Global Brewer Speeds Up Financial Reporting with Jet Reports and Jet Analytics

Carlsberg was one of the first international brewers to export beer to China, starting over 150 years ago. Today, The Carlsberg Brewery Guangdong in Huizhou supplies products to mainland China, Hong Kong, and the Macau markets. Carlsberg offers 20 different brews from 25 breweries in China, catering to consumers on various drinking occasions.

The Challenge

To produce their financial and management reports, the finance team at Carlsberg China needed to combine data from more than eight Microsoft Dynamics NAV databases. Because of the data volumes and number of databases involved, end users found it hard to navigate their NAV systems to find the data they needed.

This meant the finance team was forced to export data from each NAV system and manually stitch them together in Excel to generate the reports they needed. This process consumed a lot of time and manual effort and had to be repeated from scratch, each month.

The team at Carlsberg recognized that they needed a solution that could consolidate data from multiple companies and databases into a single data warehouse, without requiring a lengthy implementation process, or relying on technical specialists. The chosen solution would also need to cope with their data volumes and still provide fast query response times for their more than 300 end users.

Facing these challenges, they chose to deploy Jet Analytics and Jet Reports.

Building to Success with Jet

Using Jet Analytics, Carlsberg China was able to work with pre-built content to quickly create a data warehouse. Jet Analytics also provided multiple cubes to support the team’s different analysis needs while delivering sub-second query response times.

Using Jet Reports, finance team members were able to leverage their existing Excel skills to quickly and easily create the reports they needed, saving time and eliminating the need to dump data from NAV into static spreadsheets.

By implementing Jet Analytics and Jet Reports across the organization, Carlsberg China has seen many positive results:

• The team has already shaved one day off their month-end reporting process
• Previously, users were not able to generate reports, but now they are self-sufficient, because they can easily build the reports they need, without requiring technical expertise, by using Jet Reports against the data warehouse
• They can now easily and instantly run comparative reports across different date ranges using a simple pivot-style drag-and-drop table from OLAP Cubes. Previously, getting this level of visibility took weeks for them to produce manually.

Navigating Success

With simplified navigation of data and reduced dependency on the IT department to create reports, the finance team can now create the reports they need, at any time.

“We now have a reliable and timely data source providing a single version of the truth for our financial reporting. Users can easily build reports by themselves to support their analysis,” said Chen Johnson, BI Engineer at Carlsberg China. “We can also now view our data at an aggregate level instead of just viewing a detailed listing, which makes it faster and easier for users to navigate their financial data to make informed decisions.”