BI Solution for Sales

Analysis Optimization
Delivered for Apollo
Tyres
TekMindz enables Apollo Tyres to optimize
their global sales performance by bringing a
robust & scalable BI solution.
TEK INDZ
TM
Case Overview
Apollo Tyres wanted a global BI solution for sales analysis that accesses business
transaction data from SAP (as the main data source) and Excel sheets, or flat files (as the
secondary data source). The need was to build a robust and scalable BI solution based on
SAP BW that offers reporting capabilities with key guiding principles:
Business Requirement
Different user groups with diverse Use Cases to address and, as such, diverse technical
and functional objectives all had their own role-specific business requirements.
The management wanted to optimally leverage the existing ERP - SAP BW and Cognos
BI with the ultimate objective of empowering Sales analysis and improve business
performance.

Bring greater transparency to the management at the corporate and various

hierarchical levels through improved control and visibility
Transform to more Digitalized processes to support growth and enable quicker
integration of new acquisitions
Increase Return on Investments through cost optimization and increased
efficiency for time allocation towards design, deployment and maintenance of the
BI solution
Optimize Business Content - which addresses a significant number of sales
analysis requirements
Enable relevant stack holder for self analysis of Business data to expedite decision
support process

The analysts required the solution to allow them to easily create their own reports
where existing reports were insufficient in fulfilling their reporting needs.
The auditors required the solution to provide traceability to specific billing
documents for customer(s) when required to analyze instances of variances.
Additionally, their sales document level investigations needed to be addressed in
SAP BW, instead of in the transactional system.
The IT team required the solution to be automated for internal processes,
including email alerts of successes or failures of systemic processes. They also
required the existing SAP R/3 system to work at optimal efficiency by removing
old data related to business-critical transactions from the OLTP (online
transaction processing) system.
The head of planning required the BI solution to compare actual and planned
sales to ascertain and address the causes of variances or to correct plan figures.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION: COGNOS BI 10.2 SOLUTION STACK
COGNOS 10 SUITE
SAP BW
SAP R3, ABAP ROUTINES
ORACLE DB2
SAP ECC 6.0 | SAP APO | MS Excel | CSV files
Presentation Layer
Middle Layer
ETL
Database
Source Systems
1.
2.
3.
The Platform
BI components
The presentation layer
The figure below depicts the realization of various functional components into
corresponding technology components.
On a functional level, the Cognos BI and SAP BW server can be divided into three layers:
PRESENTATION LAYER
PRESENTATION LAYER
BROWSER
SECURITY ADMINISTRATION LOGGING &
AUDITING
BUSINESS
LOGIC RULE
TASK
SCHEDULING
SOLUTION
REPOSITORY
PRESENTATION LAYER
PORTAL MS OFFICE WEB SERVER EMAIL
REPORTING
PRODUCTION
OPERATIONAL
AD-HOC
ANALYSIS DASHBOARD PROCESS MANAGEMENT
DATA MINING
OLAP
DRILL & EXPLORE
MERTICS
KPIs
ALERTS
INTEGRATION
DEFININTION
EXECUTION
ETL EII METADATA
The Solution
With existing business processes and IT systems at Apollo, transaction processing system
was on SAP ECC running on BW 7.0 with Cognos 10 BI Suite. TekMindzs scope was to
help Sales & Marketing stakeholders to redefine/identify KPIs of Replacement,
Institutional and Export market along with revamp of their existing Business Intelligence
solution for the Sales & Marketing Department. TekMindzs scope of work covered the
following activities:
The solution leverages the rich functionality available with Cognos and SAP BW suite at
Application Server, Client and Administrator levels. At the Presentation Layer, Cognos BI
comes with a built-in web interface called the user console. The user console forms a
front-end that allows a human user to interact with the server. The presentation layer can
be used for browsing and opening existing content (reports, dashboards, analysis) but to
some extent can also be used to create new BI content. New content in the form of
reports and analysis views can be created using the Web Ad Hoc Query and Reporting
component (WAQR). The Cognos BI and SAP DW solution consists of the report
definitions, dashboard definitions, predefined analysis metadata and data integration
metadata. The report definitions are sets of predefined report PRPT files. The dashboard
definition is a set of XAction & widget files. The analysis metadata is the set of XAction
files. Report Designer and Design Studio from the Cognos BI client tool were used to
develop the custom solution.
1.
2.
3.
4.
Inclusion of Dynamic Material Hierarchy to support drilled down analysis
Inclusion of Time Dimension
Redesign/creation of Sales standard cube and Sales customized cubes with
Hierarchical analysis
Enabling the business to understand the competitive market based on third party
data such as ATMA and SIAM
Dealer Deposit Rotation Dashboard
Design
Reports
Rendered
Reports
Options available for publishing reports
Output
Options Publish
Response
PDF (Default)
TXT
Excel (to help power-user apply individual analysis and heuristics)
Apollo Tyres has processes for Dealer category based on recurring advance scheme (RAS) to define
dealer credit limit for dealers who buy products from the Company. There are four Dealers
categories based on RAS as well as product categories.
Based on each Dealers category, Outstanding Aging shows credit days of dealer, it is categorized
based on days (0-30, 30-45, 45-60, 60-90, and above 90 days).
Dealer Health-check Dashboard
Dealer Health Checks Dashboard helps the organization to monitor organization replacement market
dealers performance on monthly basis (MTD), based on Sales value against dealers category. This
also helps to monitor location-wise dealer performance. This dashboard covers those dealers that
show zero sales i.e. not buying any product from Company. This comes under category of Unbilled
Customer.
Sales Performance Dashboard
Sales Performance Dashboard helps the organization to monitor organization replacement market
Sales performance on monthly basis (MTD) against Sales value/volume and Product category. This
Dashboard also helps the organization to know dealers behavior against payment realization.
About Apollo Tyres
Apollo Tyres Ltd. has its corporate headquarters in Gurgaon,
India. Apollo Tyres is in the business of manufacture and
sale of tyres since its inception in 1972. The company offers
a comprehensive product portfolio spread across passenger
cars, light trucks, truck-buses, off highway & bicycle tyres,
retreading material and retreaded tyres. The company
currently has its footprint across the globe with
manufacturing facilities in Asia, Europe and Africa with nine
modern tyre facilities and exports to over 118 countries.
About TekMindz
TekMindz is an IT consulting & technology services company with
headquarters in India, serving clients across Asia/Pacific, Middle
East, North America and Africa. Bringing together technology,
people and processes across diverse sectors for organizations
around the world, TekMindz enables business enterprises and
governments to most effectively serve their customers and citizens.
Know more about us by visiting our website at www.tekmindz.com
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+1-408-692-7621
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