A leading provider of haircare products to the South African market has looked to the Cognos Powerplay business intelligence solution provided by Synergy Computing to help give it the edge in a highly competitive market.
Colomer South Africa is a subsidiary of the Colomer Group, based in Spain. Locally, the company markets, distributes and sells a range of over 100 haircare products to locations around the country.
According to Christiaan Janse van Rensburg, financial controller at Colomer SA, the company sought insight into the performance of individual products in each location where they were on sale.
"This industry is very competitive, with a number of players offering a wide range of rival products. The accessibility of accurate and detailed information is critical to enable our company to flexibly adjust strategy in any given region - we needed up to date information on sales per region and per brand across a diverse product range," he says.
With a historical use of Cognos in the company, he says this was the natural choice to provide the necessary analysis. The company uses the Accpac enterprise resource planning system, and Janse van Rensburg says this also serves as the source of the information which is acted upon by the Cognos Powerplay business intelligence tools.
According to Bruce Harris, account manager at Synergy Computing, close integration between Accpac and Cognos ensures accurate and reliable data input.
"Effective intelligence is dependent on the availability of accurate and relevant data for analysis. Since the ERP solution records all sales-related data for Colomer's product sets, this provides the basis for effective insight into individual product performance," he says.
Continuing, Janse van Rensburg explains that different divisions within the Colomer management team use the insight provided by the BI solution. "These divisions are sales, marketing and finance; while each examines the intelligence differently, Synergy has nevertheless designed a single cube, which ensures that there is always only one version of the truth; prior to that, we had two cubes, which led to problems of inconsistency."
In terms of the flexibility of its strategy, he says the insights gleaned from its BI system are applied as practical interventions. "Budgets and forecasts are set per region and per product; with the ability to determine performance, we are able to identify possible problems and adjust marketing strategy on the fly. That may mean sending in sales representatives, adjusting promotional tactics or even identifying whether or not a particular product is appropriate for the region," he says.
Not only has the BI solution provided this insight, it has also eliminated a manual and time-consuming task. Janse van Rensburg explains: "Previously, we had to manually enter data into spreadsheets, which someone had to pull from Accpac, in order to produce monthly reports which are sent to the Colomer head office in Spain. Today, Cognos does all of that for us, more accurately and much faster. That saves up to seven days a month which can now be spent on strategic initiatives. Cognos has added great value to the organisation, and we're very happy with how Synergy has supported our BI initiative," he concludes.
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