Customer Spotlight: Taking a Bite of Data Analytics

Qlik enables Anjoy Foods to remain a competitive force in the flourishing food industry.

Headquartered in Xiamen, China, Fujian Anjoy Foods Co. Ltd is a company in the midst of China’s rapidly growing food industry. In order to stay competitive, it’s imperative for these companies to excel in operational efficiency at all levels of the supply chain.

Founded in 2001, Anjoy Foods has become one of the largest frozen food enterprises in China, and is a leader in the more specialized hotpot flavoring industry. Anjoy Foods has products marketed and sold in more than 30 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, with nearly 600 dealers and large supermarkets and caterers across the country. In addition to the domestic market, Anjoy Foods also exports their frozen products, nearly 250,000 tons per year, internationally to the United States, Australia and other countries.

At Anjoy Foods, CEO Zhang Qingmiao’s belief is that for companies to succeed in the face of fierce competition, they have to focus on several areas. They must constantly look at ways to improve internally, ensure good business management, guarantee product quality, a good distribution network, improve team productivity and maintain a healthy corporate culture. To accomplish these goals, Anjoy Food turned to data analytics. Zhang Qingmiao commented on this change:

“The use of information technology in traditional food processing and manufacturing enterprises is relatively weak, but with developments in the market, using data to provide reference and guidance for business decision-making is an inevitable trend. In recent years, Anjoy Foods has been developing rapidly and visual analytics has been a great source of help to our business decision-making, helping us to improve the transparency and efficiency of our operations, and our market competitiveness."

When it comes to efficiency at all levels of the supply chain, Anjoy Foods is excelling with #Qlik:

Anjoy Foods’ management relies on data from all divisions, so there was a need to find a way to analyze its performance and improve its operational efficiency in terms of inventory, logistics and sales. Before using Qlik, the management usually obtained data reports through the different business departments individually, and the process to create a report usually required several days as it was a very time-consuming effort. Moreover, the data itself does not solve the company's business problems, as Anjoy Foods wasn’t able to see where the problems were coming from, there were little to no trends or insights.

Deciding they needed a change, Anjoy Foods chose to use the Qlik platform. With the help of Shanghai-based Keyroads InfoTech, Anjoy Foods’ implementation partner, Qlik was introduced in 2011. From the start, Anjoy Foods deployed Qlik in various departments and asked all the executives to use the Qlik platform for data analysis. Now, Anjoy Foods has access to real-time data which prompted insightful decision-making through data mining, early warning analysis, sales forecasting, and more. Overall operations are running more efficiently than ever.

"Qlik is a very good visualization platform for data analysis. Some features such as in-memory processing and automatic associative indexing, makes data analysis very easy. Qlik platform is powerful by itself, combined with a secondary development by Anjoy Foods, the current utilization of Qlik across all departments, has resulted in significant benefit." - Shi Xurong, Chief Information Officer of Anjoy Foods

The advantages of full transparency, no dead ends, and real-time access to analysis through Qlik provided a flexible forecasting model to Anjoy Foods. Qlik helped to automate order placement and production scheduling. This offered convenience for enterprise managers to make effective decisions based on facts and greatly enhanced the high-level management efficiency. Now, instead of seeing the blind spots in their data, Anjoy Foods sees the whole story of their supply chain.

By using Qlik, Anjoy Foods reports that their internal, big data management became more transparent, agile, and inclusive of all functions needed to manage the company from multiple perspectives. Through integrating multiple Qlik applications, the pressure on the management team has been greatly reduced since Qlik is now handling analytics for them, allocating production capacity and forecasting sales. Looking towards the future, Anjoy Foods plans to explore Qlik’s mobile capabilities through Qlik Sense, allowing their mobile employees access to the same data-driven insights. As Shi Xurong put it:

“From a software perspective, Qlik has tremendous advantages. It is faster than traditional BI in building modules, very fast. As long as you have some application development knowledge, you can handle it easily. I also think it is very stable, with good performance and storage-based analysis. Plus it is easy to develop, and it is the most advanced and agile BI. That’s why we chose Qlik.”

As the Chinese food industry continues to grow and foster competition, Anjoy Foods will remain an innovative, data-driven player with Qlik by its side.

 

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