Bulgarian export-oriented company Kika Group is boldly entering new markets in Europe and Asia, relying on Business Intelligence (BI) software.

Kika Group, known for its baby brand KikkaBoo, has managed to gain popularity in a short time and is now well known both on the Bulgarian market and worldwide. Currently, the brand has been successfully implemented in more than 40 countries.

The head office of Kika Group is located in Bulgaria, and the company has developed a branch in Spain and recently in China.

Thanks to new software, the company can gain a complete picture of its business. The solution is Qlik Sense, implemented by the Valkan Solutions team.

"A "panoramic picture" of Kika Group's business

Before the implementation of the project, as a company keeping pace with digitalization, Kika Group relied on systems to manage its business in both Bulgaria and Spain. However, they were different and unconnected. The company also had Power BI, which covered only one of the companies with basic reports.

The lack of integration between the systems of Kika Group's Bulgarian and Spanish companies proved to be a real challenge for the synchronization and analysis of the company's data. Management had been looking for a solution to this problem for a long time. After discussions with Balkan Services, a decision was made to implement a new system to bring together and analyze the company's stock and sales for its different divisions around the world, giving management the big picture of the business at any given time.

The Qlik Sense reporting system

allows installation both on-site at the customer (on-premises, Client-Managed) and in the cloud (SaaS). The cloud version of the BI software has been deployed at Kika Group. The main advantages of the SaaS version are that it requires no investment in hardware, the technology is secure and reliable and users are always working with the most up-to-date version of the system.

Wide range and multiple markets

In Kika Group's business, selling a product while it is still on the way is commonplace. Thanks to the comprehensive BI system developed by Balkan Services and based on Qlik Sense, in such cases the company's product department can make faster requests to the factories and thus speed up and improve stock availability in its warehouses and optimize sales.

The business analytics system also provides the ability to monitor consumer behavior in individual markets, which for the company are more than 40.

It is important to mention that Kika Group works with a very wide range of products - there are around 3,000 unique codes. In Qlik Sense, the company can easily track which of all these items are the best sellers, both by brand and by category. This functionality is helpful to the company when reviewing its inventory in different warehouses and determining what merchandise should be transferred between them.

The company reports a significant reduction in reporting and analysis time. Before implementing Qlik Sense, it took a minimum of three or four people 16 hours to produce a quarterly report. Currently, the same number of people produce a similar report in 3-4 hours.

The company's management is adamant that the time the business analytics software saves senior management is one of its most fundamental advantages.

Users of the BI system give feedback that the software is very interactive, pleasant, and easy to use, and the depth of the reports makes it a valuable "ally" for making the right decisions at the right time.

The realized need for business process optimization

According to observations by Balkan Services, the Kika Group team had a well-realized need to upgrade digitization solutions for optimization.

In the face of Qlik Sense, Kika Group saw a tool that could facilitate the company's operational work and optimize it significantly.

A key factor for the success of the project is good communication and collaboration between the two teams.

Thanks to the implemented Business Intelligence software, the company has all its business information in one place, which gives Kika Group's management the peace of mind to boldly expand its business worldwide.