Applications provide critical KM for retail marketing, business reporting

Bridgestone Europe spent hours creating reports, such as executive pricing reports and monthly pricing evolution packages for the leadership team. They pulled data from multiple data sources with no single version of the truth because those sources were not able to communicate with each other effectively. They began to look for a new solution—more specifically for a self-service approach to data that involved all departments, divisions and points of sale that would provide a single environment for all data.

Bridgestone Europe evaluated several possible solutions, eventually choosing QlikView and Qlik NPrinting from Qlik because of their enterprise readiness and ability to extract data from multiple data sources, such as Oracle, Microsoft Access and SAP.

“Qlik gives us a total overview of the entire operation at a glance,” says, Viviane Stranger, Bridgestone Europe application owner. “It brings our factories, offices and employees closer together and streamlines the organization right up to the highest level. Everyone looks at the same data, which is defined by the KPIs, rather than their own data. The business is very satisfied, you see reports appearing at a wide range of meetings that shed light on the data from different perspectives. The business no longer has to invest time in making reports, but can rather focus on analyzing information and making decisions.”

The implementation process was divided into three steps: blueprint, development and user tests. What made the deployment effective was that the users were involved in the process at an early stage. Their participation ensured rapid acceptance of the new software.

Qlik is now being used in all business divisions, according to Stranger. Day-to-day sales have been made easier thanks to unambiguous reports to the various offices. The price department uses Qlik for positioning and analyzing products, while logistics and distribution use a whole range of analyses for, among other things, product availability, fill rate, safety, delivery and measuring tire pressure.

“I think I save about four to five hours per month on making reports thanks to Qlik,” says Bridgestone Europe pricing director Wim Beirens. “Examples include the executive pricing reports and the monthly pricing evolution packages for the leadership team in Europe. These are 12 slides that can be prepared and printed with a single click. This used to take us hours. Furthermore, we now have fewer discussions about the reports, and as a result we can focus more on more important subjects.”

Bridgestone Europe plans to continue using Qlik for its supply chain data analysis and to continue to work with the company to find important insights for the business, according to Stranger.

As small retailers like Merrill and multinational retailers like Bridgestone Europe continue to seek the best opportunities for marketing investments and to obtain the fastest reliable information about sales, pricing, inventory and other essential details, they will continue to rely on knowledge management solutions to set themselves apart from their competitors.