Global footwear and apparel retailer, ASICS wanted to sharpen its internal processes and required a data and analytics coach to train and provide the right equipment to succeed.

ASICS’s category planning team was challenged with getting access to data in a timely manner to make key decisions for current and future seasons and review the performance of previous seasons.

Access was often hindered by a need to use manual processes to cross-reference and compare. At the same time, it was having issues with the time it took to plan for the next season, as the accuracy of predictions was based on assumptions rather than actionable data.

“It’s impossible for many organisations to plan ahead when data is siloed in various applications or excel spreadsheets, because rarely do these data conflate into one single source of actionable truth,” Decision Inc. Australia managing director, Tony Butler said.

“Furthermore, when data is isolated like this it’s often used to inform how a business has performed, rather than providing insights that can help it forecast ahead and improve performance.”

The team at ASICS had been working with Decision Inc. Australia for over 10 years and reached out to the data and analytics consultancy firm to see if there was a solution that would improve their planning capability.

Decision Inc. worked closely with ASICS Oceania general manager, Michael Masulans to centralise critical data sources from ERP, POS, and warehouse management systems to build unified analytics platform.

As well as consolidate sales, budget, open orders, delivery, and inventory data with the planning team’s range, promotion and merchandise plans, the solution provided the team with a single dashboard, which automated all reporting and allowed them to glean insights from the data, and finally a visualisation platform to make sense of the gained insights.

The new dashboard included the implementation of Qlik Sense to centralise all of the company’s data into one single platform. Qlik has the additional benefit of ensuring all data funnelled into it would interoperate, ensuring that it could be easily accessed and analysed regardless of its format.

The design of the customised dashboard helped ASICS visualise its data quickly and meaningfully, allowing it to create visualisation that helped it understand the data for more accurate forecasting and planning.

“It’s one thing to ensure you can access all your data quickly, but the power of data can only be realised once it’s analysed and visualised. Not everyone is a data engineer, so it was imperative that we make the data accessible to everyone involved in sales and operational planning at ASICS,” Butler said.

ASICS now uses Qlik to develop dashboards for sales, category & planning, supply chain, retail and warehouse operations teams. The platform allows each BU/function to take actions based on timely data and insights, streamlining decision-making and increasing visibility over its operational data.

“Qlik provides us with a single analytics platform which centralises our analytics and makes it accessible for everyone in the business,” Masulans said.

ASICS now has an automated range plan for each retail channel, two dynamic merchandise category reports which tell the story of its seasonal sales progress, and improved access to data to better support its entire planning process.

The benefits have been immediately felt, according to Masulans.

“Qlik Planning dashboards have given us the ability to deep dive into our Sales and Inventory data with speed and confidence,” he said.

“Having a view of sales, margin, demand and inventory in one easy to navigate location has saved us valuable time. The planning team have been able to refocus to insights and outcomes and are better equipped to influence our future sales capability, as well as foresee future business risks to our plan.

“The tools that have been built are flexible to change and evolve to our business requirements. We’re looking forward to continuing our Qlik journey as we further evolve and stabilise the data that feeds into our Integrated Planning system.”

The solution has since been adopted by the retail arm of the business, providing them with a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly overview, as well as a previous year comparison.

“It’s been a great tool that is able to be used by managers, ASMs and our regionals, providing great insight into the business. The biggest benefit is the that it provides one source of truth that is accessible to the relevant management team. We use this daily and have been able to make some smart analysis of the stores,” Masulans said.

The retail, sales and planning teams are now able to accurately forecast for seasons ahead, the planning team can now plan more efficiently.

“It’s allowed us to lead with greater insight, and we can now coach solutions through to the right answer required for questions asked of the team from the wider business, and even within their departments,” he said. “It’s helped us solve difficult challenges that, previously, internal staff couldn’t solve as they just didn’t have access to the right information quickly enough,” Masulans added.

“Now we can access it quickly, easily and in a format that anyone can understand, regardless of the data or the challenge we’re looking to solve.”