BI Insight

Background

Falken Tire is a brand of tires by Japanese Sumitomo Rubber Industries with branches across Asia, America and Europe. Their first tire was produced in 1983 and it wasn’t until two years later that they began exporting their tires outside Japan and entered the US market only in 1990.

As the organization grew, so did the need for accurate and immediate information. The company lacked an effective way to consolidate, manage and distribute business data. Data resided in many different sources and in different formats, limiting its ability to analyze and deliver it within a single platform. To evaluate performance in the market, Falken Tire compared their Sales data with the Market data. Falken Tire wanted to perform Market Share Analysis and also forecast demand. However, they were faced with complications involving multi-source data analysis.

These issues needed to be addressed by Systech Solutions, Inc.

Challenges

Diversity of sources:

The fundamental problem that Falken Tire faced was that their data was stored in different places. The Sales data was in the Operation System, Objective data was in a flat file and Market data was in an SQL database. It was not only time consuming to create a report but also not flexible to do further analysis.

Tracking and forecasting:

Traditionally, Falken Tire could not track or forecast actual sales. Therefore, it was essential to configure a reporting tool to access information in the data mart with ease. They needed to get a deeper insight into their key sales performance to better forecast the market.

Solution

After studying the data from different sources, Systech came up with a model of how the information fit together. To enable this, the development team needed to understand the existing information and find the correlated pieces. Systech’s development team then created a common format for the data mart in a SQL Server 2005 database. Later, Informatica was decided on as the most appropriate ETL platform for this BI implementation at Falken Tire. The ETL platform was configured to support reporting and complex data analysis with maximum efficiency. It was also structured to provide enough flexibility to accommodate future trade volume and business growth.
Subsequently, MicroStrategy was configured to access information in the data mart to deliver customer friendly reports, templates and dashboards.

Result

Centralized data in BI data mart:

• Users could easily access the data. Also allowed them to compare Falken Tire sales with their competitor and do market analysis.
• The robust architecture of the new ETL platform provided flexibility and scalability.
• The new ETL process fetched data to reports based on real time which was impossible earlier.

 Empowered to report and analyze data to make improved decisions:

• The new and improved dashboard consisted of multiple parameters/metrics that helped track all Key Performance Indicators in Sales and Inventory.
• The dashboard enabled Falken Tire to view the performance of the company based on their objectives.
• It helped create a Daily Sales Report for the previous working day and also helped to view Sales by drilling down to the zip level of the state.
• The solution enabled business users to drill into the key trends to do an online analysis with just a click without coming back to the developer asking for a separate report.
• The reporting tool automated the comparative market share analysis of the Sales. This process which was a multi-step process earlier was now an automated process.
• They could report sales figures, forecast projection, estimate competitive sales and gauge the state of business.
• Based on the forecasting demand they could manage the inventory.

 The Systech team thus helped the end users view critical performance information in a matter of seconds and quickly make decisions that seek to optimize market share.