Canon India Empowers Sales Workforce With BI Tool

Canon India has been at the forefront of many digital innovations. It is one of the leading names in the digital imaging space and has a complete portfolio of services taking care of all enterprise printing requirements.

The data analysis dilemma

In addition to having a robust R&D wing, it also commands a vast area through its service network that spans across the length and breadth of the country, which is individually managed by a regional/ national level sales manager at Canon India. “All the sales-related data is managed by our data centre hosted here in Gurgaon. But the data was of practically no use to our top management; it was very difficult to make sense of a transaction report generated by an ERP-like system,” says Shikha Rai, director of IT/ QEGS and General Affairs Division at Canon India.

Moreover, regional sales heads had no clue of their sales statistics either. Product-related data such as budget allocation, product movement, targets etc was not available. “To analyse a zillion bytes of business-related data at month end, and that too, when your transactions are going on, results in huge downtime,” says Rai.

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Following this realisation, Canon India started hunting for a suitable Business Intelligence tool. As they weren’t into a sector where complex analysis is needed, the primary requirements were simplicity and ease of operations. The end users were going to be the members of the sales workforce themselves, so it was all the more imperative for the solution to be uncomplicated. Additionally, it had to work on a near real-time basis.

The BI solution

After a detailed market scan, Canon narrowed down on QlikView due to its ability to be fast and easy on the server. “This product from TeamComputers is very quick and inexpensive to deploy,” says Rai.
TeamComputers has developed and patented a unique technology called AQL, which pulls the data from the server, analyses it and keeps it with itself, thus, it doesn’t need any additional server space, which makes it extremely fast.

The first module to go live was, of course, the sales module. This was later integrated with the accounts module. “Through this integration, if our sales people are interacting with their customers, the accounts people automatically come to know of the receivables,” Rai explains.

Addition of the inventory module was the last phase of the implementation. The fact that the solution is browser-based makes it easily accessible for a mobile workforce. Product managers can now plan the inventory in advance and update records, which are accessible by others as well on the move.

The benefits reaped

“Now our sales workforce is better informed about the business and is well-equipped to take decisions on the spot. They aren’t dependent on anyone, anymore,” says Rai.

The next version of QlikView is slated to be available early next year, which is the time when Canon India plans to upgrade the solution.

The company is also planning to get aligned with the International Financial Reporting Systems, which requires a re-evaluation of the entire IT set-up. “Aligning ourselves with such a system is a challenge in itself and everything, including the ERP, has to be reviewed,” says Rai.

The other major IT initiative the company has planned is the digitisation and archival of all company data through the adoption of DMS. Virtualisation is also in the pipeline for restraining IT costs.