and doesn’t deliver information in a way that can be easily explored to answer questions.   Fujitsu General is one organisation that has turned the corner, providing information on-demand across the business to deliver an effective, high performing supply chain with exceptional results, delivering value in just three weeks. Business intelligence solutions have evolved beyond reporting.  Organisations are demanding analysis that is faster and more flexible to fulfill different reporting demands. This would include improving the timeliness of information, data presentation, capabilities to interact and work with data, and IT delivering more value out to the business for making everyday decisions.

3. Leading supplier of air conditioners Fujitsu General (Aust.) was like many, pushing out formatted, standard reports to the business, but having no real time reporting that could be flexibly provided and analysed when needed by operational, sales, marketing, finance and management teams to understand performance.  Their Epicorsystem was doing a great job of managing ERP transactional data; but Fujitsu were forced to run multiple, limited access reports, consuming over 6 hours a month, to try to glean any information from that data, that was always a month behind. With offices and warehouse facilities established in all major capital cities around Australia, Fujitsu sells  and services over 2,500 points of presence that comprise their retailer and dealer sales channels across the country.  With such a broad network, management of sales and marketing initiatives with associated stock impacts was difficult due to the complexity and inter-reliance between rebates, customer orders, stock allocations, deliveries and various levels of product views needed.

4. To increase line level, cost and stock allocation profitability and improve sales and marketing initiatives in the areas of rebates, customer orders, stock allocations and deliveries, Fujitsu deployed a QlikView business intelligence application with the help of Inside Infothat analysed performance across sales, rebates and inventory integrating with the Epicor ERP system. Improved cost and inventory management A critical part of managing supply chain processes understands the flow of goods through the organisation.  Any number of factors can have a dramatic effect on inventory stock levels. Fujitsu’s challenge was to ensure an optimal level of stock to meet usage requirements with the least impact on operating capital, especially in light of long stock replenishment timeframes.  Fujitsu’s QlikView model that Inside Info developed analyses over 1,000,000 order transaction lines categorising 60,000 inventory items into any level of either; category, product type, model and component parts, to understand business impact. 

5. Epicor picks up the kit of available items that form part of an order, QlikView separates out each of these items and assigns individual costs.  This approach has delivered a 10% improvement in cost allocation to product items and therefore more accurately measuring margin and resulting product and customer health, more effectively. Furthermore, QlikView has improved inventory management for Fujitsu by 12%, helping administrators pre-empt orders, delivery plans and inventory glitches by understanding unallocated stock.   Based on this knowledge a Bill Plan is then created in Epicor, so orders can be filled by the right delivery deadline. Within a couple of  click’s any performance failures can by pinpointed by customer, by product, by line item, by location and by order for open and closed sales.  Fujitsu General can immediately see at a total and transactional level, the cost of stock held by customer and their product lines.  This can be used to understand the highest value older stock on hand that should be the focus of a run out promotion.

6. Supply and demand in sync with cross-functional data analysis One of the key drivers of supply chain management is to achieve the “perfect order” for customers at every opportunity.  Managers need to know where demand is coming from, where it is greatest, who is buying the goods, and how these factors change over time.  This information enables them to understand actual demand versus forecasts, and relate that to the performance of the internal supply chain. Also critical is the ability to quantify and analyse the effectiveness of the fulfillment process — the ability to fulfill customer orders efficiently and in a timely manner. Fujitsu have successfully married supply and demand within the organisation, managing the complex interrelationship of products, marketing promotions, rebates and inventory for suppliers and resellers doing business as part of its network.   For example, QlikView is used to verify invoicing and stock in transit with resellers.  Allowing analysis of individual store and group level performance of retail outlets for each individual customer, by analysing ship to numbers rather than billing addresses.

7. QlikView also keeps a handle on promotional rebates paid to channel, which form a significant portion of the marketing budget.  Finance, sales and marketing can see what stock levels retailers have committed to, if it’s driven by a specific promotion and the cash-back rebates or discounts they’re receiving, lining up with fulfillment of these to targets.  QlikView is then used to check stock availability for commitments to ensure demand and supply match.  The result – a 15% improved return on rebate investment by better aligning customer contribution with rebates payable and resources spent. Insight on-demand and ease of use are key IT teams generally find ways to improve their processes for data aggregation, integration and storage, but data delivery and simple exploration of the data continues to present a challenge.  Business intelligence tools must be useful and accessible to the less-technical among us, especially to deliver ad hoc query and analysis which is what most of us use them for according to the latest 2012 BI Survey 12 report.

8. The differentiating factor is to provide interactive data delivery and analysis in way that is simple, with powerful, unrestricted query capability that can deliver value fast.  In the case of Fujitsu General, they used in-memory associative technology on a single platform to make data more usable, timely, and easier to develop and deliver.  This meant Fujitsu could design, deploy and use their QlikView solution analysing performance across sales, rebates and inventory in just 3 weeks.  An alternative approach would have taken on average 4 months and be quite services intensive. Sales, management, operational and finance teams now explore data on their own in the one dashboard-style application and drill into the underlying details with just a few clicks for quick answers to their business questions with near instant response times, updated every few hours.  This process improved Fujitsu’s IT staff productivity by 12% in not having to constantly author and produce reports.

9. Taking some tips from Fujitsu and its ability to easily consume and interact with its data, we can see that to optimise decisions and generate maximum efficiencies, companies can look to a business intelligence solution that provides insight across the entire chain, can respond to changes, and can show how performance at one stage can affect outcomes further down the line. The point is to not just report, but to allow detailed exploration of the data in a simple to use, simple to deploy way to understand operational effectiveness, quantify inefficiency, and identify where to optimise to achieve goals faster to improve the bottom line.

10. Thank You Inside Info