SAS Visual Analytics helps maximize profitability through Prescriptive Analytics & Data Visualization

The Himalaya Drug Company leverages self-service BI environment to develop customer insight, competitiveness and operational efficiency

With more than eight decades of market presence in the Herbal Wellness and Healthcare segment, The Himalaya Drug Company remains committed to enriching the lives of people using their products. Today, the Himalaya brand is synonymous with safe and efficacious herbal products. Complementing its strong commitment toward customer-focus and innovation, Himalaya turned to SAS Visual Analytics for its Herbal Healthcare business operations, and predictive analytics related requirements.

With operations in over 90 countries, Himalaya’s herbal products are prescribed by more than 400,000 doctors worldwide, and millions of customers trust them for their health and personal care needs. Himalaya’s major thrust lies in making herbal wellness a part of every home via herbal solutions based on science. With a complex global distribution network coupled with high volumes of transactional data accumulating by the day, it was imminent to create a multi-level visibility across their facilities to empower analysts and managers for a data-driven decision making.

With SAS Visual Analytics, the business analytics team no longer need to wait for end of the month to analyze the business performance and respective KPIs. Instead, executives have up-to-date visibility of latest insights based on refreshed data, which enables them to make nimble decisions swiftly and confidently.

Significantly enhanced commercial effectiveness

Himalaya makes significant investments in the sales and marketing activities through various campaigns, promotional inputs, sponsorships and trade-offers keeping their business objectives in perspective. Analyzing whether these investments are indeed translating into incremental sales or deep-diving to answer different what-if scenarios like ‘which campaigns or trade-offers have succeeded, and which ones did not’, were critical to the business. Although, tracking the returns on these investments has never been easy.

Transforming this information into a coherent dashboard was a daunting task because of the volumes of data which, sometimes resulted in missed opportunities.

With SAS Visual Analytics there’s been a quick turnaround time of daily-level granular reporting spanning multiple business teams including Supply Chain & Operations, Finance, Sales & Marketing among others to enable a faster decision-making capability. Ad hoc analytical and reporting capabilities in SAS Visual Analytics enabled Himalaya to significantly enhance their productivity and an overall commercial effectivity.

Challenge

• Creation of a flexible, user-friendly solution for visualizing large amounts of transactional data for quick decision-making
• Lack of credible mechanism to track critical KPIs like the return on investments among others
• Equip the business units to measure performance and aid in planning for the future

Benefits

• Aids in taking prompt and correct proactive business decision for overall commercial effectiveness
• Quicker turnaround of reports and explorations at varying hierarchies
• Instant and customized user-driven report generation
• Identifies data patterns and trends for deeper investigations to business problems

Discovering hidden insights

Data Preparatory activities were seamlessly attained through building effective data manipulations on SAS Enterprise Guide, with necessary exceptional business logics and scenarios designed in the process to harmonize data coming from varied transactional sources.

Sincere commitment and utmost faith in the quality and integrity of the data enabled Himalaya to make quick informed decisions to outpace the market.

SAS Visual Analytics helps Himalaya reinforce that faith with confidence. With exhaustive data manipulations and business logics built in the solution, combined with an appealing interface, analysts can focus more on fetching answers rather than validating business scenarios.

Collaborative Visualizations

With SAS Visual Analytics, officers and business managers have the freedom to dissect their data and run their own analyses and discovery without requiring extensive IT support. They can generate and share their own reports, dashboards and visualizations simply by clicking or drilling into items of interest. Running ad hoc analytics like correlation to analyze sales performance vis-à-vis marketing spends, sales force activities, market trends and external factors to discover valuable insights in the areas of campaign effectiveness has been easy.

For example, review of sales performance and productivity is now based on dashboards and meetings are conducted with this single source of truth as the reference point.

“Keeping the data ready before executives get to work is quite essential for an increased productivity. We now have accurate information available in time for our executives to act upon thereby translating into higher business efficiencies.” says Mr. Ananth Narayan, General Manager – IT, The Himalaya Drug Company.

With compelling visualizations and easy drill-down capabilities, executives can quickly decipher meaning of the data and make informed decisions. KPIs in the Herbal Healthcare and Wellness business operations are crucial and are monitored more closely with renewed focus to gain a holistic view of its overall performance. There seem to be a steady shift from reactive to proactive approach where more than after-the-fact reporting, the focus now is on prescriptive and predictive modes.

Having deployed SAS Visual Analytics, the management team envisions to build on that foundation and gradually incorporate advanced sophistication of ‘what-if’ scenario and ‘goal-seeking’ analysis to address ad hoc simulative scenarios across their businesses.