RITU KUMAR is one of the leading fashion houses in India, ruling the high-end couture retail space for over two decades. Under the flagship of Ritika Limited, it operates two main production centres and factories in Delhi and Calcutta. All factories are equipped with in-house printing, tailoring, finishing and quality control facilities employing more than 200 employees directly and about 3000 indirectly.

RITU KUMAR has 22 boutiques in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Amritsar and Chandigarh. They have recently deployed Sweden based software company QlikTech’s QlikView Business Intelligence solution to help the management take appropriate decisions and provide predictive analysis helping businesses to work upon future strategies.

Need For QlikView

With branches spread across the country, the top management was finding it difficult to streamline the processes. The company was using multiple solutions like retail software from Polaris, textile production software from Texma and Auriga for consolidation of data. But the results were unsatisfactory and time consuming.

The company wanted a quick, simple and comprehensive real time data analytics solution that could structure its vast data, provide a consolidated picture of the organisation and assist in strategic decision-making.

Informs Amrish Kumar, CFO, RITU KUMAR, “We were facing lots of problems related to the management of data and taking appropriate decision at the right time as our in-house team was not able to provide figures at the right time. Everyone wanted to produce as good a report as possible resulting in endless time being spent trying to persuade the reader that their department was the most important within the business.”

Collecting data from the sales team spread across various cities and analysing it to prepare the report was a major challenge before RITU KUMAR.

All this prompted RITU KUMAR to ask TEAM Computers to step in with its Business Intelligence solution QlikView.

Teaming Up With TEAM Computers

TEAM Computers is an AMC solution provider for RITU KUMAR. It is the distributor for QlikTech’s poduct QlikView in India. Having been associated with RITU KUMAR earlier, TEAM was better able to understand its chief concern areas.

QlikView was tailored to meet the unique requirements of RITU KUMAR. It was targeted at addressing RITU KUMAR's key concerns relating to tracking and collating data and analysing reports related to sales, finance and production. To make informed, high impact decisions, RITU KUMAR needed quick access to critical information and data across their whole line.

The main challenge faced by TEAM was understanding the large pool of seamless, unstructured data in RITU KUMAR. TEAM coordinated with multiple vendors to streamline and structure their data model.

“We did not evaluated business intelligence solutions of other vendors. We only asked TEAM to showcase their offerings in the BI space. Other applications like retail software and textile manufacturing software are also incorporated in this business intelligence solution,” added Kumar.

The basic and critical sales applications were rolled out within two months. The production application has also been tested and made live. The finance application is expected to be rolled out shortly.

Accelerating decision making

Using QlikView, Ritika has now been able to conduct real time analysis of reports. It also accelerated strategic decision making, as the management had access to the ‘big picture’ on the graphically designed QlikView dashboard, with an easy-to-understand and easy-to-administer format. Kumar opines, “With QlikView we have now started to recognise the return on investment though we have not completed the whole process of deployment.”

The top-level management executives are accessing all information available through the top-down analytic dashboards and reports for various modules like sales, production, etc. The deployment has been able to overcome shortfalls of Excel-based MIS and single portal for comprehensive tactical and strategic business reporting. RITU KUMAR has been able to identify profitable apparel lines, season best-sellers, real time analytics and remote access to sophisticated reports.