 "QlikView Driving Action At Canon India")
Headquartered in Gurgaon, Canon has been operating in India for 10 years now in the area of marketing, sales and service of digital imaging products like photocopies, printers, scanners, facsimile, cameras and projectors. In order to accomplish its vision of becoming a number one player in the digital imaging space in India, Canon India has chalked out some key business strategies. To achieve this, Canon’s executives determined that the company needs to have an IT infrastructure which is robust enough to support the business growth.
In tow with its vision, Canon recently deployed QlikView, the Data Analytics tool of TEAM Computers in order to enable the top level management take the right decisions.
Weary of churning out reports
Canon India has a centralised data centre at the corporate office and is connected to all its location through Virtual Private Network. Oracle applications form the basis of transaction processing. Lotus notes is used extensively for messaging and many workflows for purchase, travel, sales force automation, HR etc.
It has 281 channel partners, 397 retail stores, 32 Canon Care Centres, over 100 authorised service centres and more than 2700 IT resellers across 300 towns in India. The company was facing acute problems in coordinating with the partners and locating the exact status of various orders and shipments.
According to Shikha Rai, assistant director - IT, Canon India, “Our business pain area was not having a unified and consolidated source to view reports related to products they were trading in. The process of churning out reports from Oracle apps, extracting into Excel, cleaning it wherever required, was turning out to be time consuming and not user-friendly.”
The company intends to achieve the Rs 550 crore milestone in 2007. This has prompted the company to realise the importance of growth and investment in strategic areas. Equally important to the company’s prospects is making the right information available to the decision makers of the organisation.
Collaborating with TEAM
After evaluating the BI solutions of other vendors, Canon decided to go with TEAM due to its cost effectiveness. TEAM’s QlikView tool enabled Canon’s management to see a unified view of their data coming from different data sources. It drilled down the data to model level and provided dashboards and charts across hierarchy and patterns, so that the management could view hourly refreshed data related to their domain and take necessary decision or monitor the stock.
Rai opines, “QlikView provided high-level summary to detail level sales, inventory and finance (Accounts Receivables) data analysis through an easy-to-use, yet robust and flexible interface capable of handling multiple levels of user expertise and requirements. The implementation was by-and-large smooth and completed within three months.”
Qlikview has been implemented in the sales, marketing, inventory and accounts receivables modules simultaneously. Canon India has taken 30 licenses from TEAM Computers.
Easy accessibility of information
Earlier, customer information was stored in one database, accounting and sales information in another; but now with the deployment of the BI tool, the availability of information to both sales and marketing people has became easy. Top level management can now view the target versus actual channel wise performance.
“For us, BI is not dumb reporting, it is driving action in Canon. Easy-to-understand dashboards have made it easy for us to analyse strategies. In fact, users are now demanding enhancements in applications. The actual time earlier taken for making reports has reduced drastically, thereby saving the time of our executives,” reflects Rai.
The ERP applications have been made cleaner, leaner and better. Inventory module provides details on merchandise stocks available warehouse wise at the model level, and an analysis on slow moving and non-moving items that help managers decide what needs to be liquidated.
Now with the demand from the users, Canon plans to increase the number of licenses in the near future.
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