A wholly owned subsidiary of a diversified Indian conglomerate, our customer is an established market leader in lifestyle electrical solutions and consumer durables. The brand portfolio includes a wide range of products as in Fans, Home Appliances, Switchgears, and Lighting etc.
With a workforce of 1000+ employees aligned to the four lines of businesses, the customer has a large network of suppliers, distributors and dealers across the country.
The Indian Consumers Durable industry, already facing tough head on competition from the affordable and low-priced Chinese products, is dealing with immense pressure in terms of cost and margin. The reputed brands have to put up with the situation where consumers are increasingly getting attracted towards the lucrative yet low-quality manufacturers.
Untouched with these external market forces, our customer’s day to day operations have heavy reliance on supply chain, logistics and production operations and the aligned workforce. Due to lack of automation and unwanted dependencies on manual processes, it was challenging to keep a finger on the pulse of important business metrics in near real-time.
The enterprise strategy and planning led to a decision to implement an Enterprise-wide analytics solution. The customer evaluated different business intelligence (BI) platforms and service providers. With extensive evaluation,they chose Qlik as their BI platform and Polestar Solutions as the implementation partner.
In September 2019, we completed 2 years of our partnership with Polestar. I use the term, “Partner” because Polestar has turned out to be much more than just a software implementer. Their approach has consistently been to generate maximum value for our business through their implementations. The best thing about working with Polestar is their understanding of the business processes and business needs. They always give a fair idea about the timelines of implementation and deliver on their words. Their successful implementation on Qlik platform has prompted us to seek their services for different functions and business units
Program Manager-Digital Think TankThe existing processes and systems – across Sales, Supply Chain, Production operations, Logistics and HR – were enough merely to keep up with ongoing business needs. But, in the hindsight, management realized that there was a dire need to transform the ways of working to underpin the next wave of growth in alignment with the company’s vision.
The supply chain process stretched from manufacturing plants to the customers. Although, owing to multiple data sources such as ERP, Excel, etc., and lack of automation, it was challenging to have integrated and unified analytics and reporting. The inventory report was not doing the quantity conversion basis on UoM which ultimately gave a wrong picture and resulted in a mismatch with the physical inventory in warehouses. The AR report in ERP resulted in inconsistent views as there was no provision to enter manual adjustments. Additionally, collating the data for HR was a challenge. A system was needed that could generate dynamic reports like hiring vs attrition, sales-target achievement, flag overdue tasks, and provide insights to retain talent.
The situation diagnosis brought out a few aspects that required immediate attention. All in all, challenges could be summarized as below:
Data resided in multiple disparate systems resulting in silos
Absence of comprehensive and integrated Analytics covering end-to-end supply chain process and sales
Limited means to keep a real-time tab on performance, demand etc.
Substantial reliance on manual interventions and lack of automation
Effort-intensive maintenance of data in excels
Limited view into historical trends and changes
Post Discovery, the Qlik experts at Polestar worked closely with the business and IT stakeholders to design data models and implement an inter-connected data integration platform touching all possible sources. Each implementation was checked with the business teams to develop a system to optimize their day-to-day interaction with the solution.
The modules delivered - Sales, HR, Branding, Finance, Manufacturing, Logistics, and Services. A Qlik-based analytics solution was delivered to help the users identify areas where value needs to be added or unnecessary overheads to be removed/optimized.
Below is the summary of the Key Solutions that we delivered along with the immediate benefits:
The answer to the situation lay in establishing an all-encompassing enterprise-wide Analytics and BI platform that could address the business complexities and enable a data-driven decision-support system. Which required relooking at the data assets holistically across the 4 business lines - Switch Gears, Fans, Lighting and Appliances.
Polestar, in close coordination with the customer stakeholders and Qlik, took a big-bang approach. Internalizing the customer’s needs, Polestar’s solution was based on two principles - Data Democratization and Insights-Infused Data Management.
