Customer Spotlight: OneWindow At Canon Russia

Canon operates in the Russian Federation via Canon Russia with offices in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. The region’s priority goals involve establishing long-term and productive cooperation with partners, key customers and leading Russian corporations to drive sales growth and support in both the B2B (business solutions) and B2C (consumer goods) segments.

Large companies like Canon that operate in several regions globally routinely suffer from communication bottlenecks. Canon Russia itself was challenged with managing multiple IT systems and the growing data volumes that slowed down reporting.Department managers and senior executives were looking for a solution that would combine disparate and siloed data in a single view for both reactive and longer-term planning.

Qlik was already being used by Canon divisions in several European countries, and it was known internally as a scalable platform. Canon Russia worked closely with Qlik partner ATK Consulting Group to develop an application focusing on primary and secondary sales data, broken down by product or channel hierarchy levels.

“In 2016, jointly with our partner, ATK Consulting Group,

we implemented the most critical BI reporting functionality, provided employee training,

and began adding additional functionality to the application on our own.”

– Pentti Nelimarkka, Director of Strategic Growth, Canon Russia

The Cannon Russia finance department joined the Qlik ecosystem as part of the onboarding process. Together, they developed a platform that maintains data on receivables, profit and losses according to two account systems: Russian accounting practices and the European financial accounting system (USGAAP). On this foundation Canon Russia is looking to integrate inventory data to reflect current supply chain status of distributors and partners for demand planning and execution.

The Qlik application is now being used by across most of Canon Russia’s departments, including top managers, finance, marketing, sales and strategic planning departments. The project, internally referred to as OneWindow, incorporates 11 data sources and 1.7m transaction lines. It developed a five-fold reduction in financial and commercial reporting and streamlined business decision-making processes across multiple divisions. OneWindow is structured as several automated BI workstations, customized for various roles and business tasks of user, and managed by a matrix of access to various reporting levels.

“Over the 7 months that the project has been underway,

we have actually managed to create a one-stop window providing

access to current business intelligence on finance, sales and

inventories based on the Qlik platform.”

– Pentti Nelimarkka, Director of Strategic Growth, Canon Russia

Looking forward, Canon Russia is planning to make their BI reports even more detailed for the marketing, services and logistics departments, focusing on integrating digital activities and social network data into the planning and forecasting efforts for departments.