Canon completed implementation of a BI system

On January 30, 2017 the ATC company announced a QlikView technology implementation project in infrastructure of Canon company.

Project Tasks

Among the tasks set by the customer:

• Increase in flexibility, availability and transparency of the corporate reporting
• Acceleration of acceptance of business solutions
• Standardization of the reporting of different divisions of the company
• Optimization of a financial accounting system and accounts receivable management
• Optimization of load of IT department and analysts of the company
• Interactive access to the key reporting under finance, sales and warehouses depending on the access level of the user
• Output of the outdated analytical systems from operation^[1].

Project Progress

In the course of accomplishment of project works technologies and the equipment are used:

• BI Platform QlikView
• ERP system of Epicor iScala 3.0
• Server: DB of Microsoft SQL Server 2012, VMware of VM 10 Cores; 64Gb RAM;
• DWH of Netapp.

In a work progress specialists of a project team output a number of recommendations for implementation of the similar systems:

• Requirement analysis and audit of a status of analytics before implementation. It is extremely necessary to carry out preliminary requirement analysis, shown by business to the system of the business analysis and also to book audit of the current methods of work with analytics. It will allow to estimate more precisely complexity of a new system, so - terms and implementation cost. Besides, preliminary careful estimate of requirements will allow to buy once the necessary number of licenses and to receive the best conditions from vendor.
• Value assessment of implementation and cost of ownership of a system in the future is required.
• Support of top management of customer company. Implementation of BI is beyond the approach to implementation of business applications which settled in the company as information resources which are located by different divisions are necessary. Existence of an administrative resource will allow to attract key staff to the project whose knowledge, as a result, will define success of implementation.

Project Results

Users are analysts of QlikView (applications and reports):

• top management,
• finance department,
• department of sales,
• department of marketing,
• department of customer service,
• department of business planning.

In a project deliverable terms of preparation of financial and business statements were reduced by 5.3 times, interactivity of the obtained operational sales informations and to debts, the speed and justification of acceptance of business solutions increased. Four workplaces are optimized.

The start of the project was the most difficult stage — primary analysis of requirements to a business intelligence and formation of terms of reference for the new BI solution. As a functional design, it was necessary to carry out big internal work — to involve experts from different divisions and to approve among themselves their requirements. The second problem follows from the first — in view of differences in approaches and requirements at divisions, time expenditure practically at each stage considerably increases. But, despite difficulties, thorough training allowed to select really suitable BI tools and quickly enough to implement it. Evgeny Popkov, Chief information officer Canon.Py

Notes