Solution overview

Flipkart

Flipkart—founded in 2007 in Bangalore, India—is the largest B2B e-commerce platform in the country. Having started with books, it has now diversified into a wide range of products.

Industry: Consumer Products

Function: Finance, IT,

Marketing, Operations, Sales, Supply Chain

Geography: India

Challenges:

Integrate complex data from disparate sources

Deliver analytical data to staff in various departments

Improve inventory utilization

Solution:

Flipkart has deployed QlikView 11 to 200 users, together with 35 named users, and implemented several applications analyzing 25 million rows of data.

Benefits:

Provided transparent and up-to-date information for analysis

Embedded data-driven decision making at Flipkart

Improved inventory utilization

Delivered first application for sales in just six weeks

Data source systems Applications: Open Source ERP software Database: Microsoft Excel, MySQL

FLIPKART IMPROVES INVENTORY UTILIZATION WITH QLIKVIEW

“QlikView is a superb tool for managing inventory by allowing you to optimize stock levels and lower costs associated with excess stock. By using QlikView in our day-to-day operations, we’ve improved inventory utilization by 5 percent.” – Pravin Shinde, Analytics Manager, Flipkart

Flipkart, the largest B2B e-commerce business in India, went live in 2007 with the objective of making books easily available to anyone with internet access. Founded by entrepreneurs Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, Flipkart has diversified from book sales into other products. It sells entertainment products—from movies, music to consumer electronics—as well as healthcare and personal products, home appliances, and clothing. Flipkart experiences massive growth quarter on quarter

The rapid diversification has also brought rapid growth. This is illustrated by the company’s expanding network of warehouses and procurement operations.

This kind of scale has added to the need for Flipkart to continually upgrade its business discovery software to better serve multiple business units with new applications.

As a startup, Flipkart initially used open source technology to support the launch, but soon found that open source business intelligence (BI) tools had limited functionality. Shinde says: “Scalability was a problem. It was hard to drill down into our data to produce complex reports.”

QlikView impresses Flipkart as replacement for open source BI

In August 2011, the company invested in its first licensed business discovery software with QlikView Enterprise Edition, which has since been upgraded to QlikView 11. By then, Flipkart was experiencing an increasingly complex data flow from different business units—for example, inventory and supply chain. Shinde says: “We needed a smart system to collate and display meaningful and actionable analysis for decision makers across different business units and locations. Prior to this, we’d very much been an open source house. But with exponential expansion in the business and a growing number of knowledge workers and managers requiring BI analysis and reports, we needed flexibility and speed in our analytics system.”

Flipkart was impressed by the rapid time to business value achieved with QlikView. Shinde says: “The first application for sales took just six weeks to implement and each subsequent functional area—supply chain, inventory and finance—took a similar effort. Speed of delivery made all the difference to our business, with analysis available instantly at the fingertips of our knowledge workers on a self-service basis.”

Another high-performing application in QlikView is for inventory management. Sales people and managers access data and find information quickly without any IT support. Shinde says: “Previously, we were

RETURN ON INVESTMENT

Inventory utilization improvement

TIME TO VALUE

First application for sales takes just six weeks

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“With QlikView, we are trying to establish data-driven decision making as a culture within our organization. All the relevant teams have been empowered and no longer depend on anyone else for reports and analysis.”

– Pravin Shinde, Analytics Manager, Flipkart

using ad hoc processes and reporting. QlikView is a superb tool for managing inventory by allowing you to optimize stock levels and lower costs associated with excess stock. By using QlikView in our day-to-day operations, we’ve improved inventory utilization by 5 percent.”

Using its 12-strong in-house IT team, Flipkart has deployed QlikView 11 to 200 users, together with 35 named users, without requiring help from external consultants. The QlikView applications analyze around 25 million rows of data, which is increasing in line with the company’s growth. With direct access to company data, staff can spend more time on analysis rather than data collation, and work with one version of the truth.

Flipkart transforms its business culture

In an industry where fast access to information is important, QlikView has also transformed the way Flipkart does business. It’s helping to make the company more agile and responsive to its customers. “With QlikView, we are trying to establish data-driven decision making as a culture within our organization,” says Shinde. “We’re changing the way we see ourselves. All the relevant teams have been empowered and no longer depend on anyone else for reports and analysis. We’ve developed the capacity to share knowledge holistically across teams, which means we can better evaluate our sales strategy.”

The teams have responded well to QlikView due to its intuitive nature and user-friendly dashboards. Users can explore information freely rather than follow predefined paths of questions. The QlikView business discovery platform’s application-driven model works with existing data sources, which for Flipkart includes the open source MySQL data management system and Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software. According to Shinde, the company plans to extend QlikView use to employee tablets and smartphones—which is now possible with QlikView 11—and provide a dashboard for senior management to gain an overview of company performance.