Woolworths Financial Services, the credit and financial products arm of the South African retail clothing, home goods and food chain, has implemented new business intelligence technology to help identify business opportunities, introduce new financial products and hone its business practices.
The use of Cognos' KPI Business Pack, from BI solutions specialists, Synergy Computing, also ensures the company is able to take daily action to keep operational activities totally aligned with key business strategies.
"By using a balanced scorecard approach to monitor our business performance and linking this to the key performance indicators (KPI), we're able to make a hard connection between business performance and business strategies," says Raoul Miller, Head of Knowledge Management at Woolworths Financial Services, which manages the company's private label shopping card, the Woolworths Visa credit cards, personal loans and its unit trust products.
"We not only provide the high, overview, level of business performance. Through the use of Web portal technology, we're able to drive this down to operational levels so that individuals can see how well they are doing and what they need to do to ensure their performance is aligned with the company's goals."
Before implementing balanced scorecarding and KPIs, Woolworths was dependent on flat, monthly reports that gave an historic perspective of performances and needed in-depth analysis to determine action. Now Woolworths' 400 key users have daily input on different aspects of its businesses.
"No longer do we have to wait until the end of the month to unpack the information that resided in the historical reports which was the only way of seeing what business opportunities we might have missed, or reviewing some of the successes we might have had.
"By linking these cubes with KPIs, critical information is now available to all on a daily basis. It's in their faces, enabling them to collaborate as a working group to take any necessary action."
Woolworths initially implemented Cognos' PowerPlay and Impromptu analytical and reporting tools based on a client environment, enabling BI specialists to develop analytical cubes and reports for publishing and disseminating to key decision-makers. It subsequently implemented PowerPlay's and Upfront Web portal to enable reports to be published and accessed over a standard Internet or intranet browser and has now added KPI Business Pack.
One of the key business goals of the Financial Services division is to continue the move from being a product-centric company to one focused on its customers. These customers currently total 1.6 million, with transactions managed across multiple channels - online, call centre, direct mail and in-store.
"BI brings us the ability to understand our customers better and at a deeper level than was previously possible. We're realising a greater analytical capacity enabling us to see our strengths, focus on the bigger corporate picture and track progress against our business strategy," says Miller.
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