Intelligently Selling Cinthol

Godrej Consumer Products (GCPL), part of one of India's largest and trusted conglomerate, has chosen the QlikView Business Discovery platform to assist in their sales and distribution performance. Before choosing QlikTech, GCPL pondered upon all the leading BI companies and finally went ahead with it. The deployment of the solution was taken care by Kolkata based Green Cube Infotech (GCI), a solution provider.

Talking about GCPL requirement, Anand Mandapaka, MD, Green Cube says, "GCPL had an existing BI software and had been trying to implement their sales and distribution application for the past 2 years. GCPL decided to engage with QlikTech considering its business discovery leadership. QlikTech was invited to build a ‘Seeing is Believing' (POC) application using their primary and secondary sales data. When the applications were built, GCPL was convinced of the superior capabilities of QlikView Business Discovery as compared to other competing BI players. Being aware of the quality of work, we (GCI) had done with other CPG companies in India, QlikTech introduced GCI to Godrej. Green Cube demonstrated its commitment and experience by showcasing some of the applications built by them in the past to Godrej consumer products."

THE NEED
GCPL needed their sales staffs across the country to have online interactive access to their sales and distribution data in order to monitor and drive performance. To meet the requirements of the business, GCPL was looking for a solution which would enable the business users to interactively access millions of rows of large data. The challenge was accentuated due to the vast size of data held by a number of distributors and retailers across the country selling a large number of products. The business wanted to slice and dice information across geographies, products and sales hierarchies. QlikView Business Discovery will allow the users to have quick and easy access to their targets and performance. The sales and distribution dashboard is used to monitor sales of Godrej Consumer Products across its primary, secondary and retail areas.

Subrata Dey, executive VP (IT) at GCPL adds, "We needed a powerful and user intuitive BI solution that could facilitate the business users pan-India to understand the sales and distribution performance and aid them with strategic insights for better decision making. In the first phase, we have offered this BI capabilities to our sales staff across India, and in the next phase we will cover supply chain and finance department."

Phillip Beniac, regional VP, sales (Asia Pacific) says, "Before QlikView Business Discovery platform, the management and sales team of GCPL used to get the required information in traditional static forms making it challenging to analyze and take business decisions. The static reports that were being created earlier, for multiple user requests made it difficult to manage existing reports. The time to market for any new report creation or user request was high resulting in more cost (in terms of development efforts as well as time lost to make the information available to business)."

THE SOLUTION
In the first phase GCPL implemented the sales and distribution application in the areas including primary sales, secondary sales and sales to retailers. The existing source data structure was as follows Data Warehouse - SAP BW, Data extracted using Qlikview SAP Connector and Qlikview Version 11.

The QlikView Business Discovery solution will enable the users to access data through a more interactive platform that would help them clearly monitor and drive performance across the entire business. GCPL wanted a solution that was simple and easy to use, as well as providing users with self-service access to the data that mattered.

Dey informs, "QlikView Business Discovery platform provides a flexible business analytics framework and helps organizations realize their business analytics' objectives. QlikView business analytics delivers competitive insights that are often hidden in data, enabling organizations to reach evidence-based decisions and confidently to solve complex business problems, manage performance to achieve measurable business objectives, drive sustainable growth through innovation, anticipate and manage change. Our proven approach help organizations in long-term success and transforms technology executives into business innovation leaders."

CHALLENGES
As a solution provider the biggest challenge before Green Cube Infotech was the vast size of the data to be extracted. Typically this ran into millions of records downloaded on a daily basis and data validation, as some of the data points had not been mapped in their existing solution. This meant that the earlier solution team had to also work in tandem adding all the new data points in their existing solution. Designing the data model for the application was also extremely challenging keeping in mind vast size of the data.

Mandapaka also adds, "The earlier solution had mapped the retailers only to the distributors but business wanted to see reports salesman wise. Overcoming this challenge was very most important as this threatened to derail the entire project. Users who would access the application could only view data they had access to. There were over 330 ASM's who would view this application, but the application had to restrict their access only to their own area. We therefore used the publisher component of QlikView to split one large application into many (330) smaller applications and then mapped each ASM to his own application. The challenge here was to ensure that this entire process was completed and the application ready for access by 6am every day. Since this application would also be viewed over the internet, we had to look into the security angle and hence complete the SSL process also."

FINALLY
"It was very satisfying working with a client like GCPL who while pushing us all the time also did not hesitate to push their own people to complete their side of the development. The best part of this development was however when the EVP of IT (GCPL) the owner of the project, mentioned in a public forum that ‘the biggest challenge of any implementation was the presence of a good implementation partner and that GCPL were fortunate to have GCI as their partner," Mandapaka concludes.

Sandhya Malhotra
sandhyam@cybermedia.co.in