In line with the customer’s vision, and keeping in view the complexity arising due to disparate business needs from 4 different business lines, Polestar took a Hybrid execution approach. A hybrid approach was imperative as it was necessary to not just address the discrete needs of the individual lines of business - but also have enterprise view and bring out data synergies across lines of businesses. ‘Diversification within a Cohesive and Unified Set-up’ was our guiding principle.
Commencing with a Business Discovery Phase, the execution phase was to implement data management and analytics solutions in an agile fashion with some quick deliverables so the users always know their requirements are captured
Commencing with a Six-Week Business Discovery Phase
We, at Polestar, realized that a successful discovery phase is the key to success. Here is how we handled it:
Aligning an average of 50+ business stakeholders from each business line and IT
Deploying business analysis and SMEs adept in consumers' durable domain
Setting a pre-prepared list of right questions around processes, people, and technology
Conduction multiple workshops with individual business lines and eliciting the business requirements around reporting, dashboarding, and data sources
A blueprinting exercise that included the development and validation of various scorecards, priorities and dashboard wireframes
Leveraging our in-house Knowledge eXchange (KX) portal
At the end of the discovery, we had a signed-off Software Requirement Specification (SRS), which included:
Post Discovery, the Qlik experts at Polestar worked closely with the business and IT stakeholders to design data models and implement an inter-connected data integration platform touching all possible sources. Each implementation was checked with the business teams to develop a system to optimize their day-to-day interaction with the solution.
The modules delivered - Sales, HR, Branding, Finance, Manufacturing, Logistics, and Services. A Qlik-based analytics solution was delivered to help the users identify areas where value needs to be added or unnecessary overheads to be removed/optimized.
Below is the summary of the Key Solutions that we delivered along with the immediate benefits:
Balanced Scorecards: Keep better control and watch on employee performance, balanced scorecards were created to monitor and review results by division, team, and individual
Vendor Analytics: Enabling Vendor Comparison based on ‘On Time in Full (OTIF)
Pricing Analytics: Highlight variation in prices of Raw Materials, Semi-finished Goods, and Purchased Finished Goods across vendors, regions and time
Inventory Analytics: Real-time Working Capital Management and Movement of Slow-Moving Articles to manage demand better
Customer Service: To address customer complaints faster by locating the right inventory in the right region
Production Analytics: Helped procurement team view production status and inventory on the go and decide the procurement plan, along with the quality data to check the quality status of the lots through automated BI and logic.
Logistics Analytics – Enabled an end-to-end view into the cycle from the first step of invoice till the dispatch and delivery. Helped identify the ageing on every step on the granular level, consequently, avoid users’ manual efforts daily struggle with the excel sheets
Procurement Analytics - BI helped them identify the best vendor for procurement by calculating Vendor Rating on the basis of quality, delivery, and quantity.
HR Analytics – Enabled tracking of historical changes related to employee promotions and performance data, leaves, etc.
Lastly, a strong governance mechanism was set up to ensure timely delivery and proactive mitigations of risks. A steering committee was formed to resolve any kind of disputes related to project deviation or scope creep.
A holistic view across the business was established and the data from disparate systems (like ERP, SFA, etc.) when put together help in day-to-day planning as well as in long term goal setting.
The BI tool became a go-to platform for all the reviews – Individual, Team and Board reviews. A collaborative effort ensured that every unique business in the company understood how other businesses are handling the common problems. This helped them get a cue for the solutions to their problems.
Put together, the solution resulted in the following business outcomes for our customer:
Better customer engagement & brand equity through efficient management of customer demands and complaints
Standardized, transparent and well-managed sales target-setting and planning across divisions
Efficient engagement with the suppliers, distributors and deals through expeditious scheme launches in responsive manner
Decrease the cost of manufacturing and timelines and procurement budget planning
More Efficient and quality controlled procurement cycle
Better control on profitability by real-time tracking of channels franchisee
