Ultra Liquors improves operations, reduces fraud with QlikView

Ultra Liquors is a leading discount liquor retail group operating 30 branch stores in all the major centres countrywide (as well as a growing number of franchise outlets).

The company has an administrative office in Cape Town and its head office in Johannesburg.

Ultra Liquors' branch stores run electronic point of sale (POS) systems, notes Craig Robinson, group IT director. The company's stores and head office are linked to the admin office via a virtual private network.

At the end of every trading day, sales data is transmitted to centralised back-office servers in Cape Town. Once there, it is consolidated and accessed through an accounting system.

Robinson says the accounting system, which main function is to generate financial and management accounts, does not integrate with the POS system.

As a result, analysing stock moves (sales) by teller, item, transaction, store or customer was a costly, delay-prone and therefore impracticable exercise. “Being hamstrung in this way also opened us up to fraud,” he says.

In 2007, a major supplier told Robinson of a quick, easy and powerful means of achieving the desired stock analysis - a business intelligence solution called QlikView. “We learned that QlikView was used by many of our suppliers,” Robinson says.

He called for a demo, and true to its reputation, QlikView demonstrated quick and easy analysis of stock movements down to the smallest detail, without the need for a data warehouse to be built at great cost and considerable delay.

“QlikView's innovative technology handles enormous amounts of data in-memory, combining with a non-hierarchical data modelling structure to deliver speedy access to information,” Robinson explains. “Moreover, the solution was quick to implement and very easy to use. For all that it is extraordinarily powerful.”

Robinson says QlikView South Africa's solution delivery was impressive. “I did a business requirements analysis and briefed them during the course of one morning, giving them some month-end reports from which to build a stock data model. Ten days later the model was ready, and that was that. It gave us all we needed.”

He says the data model achieved the kind of analysis that would otherwise have taken an inordinate amount of time - consolidating thousands of reports and presenting key performance areas in a single dashboard.

“In terms of tracking business trends it made the impossible possible,” says Robinson. “You cannot go through 10 standard reports for every one of our 30 stores, if they are 100 pages each.

“Previously we would have to work through all POS reports over several hours, and once areas of investigation have been identified, proceed with more reports. The QlikView dashboard shows problem areas at a glance, allowing you to drill down and investigate.”

More detailed and immediate stock analysis through QlikView has resulted in Ultra Liquors improving its operations dramatically, Robinson says.

“We have improved market intelligence, and we can monitor stock-outs, overstocks, redundant stock and obsolete stock as soon as they occur. This has helped us free up cash as well as improved customer service.”

Robinson explains that Qlikview allowed Ultra Liquors to put controls in place to prevent fraud - by monitoring refunds, voids, credit notes and overrides. “It significantly reduced the amount of fraud committed, compared to history. I believe the project easily paid for itself within the first year of being completed.”

Discussing cost, Robinson declares himself to be happy. “The upfront cost might be similar to other BI solutions, but the real difference comes with implementing and using it,” he says.

“Where another solution might take months to be ready, this took a couple of days. We paid for 10 days of one programmer's time. One person looks after the solution on an ongoing basis. Should more development be needed, I have been trained to do it, but we'll probably get a focused consultant in to do that.”

Robinson says since Ultra Liquors upgraded to the latest QlikView edition (QlikView Server 9), store access is a cinch. “Previously we used to e-mail the data model to regions, but it got too unwieldy. Web-based access has made distribution much easier.”

Having tasted the benefits of improved stock management and fraud detection, enabled by a stable solution that is both accessible and user-friendly, Ultra Liquors foresees developing more data models in future, starting with a customer application.

“QlikView has delivered on its considerable promise,” says Robinson. “We're definitely going to make more extensive use of it in the company.”