ROESER Medical GmbH
ROESER Medical implements company-wide sales management with analysis and reporting tool
"With our new BI solution we were able to provide a single management tool with a common view of the group's sales figures within just two months of taking over several companies.“
Andreas Klopp, Head of IT-solutions, ROESER Medical GmbH.
The challenge of company-wide sales management
ROESER Medical GmbH is a specialist for medical products and a provider of a full range of services for hospitals. Its product portfolio includes over 800,000 articles. Around 1,200 hospitals are supplied with medical devices, medical technology and hospital services. These include system concepts for the selection, acquisition and monitoring of complete product and service bundles. The group employs around 380 people and has its headquarters in Bochum with other branches in Mülheim on the Ruhr and Leinfelden-Echterdingen near Stuttgart. The group has grown strongly through targeted acquisitions in recent years. As a result, the number of IT systems it ran also grew: The company operates four parallel ERP systems, for example. Due to the heterogeneous structure of its IT landscape, a consolidated view of its data was not possible. Evaluations were carried out on the basis of Excel - but only on a monthly basis due to the high manual effort involved. In parallel, ad-hoc evaluations were made directly from the ERP systems.
Key requirements: central, simple, mobile
To provide company-wide sales management, ROESER Medical was looking for an analysis and reporting solution that could be used to merge and evaluate data from all systems on one platform.
They wanted to find a flexible BI solution for standard reports and ad-hoc queries, which also allows controlling analysis based on up-to-the-minute data across company groups. It should be possible to evaluate heterogeneous data structures without aggregation in legacy systems. They wanted it to be as easy to operate as possible to allow direct usage in the departments without support from IT. In addition to this, the application should be available on mobile devices, so that the 85 sales representatives can have access to information such as current sales and sales to their customers while on the road.
The choice fell on the QlikView business discovery platform. On the one hand, the memory-based and associative data model was crucial to the decision. Aggregated key figures can be analyzed at the highest level of detail without creating multidimensional OLAP cubes. All data is stored in RAM with an average compression ratio of 10. This makes it possible to analyze large, complex amounts of data from various sources within short response times for calculations and selections. There is no need to access the underlying databases. On the other hand, the self-service BI approach was also a decisive factor in the decision: Users in specialist departments have direct access to information independent of IT and can work up and distribute that data on their own. The intuitive usability with a color-coded point-and-click interface helps makes this possible.
The mobile client was also an argument in favor of this solution: it allows all functions such as interactive analyses and the associative search to be used on mobile devices like the iPad.
Rapid Deployment
In the implementation of the project ROESER was supported by COSMO CONSULT BI GmbH which specializes in the planning, implementation and support of business intelligence projects.
Within two months the infrastructure was built, the solution implemented and all data integrated. Just four weeks later the sales staff could use the system productively following an appropriate training program.
Reports and analyses down to the highest level of detail daily instead of monthly
Currently, 170 members from sales, controlling, financial accounting and business management use a central sales dashboard. In total, 6.2 million rows of data from two Microsoft Dynamics NAV 6.0 systems are evaluated as well as historical data from MS Dynamics NAV 2.60 according to different dimensions.
Sales representatives can access data on the go via iPad, even in offline mode. cc|bi dynamics dashboards are used. COSMO CONSULT preconfigures the dashboards and they allow for consolidated and client-independent evaluations in areas such as distribution and sales, financial accounting and controlling.
The customer structure is, for example, evaluated according to various criteria such as region, purchasing behavior, etc. Sales areas are also compared among themselves. Another area of application is the analysis of current sales and sales histories of customers in their purchasing organization or company structure. Furthermore, you can analyze revenue and sales volume data across all manufacturers at article level. With one click you can see, for example, both sales levels for particular manufacturers and how much gross profit were realized for a specific customer or how margins have developed in the last two years. Articles with strong or weak sales can be immediately represented in graphs.
One positive side effect is the reduction of the burden on financial controlling, which previously had to implement all evaluations.
Based on the positive experiences so far, there are plans to use the BI solution for customer analytics at the subsidiary HospiGate, a special logistics firm for hospitals, in the future. In addition, the sales planning is to be mapped in its entirety using a specific planning component.
"With our new BI solution we were able to provide a single management tool with a common view of the group's sales figures within just two months of taking over several companies", said Andreas Klopp, Head of IT-solutions, ROESER Medical GmbH, in summary. "Previously we could get a report on the status of the sales only once per month. Today, it takes one click for the sales staff to be able to immediately see their up-to-date performance data."
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