The situation. Courts opened its first Singapore store in 1974 and grew into one of the largest furniture, electronics and IT retailers in Southeast Asia, with twelve stores island-wide including the 100,000 square foot Megastore at Tampines. Flexible payment plans are central to its offer, and they generate a heavy load of data processing, above all in credit management reporting.
The challenge. Courts had spent several years rolling out an ERP system to organise product, customer and flexi-payment information. The next step was a transaction reporting process that let employees access, extract and analyse credit management data on their own. The ERP could do it in principle, but not at the speed the business expected.
The evaluation. Courts considered building its own reporting on Crystal Reports, which it already used elsewhere. KMS arrived with a ready framework for exactly the area Courts cared about, credit management, so the work became mapping Courts' data onto that framework rather than starting from scratch.
What KMS built. Two Qlik applications on Microsoft Navision and SQL Server. The first is a KPI dashboard covering the company's performance against its targets for the year, from sales and cash management to margins and stock. The second is a credit management dashboard giving detailed credit reports to about fifty users across the organisation. The KPI dashboard took six months; the more complex credit management reporting was live in three.
"Our intention was to look for a solution that made it easier for our users to extract information and perform analyses on their own without having to rely on the IT department. The Business Intelligence solution offered by KMS allowed us to access and filter the information quickly and with ease through the use of a proper dashboard reporting system." — Neil J. Todd, Director, Information and Communications Systems, Courts (Singapore) Pte Ltd
Results. Key employees filter and analyse far more information than before, including demographic analysis of a changing customer base. Reporting is faster and safer, and Courts has said it would work with KMS again on applications for other areas of the business as the need arises.