SINGAPORE, 21 DECEMBER 2009—Dissatisfied with the limitations of batch processing-based accounting system, chocolate and confectionary products distributor and retailer The Cocoa Trees shifted to a solution that hastened generation of reports.
With QlikView, a real-time sales performance report can be made available for The Cocoa Trees executives at the start of their day. At the department level, data analysis goes deep to the transaction/document level.
When The Cocoa Trees started with QlikView in January 2005, the company was able to make the solution operational within 40 man-hours to10 key business users across its divisions, including export and retail, international and local sales, purchasing and accounts, as well as top management.
QlikTech Partner Knowledge Management Solutions Pte Ltd and IBIZ Consulting Services Pte Ltd built the data source systems using MS Navision and MS SQL.
Navision enabled The Cocoa Trees to assign expiry dates to inventory, provided users with the tool to "lot-track" inventory by expiry date and facilitated transaction processing and posting to keep inventory balances in real-time.
Beyond static reports
Going beyond the static reports churned out by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, QlikView produced interactive dashboard and helped generate incisive analysis using the data from Navision. With QlikView, automatic comparison of historical and current sales information was also made possible.
Aside from posting regular updates of information, QlikView allowed the CEO and heads of business departments to access inventory and sales information in real-time.
With the clarity of inventory status, reports for suppliers can be produced quickly and customer orders given immediate confirmation.
Getting hold of the information by the sales team regarding the size of the inventory as well as reservations against a particular stock—enabling all those processes simultaneously has gone a long way in driving efficiencies by QlikView users. Working off relevant variables, the team is also able to analyse sales information with relative ease.
"The first thing that the CEO does every morning is to check the company's sales performance using QlikView,” said Wess Wong, director of finance and business development, Focus Network Agencies Pte Ltd, which is the owner of The Cocoa Trees. “He gets an overview of the business through the visually rich, interactive dashboards, drilling down to operational details, if required, to make time-sensitive decisions."
