The situation. Robinsons Group operated sixteen upscale retail stores in Singapore and two in Malaysia as the parent of Robinsons and John Little and the franchise holder for Marks & Spencer in both countries, with almost 150 years in business, longer than any large retailer in Singapore.
The challenge. Retail runs on reporting: point-of-sale receipts, register balances, hourly sales, salesperson productivity, merchandise by item, department and store, stock-to-sales ratios, inventory turnover, seasonal patterns and promotion response. "Our organisation prints tons of paper reports," said Abigail Alice Tan, head of information technology. Reading a report for one figure, or comparing several reports before a decision, added administrative time that delayed action.
The evaluation. The first products evaluated seemed too complex for use across the company, and would have needed months of data warehouse and OLAP cube building before anything could be deployed. Qlik's interactive interface won the IT head over at once: "I could see people outside of our IT department working with it, and more importantly, wanting to work with it."
What was built. Operational summary and productivity dashboards pulling from the group's ERP and POS systems, giving at-a-glance views of performance for any merchandise hierarchy and time dimension. Sales for any period can be compared with any prior period by store, department, item, size, colour or margin. Sixty users across store operations, supply chain, finance, marketing and executive management work from the dashboards.
"Since the introduction of QlikView, Robinsons Group's decision makers have faster access to more actionable data leading to smarter, timelier business decisions so critical to retailing success." — Abigail Alice Tan, Head of Information Technology, Robinsons Group
Results. Users spend about 50 percent less time analysing data and get up to 80 percent more detail than the paper reports gave them. Multiple variance reports sit on a single display with drill-down into any result. Slow-moving merchandise is identified and moved to stores where it sells, fast sellers are reordered before they run out, and pricing is set for turnover and profit by store and chain-wide. IT support demand fell at the same time.