Customer overview
Casablanca Group Limited entered the Hong Kong market in 1993. It has established itself as a leading player in the home bedding market in Hong Kong after years of development. Incorporated on the Cayman Islands, Casablanca listed on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong on Nov. 23, 2012.
The Company mainly operates three proprietary bedding brands, including Casablanca, Casa Calvin and CASA-V. It is also a distributor of Vossen towels. The Company is headquartered in Hong Kong, and its domestic marketing centre is located in Shenzhen. It has sales outlets in 65 cities across Greater China, including first-tier cities such as Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Beijing, provincial capitals and other economically developed regions. The Company has built a modern production base and logistics centre in Huizhou, Guangdong in an effort to further expand its sales network in Greater China, import more brands in line with consumers’ increasingly sophisticated demand, and provide quality products for its customers.
Business Challenges
As the production base and material centre come into operation, Casablanca has continuously scaled up its business operations. Its original model, under which each business information system functioned independently, no longer meets the Company’s development needs since information cannot be directly exchanged. It involves considerable manual work to achieve centralized management and analysis of business and e-commerce data in both mainland China and Hong Kong. Manually compiling and combining data is inefficient and affects data accuracy. In addition, the management finds it difficult to obtain business data in a timely manner to inform its strategic decisions. To succeed in the industry, it is very important to stay abreast of the latest market trends.
The Company has an integrated business model covering production, supply and sales, with a large number of transactions carried out between its production and sales units. However, the transactions and payment settlement between the different units are manually processed, which is not only time-consuming and inefficient but also error prone. Each subsidiary/branch conducts bookkeeping independently, and then sends Excel reports to the Company’s headquarters so that staff there can synthesize and analyse the data. Furthermore, the Company needs to comply with the multi-dimensional bookkeeping requirements in mainland China and Hong Kong, meaning it is confronted with potential data security risks as well as challenges in financial management.
Solutions
In 2015, Casablanca teamed up with Kingdee to improve its information management system. Based on Casablanca’s operating model and the management’s IT application requirements, a corporate financial system has been established to facilitate its management and business operations. Built based on the business system of each unit, the system generates data for each unit and each store via Kingdee Cloud Galaxy. It enables Casablanca to conduct big data analysis via the BI system, carry out Amoeba-style profit assessment on each unit, automatically collect data with a high degree of data transparency and obtain analysis reports for decision-making purposes in an efficient manner.
Data integration
As regards offline operations, due to the differences in promotion and payment methods between Hong Kong and mainland China, different POS systems are used in the Company’s front-end business activities. As such, it is difficult for financial staff to acquire front-end business data, and the IT department needs to export POS system data before accounting tasks can be performed each month. Against such a backdrop, the front-line POS systems are used as an entry point for data collection without affecting front-end business activities, and Kingdee Cloud Galaxy is used as a data centre to achieve automatic data transmission from the front-end to the data centre. Orders generated on e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and Tmall are linked to Kingdee Guanyi Cloud for centralized order processing and delivery management. In the meantime, e-commerce data is directly sent to Kingdee Cloud Galaxy so that the management can have direct access to the data. Automatic collection of data from different platforms helps save time in integrating and analysing basic data. This operating model, under which data is integrated and reported in a timely manner and analysed simultaneously, enables the management to obtain business data in real time.
Empowering units through business collaboration
By applying the systems in multiple unit payment settlement transactions, the Company succeeded in simplifying the settlement process for both internal goods supply to production units and for inventory transfers between sales units, resulting in effective data sharing across the units and streamlined business operation processes. The application has also helped simplify a substantial number of intra-group transactions, integrate production, supply and sales operations, achieve internal business interoperability, save time for account reconciliation between different branches, and expedite payment settlement between different units. The Company’s growing business volume makes it necessary to conduct profit assessment on self-operated stores. By conducting independent accounting for different regional offices and issuing profit statements, it can use these data to evaluate the operations of its stores across the country;
Multi-accounting system, multi-book
The Company conducts accounting for all its subsidiaries/branches via Kingdee Cloud Galaxy. Such a multi-accounting system and multi-book for the same business meets the requirements of Chinese accounting standards as well as the requirements of Hong Kong management accounting, thus helping the Company leverage the multi-dimensional bookkeeping method and a more sophisticated corporate management model.
Integration of business and financial data means that business data can be directly used for financial accounting purposes, so the management is able to control business activities on a real-time basis, and monthly financial statements can be prepared in a more timely manner, thereby substantially improving the efficiency of business processing.
Improving decision-making efficiency via big data analysis
By connecting Kingdee’s ERP system with the BI system, the Company can obtain information about product sales, inventories at its various stores and warehouses, and factories’ production arrangements through big data analysis and carry out supply and sales analysis in a timely and efficient manner. The establishment of the data centre and the adoption of the BI system give the management fast access to data needed for making business decisions, allowing it to analyse sales data based on different channels, sales models and product brands, and improve the efficiency of data analysis;
Value of Customer
- The system connects multiple platforms and automates data collection. The effective data support allows the Company to respond swiftly to changes in market demand, unlocking the full potential of big data technology for corporate operations;
- Internal collaboration along the supply chain to improve work efficiency;
- Such a multi-accounting system and multi-book for the same business meets the requirements of Chinese accounting standards as well as the requirements of Hong Kong management accounting, thus helping the Company leverage the multi-dimension bookkeeping method;
- Profit centres are established; separate profit statements are issued for different offices, and profit assessment is performed on different regional markets to inform the Company’s development strategy based on effective data analysis;
The Company used to engage third-party agencies to operate its domestic e-commerce businesses. By helping it set up its own e-commerce team, the Guanyi Cloud platform provides the Company with operations management tools to adapt operations to the latest changes consumer spending patterns applying digital models, expand businesses and improve its competitiveness.