BI Solution for Sales Analysis Optimization Delivered for Apollo Tyres TekMindz enables Apollo Tyres to optimize their global sales performance by bringing a robust & scalable BI solution. TEK INDZ TM
Case Overview Apollo Tyres wanted a global BI solution for sales analysis that accesses business transaction data from SAP (as the main data source) and Excel sheets, or flat files (as the secondary data source). The need was to build a robust and scalable BI solution based on SAP BW that offers reporting capabilities with key guiding principles: Bring greater transparency to the management at the corporate and various hierarchical levels through improved control and visibility Transform to more Digitalized processes to support growth and enable quicker integration of new acquisitions Increase Return on Investments through cost optimization and increased efficiency for time allocation towards design, deployment and maintenance of the BI solution Optimize Business Content - which addresses a significant number of sales analysis requirements Enable relevant stack holder for self analysis of Business data to expedite decision support process The management wanted to optimally leverage the existing ERP - SAP BW and Cognos BI with the ultimate objective of empowering Sales analysis and improve business performance. Business Requirement Different user groups with diverse Use Cases to address and, as such, diverse technical and functional objectives all had their own role-specific business requirements. The analysts required the solution to allow them to easily create their own reports where existing reports were insufficient in fulfilling their reporting needs. The auditors required the solution to provide traceability to specific billing documents for customer(s) when required to analyze instances of variances. Additionally, their sales document level investigations needed to be addressed in SAP BW, instead of in the transactional system. The IT team required the solution to be automated for internal processes, including email alerts of successes or failures of systemic processes. They also required the existing SAP R/3 system to work at optimal efficiency by removing old data related to business-critical transactions from the OLTP (online transaction processing) system. The head of planning required the BI solution to compare actual and planned sales to ascertain and address the causes of variances or to correct plan figures.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION: COGNOS BI 10.2 SOLUTION STACK Presentation Layer COGNOS 10 SUITE Middle Layer ETL Database SAP BW SAP R3, ABAP ROUTINES ORACLE DB2 SAP ECC 6.0 SAP APO MS Excel CSV files Source Systems The figure below depicts the realization of various functional components into corresponding technology components. On a functional level, the Cognos BI and SAP BW server can be divided into three layers: 1. 2. 3. The Platform BI components The presentation layer PRESENTATION LAYER BROWSER PORTAL MS OFFICE WEB SERVER EMAIL REPORTING ANALYSIS DASHBOARD PROCESS MANAGEMENT PRODUCTION DATA MINING MERTICS INTEGRATION OPERATIONAL OLAP KPIs DEFININTION AD-HOC DRILL & EXPLORE ALERTS EXECUTION PRESENTATION LAYER SECURITY ADMINISTRATION LOGGING & AUDITING BUSINESS LOGIC RULE TASK SCHEDULING SOLUTION REPOSITORY PRESENTATION LAYER ETL METADATA EII
The Solution With existing business processes and IT systems at Apollo, transaction processing system was on SAP ECC running on BW 7.0 with Cognos 10 BI Suite. TekMindz s scope was to help Sales & Marketing stakeholders to redefine/identify KPIs of Replacement, Institutional and Export market along with revamp of their existing Business Intelligence solution for the Sales & Marketing Department. TekMindz s scope of work covered the following activities: 1. 2. 3. 4. Inclusion of Dynamic Material Hierarchy to support drilled down analysis Inclusion of Time Dimension Redesign/creation of Sales standard cube and Sales customized cubes with Hierarchical analysis Enabling the business to understand the competitive market based on third party data such as ATMA and SIAM The solution leverages the rich functionality available with Cognos and SAP BW suite at Application Server, Client and Administrator levels. At the Presentation Layer, Cognos BI comes with a built-in web interface called the user console. The user console forms a front-end that allows a human user to interact with the server. The presentation layer can be used for browsing and opening existing content (reports, dashboards, analysis) but to some extent can also be used to create new BI content. New content in the form of reports and analysis views can be created using the Web Ad Hoc Query and Reporting component (WAQR). The Cognos BI and SAP DW solution consists of the report definitions, dashboard definitions, predefined analysis metadata and data integration metadata. The report definitions are sets of predefined report PRPT files. The dashboard definition is a set of XAction & widget files. The analysis metadata is the set of XAction files. Report Designer and Design Studio from the Cognos BI client tool were used to develop the custom solution.
Publish Response Output Options Design Reports Rendered Reports Options available for publishing reports PDF (Default) Excel (to help power-user apply individual analysis and heuristics) TXT Dealer Deposit Rotation Dashboard Apollo Tyres has processes for Dealer category based on recurring advance scheme (RAS) to define dealer credit limit for dealers who buy products from the Company. There are four Dealers categories based on RAS as well as product categories. Based on each Dealers category, Outstanding Aging shows credit days of dealer, it is categorized based on days (0-30, 30-45, 45-60, 60-90, and above 90 days).
Dealer Health-check Dashboard Dealer Health Checks Dashboard helps the organization to monitor organization replacement market dealers performance on monthly basis (MTD), based on Sales value against dealers category. This also helps to monitor location-wise dealer performance. This dashboard covers those dealers that show zero sales i.e. not buying any product from Company. This comes under category of Unbilled Customer. Sales Performance Dashboard Sales Performance Dashboard helps the organization to monitor organization replacement market Sales performance on monthly basis (MTD) against Sales value/volume and Product category. This Dashboard also helps the organization to know dealers behavior against payment realization.
About Apollo Tyres Apollo Tyres Ltd. has its corporate headquarters in Gurgaon, India. Apollo Tyres is in the business of manufacture and sale of tyres since its inception in 1972. The company offers a comprehensive product portfolio spread across passenger cars, light trucks, truck-buses, off highway & bicycle tyres, retreading material and retreaded tyres. The company currently has its footprint across the globe with manufacturing facilities in Asia, Europe and Africa with nine modern tyre facilities and exports to over 118 countries.
About TekMindz TekMindz is an IT consulting & technology services company with headquarters in India, serving clients across Asia/Pacific, Middle East, North America and Africa. Bringing together technology, people and processes across diverse sectors for organizations around the world, TekMindz enables business enterprises and governments to most effectively serve their customers and citizens. Know more about us by visiting our website at www.tekmindz.com India Headquarters Samin TekMindz India Pvt. Ltd. H-171, Ground Floor, Sector 63, Noida 201307 (U.P.) India Tel : +91 120 6137000 The Americas Samin TekMindz, Inc. 2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400 Wilmington, DE 19808 Tel: +1-408-512-2275 +1-408-692-7621 Copyright 2014, Samin TekMindz (I) Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any other form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, including photocopying, reprinting or recording, for any purpose, without the written permission of Samin TekMindz. Disclaimer Information in this document is subject to change without prior notice, implied or express, and must not be interpreted as a commitment on part of Samin TekMindz, Samin TekMindz does not assume any responsibility or make any warranty against errors that may appear in this document and forswear any implied warranty of merchantability and worthiness for any purpose. URLs mentioned in this document, being the copyright of their respective owners, maybe changed by them anytime, without prior notice, and may not lead to the mentioned webpage. Trademark All other companies, brands, products or service names mentioned in this document are trademarks/registered trademarks of their respective owners.