Improving the flow of information and insights for C-level executives

Faster decisions for a retail brand

A global, privately held company that creates and distributes beauty products and personal care accessories needed a BI solution to monitor financial KPIs and put executive dashboards and reporting in place. The existing reporting was time-consuming, with inconsistent data and duplicated effort. We were asked to improve the flow of information and insights to the C-suite.

Consolidating financial data

Financial reporting was challenging and labour-intensive: month-end close took up to a couple of weeks, with manual manipulation and consolidation of data from many sources. The ERP lacked built-in financial tools such as the general ledger, and consolidating numbers at brand level with variance against budget and forecast was a major challenge.

The finance department asked us to:

• Equip the finance group with self-service reporting, including alternate reporting hierarchies.
• Automatically and securely distribute operational and management reports to over 70 recipients.
• Refresh data every 2 hours during month-end close.
• Build scorecard reports richer in detail and complexity than the standard reports.

Zura Labs solution

The solution targeted better delivery performance, lower costs and the discovery of trends and opportunities:

• Scorecards at customer, brand and category level by MTD, QTD and YTD.
• Sales, profitability and customer scorecards.
• Comparison of financial and sales performance across time periods.
• Financial reporting showing variance between budget and forecast.
• Inventory scorecards for current and future orders.
• ABC and XYZ inventory analysis highlighting the most profitable and most frequently purchased products.
• Automated daily reports delivered to the right people with the latest data.

Results achieved

We implemented a dimension management tool with an easy, web-based interface for flexible management of data structures, relationships and attributes, and designed an EDW to consolidate data from many sources into dimensional structures.

• Drag-and-drop graphical interface; finance teams manage hierarchies and perspectives self-service.
• Transparent, fast, flexible and automated data loading and extraction.
• Report distribution to multiple recipients cut from days to a few minutes.
• Customized, access-based reporting and high-performance ad-hoc analysis.
• Interactive dashboards for collaborative decision-making.
• Better preparation for seasonal fluctuations, lead times and stock-outs of the most profitable products.
• Visibility of trends, bottlenecks and profitability by customer, product, product group and region.
• Improved stock management to predict demand and delivery lead times.