The situation. RS Components is a world-leading distributor of electronic components and industrial products, part of the FTSE-listed Electrocomponents PLC, with more than 1,000 people across Asia Pacific, 450,000 products and 1.6 million customers in over eighty countries. Its Asia Pacific business generated GBP 104 million in the 2009 financial year.
The challenge. The components business is fiercely competitive and management treated fast decisions as mission-critical. Decision support ran on manual consolidation of data pulled straight from the JD Edwards ERP and Pivotal CRM systems, so time went into assembling data instead of analysing it, and decisions waited. The business needed one common view across all functions and a diverse geography that everyone could rely on.
The choice of partner. Regional GM Richard Huxley and Head of IS Glen Francis shortlisted Qlik and made the project a key priority. "We were very selective when choosing a consulting and implementation partner, as we are well aware that even the best of breed software needs an experienced and knowledgeable implementation team to bring out its optimum performance," said Glen. KMS was chosen on its record across industries and large Asian enterprises.
What KMS built. Eight primary data sources, JD Edwards and Pivotal instances in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, are drawn daily into Qlik data files and transferred to a central server. Users analyse sales, products, marketing, inventory and warehousing without touching the transactional systems, and without a data warehouse. Access is segregated by user profile through Active Directory integration. Deployment took two and a half months.
"The IS of today is about what information and insights we can provide the business with, rather than just the technology to store, transmit and retrieve data. BI gives us this capability, and has given us the credibility. QlikView provides the ease of this implementation." — Glen Francis, Head of IS, RS Components Asia Pacific
Results. Reports that once took weeks of man-days to pull, collate and check are online whenever users want them. Data is cleaned at source and refreshed daily, the load on core systems is removed, and management describes the tool as creating new awareness of what is doing well in the business and what is not.
RS Components consolidates eight data sources across Asia Pacific into one daily view