News - 02 Dec: Lifetime Brands serves seamless analysis

With increased supply chain and sales visibility, leading provider of kitchenware products is improving operational decisions

In today's volatile economy, companies that have already invested a lot of time and money in enterprise systems, such as SAP, need immediate visibility in order to make the right decisions quickly and cost effectively. That's why Lifetime Brands, North America's leading resource for nationally branded kitchenware, tabletop and home decor products, is using QlikView to maximize its existing IT landscape and gain a single view of supply chain management and sales analysis -- regardless of whether the data is stored within SAP or other source systems.

Experiencing significant expansion organically and by acquisition, Lifetime Brands has rapidly grown into a company of more than a dozen of the industry's best-known brands, including Farberware®, CasaModa® and Hoffritz®. With many individual companies and a recent SAP R/3 implementation that did not incorporate historical data, consolidated reporting and data analysis quickly became a challenge -- ultimately leading Lifetime Brands to QlikView. The complete implementation took approximately two months from contract to go-live for 145 employees.

With QlikView, Lifetime Brands is now tracking and analyzing companywide sales by specific time periods, months, division, materials, current versus historical and forecast versus actual. The sales application enables users to drill down, organize data and run reports at a level of detail that would have only been accessible by running 100 individual reports in their old system - a 99% reduction in time and energy.

Lifetime Brands also developed a supply chain analysis application. "With QlikView, we have the ability to aggregate historical data from various enterprise software systems with data from SAP systems. This has made company information accessible to everyone and enabled our users to develop consolidated reports more efficiently," said Clifford Siegel, Senior Vice President, Global Supply Chain at Lifetime Brands.

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