Company Description

Founded in 1996, Bliss was spotted by beauty-obsessed buzz-makers and quickly massaged its way to the top. The company operates spas worldwide and retails its bliss bath, body and skincare lines through its blisscatalog, blissworld.com website and at select Sephora, Nordstrom, Blue Mercury and boutique retailers. The company has three separate ERP systems, one for their wholesale business, another for their B2C business line and the third a point of sale system used by their spas.

Business Situation

Bliss' operations struggled with the following challenges:

• Three separate ERP systems which made financial and sales analysis difficult
• Recurring, time consuming efforts for report generation and critical business analysis.
• Multiple systems to communicate critical information between sales, customer service, marketing and distribution.
• Multiple systems in different business units limiting information flow between departments.

The Solution

FAI implemented QlikView, the in-memory business intelligence software for these purposes

• Sales Analysis for each of their three service lines (wholesale, B2C, point of sale)
• Dashboards with Key Performance Indicators for sales, store operations and marketing
• Shopping basket product affinities to drive increased sales
• Offer analysis to determine effectiveness of sales and marketing campaigns
• Consolidated financial reports (both income and balance) with the ability to drill down to the voucher leve
• SPA operations application to measure key performance indicators and trends
• Inventory Analysis for greater supply chain efficiencies

FAI worked shoulder to shoulder with Bliss to build these applications in a rapid and interactive manner. The initial Sales Analysis application was finished in just 6 days. Subsequent applications were also often built in days resulting in an extremely rapid time to tangible value. The solution was deployed to 30 employees across multiple functional areas and up and running within weeks. Critical data analysis, previously a complicated, time consuming process, is now fast and easy with QlikView allowing employees to gain better insight, more quickly and more intuitively

The Results

Upon using the initial application, Bliss President, Richard Dantas called QlikView a "game changing" technology. It has since spread beyond the first implementation to nearly every facet of their business. The number of users has tripled since the initial purchase and users have become raving fans - in large part because QlikView works the way they think. Bliss believes the implementation of QlikView supports their vision and fundamental commitment to providing world class service while simultaneously gaining business efficiencies without stifling their employees' enthusiasm and creativity.