Sales calls are a lot easier and more productive these days for the sales force at Pergo Inc., a major producer of laminate flooring headquartered in Trelleborg, Sweden. On visits to big box retailers or specialty flooring shops, members of the Pergo sales team can show the store managers an analysis of what has been selling at their location, what's in inventory and what's on order - all from their laptops.
With this trend information, sales personnel can identify potential out-of-stock situations and provide proactive support to Pergo customers. They also know exactly how their territory is performing, and that helps the company identify, replace and dispose of slow-moving patterns more quickly.
Until recently, this type of data analysis was virtually impossible for Pergo, in large part because its IBM iSeries 810-based Movex enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from Intentia International AB (Danderyd, Sweden) focuses on transactions rather than trend analysis. "The [iSeries] handles data well, but sometimes it's hard to find," explains Barry Daly, business analyst for Pergo.
Aggregating, comparing or contrasting data directly from the ERP was possible, but very time consuming. And, although Pergo had deployed a Powerplay data warehouse system and tools for analyzing retail data from Cognos Inc. (Ottawa, ON), they required sales personnel to be online and involved a large number of complex queries in order to pull the desired data.
In order to better draw data from disparate sources, organize it in a format that clearly depicted trends and place it all at sales reps' fingertips, Pergo deployed a business information tool called QlikView from QlikTech Inc. (Raleigh, NC), which also has roots in Sweden. QlikView not only delivers the information more quickly, it is much more flexible because it allows data to be pulled from a variety of sources including Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)-equipped systems as well as Microsoft Excel and text files. In addition, QlikView allows analysis parameters to be changed with the click of a mouse.
Pergo's use of QlikView is fully launched or in beta test across a wide range of functions including sales, sales support, planning, logistics, finance, customer care and credit administration. QlikView has also been a boon to continuous improvement teams organized last year because it can provide the information they need to create a baseline analysis as well as subsequent comparisons.
After drawing information from the company's Cognos-based data warehouse, QlikView then organizes it according to the parameters set by the user. Execution generally is by IT personnel. The data warehouse holds EDI information from the company's distributors as well as information from its Movex ERP system. The software also can accept information from other sources including directly from the ERP.
QlikView not only makes it easy to create different views of the same data structure, it also readily accepts changes to the data structure via the addition of a new information stream or by changing the parameters used in the analysis.
The QlikView sales analysis implementation, which occurred late in 2004, took only two weeks and included extensive training for the sales staff including sessions at sales meetings, road trips where IT personnel joined sales personnel on sales calls, and meetings with IT whenever a sales person visited the Raleigh office. Additional support is provided by a call-in center. User documentation includes work scenarios, which walk sales people through use of the application.
The QlikView deployment was championed by Tony Sturrus, then chief executive officer of Pergo's North American operations, who now serves as chief executive officer of the parent company.
Polling User Needs
As part of the QlikView implementation process, Daly completed a survey of unmet reporting needs that identified five key areas: general ledger, inventory, production, sales and forecasting. Across these areas, Daly says, users reported they were frustrated with how difficult it was to extract important information from ERP and other systems.
"Often data is there, but not accessible," he explains. Or the data may be technically accessible, but only to the most sophisticated users. "We got a lot of comments about spending more time developing reports than analyzing and using the data," he recalls.
Excited by the success of the sales analysis application and encouraged by the survey results, Pergo quickly decided to extend use of QlikView to inventory management and production reporting. The company is fine-tuning a dashboard that gives executives a look at key areas of the business and allows them to drill down to investigate further without help from code writers in IT. One of the next QlikView projects relates to budgeting and will give departmental budget managers a view of actual spending versus budget.
Although specific investment and return on investment numbers are not available for Pergo's QlikView deployment project because it is part of a year-long upgrade from Movex 11.1 to Movex 12.6, Daly reports many soft benefits; one of the biggest relates to inventory. "It used to be a lengthy process to identify what products to phase out and transmit that information to the sales force," says Daly. Now, he says, Pergo is able to proactively comb through customer records, identifying new customers for products that are about to be phased out. The planning knowledge provided by QlikView will allow the company to reduce inventory by days, if not weeks, without disturbing service levels.
Consistent Presentation
Pergo also uses QlikView to deliver supply chain updates to customers. Before QlikView, pulling the proper information and formatting it the way the customer wanted it was a time-consuming process. "Now we can be more responsive and provide more frequent updates," says Daly. Next, Pergo is looking at QlikView Publisher to automate distribution of its analysis and manage access more efficiently without locking files.
QlikView also helps with the consistent presentation of information at Pergo. As a European company, Pergo measures product in square meters; however, logistics providers track boxes, and U.S. retailers use square feet, so constant conversions are necessary. Since the QlikView sales analysis application included a tool to automatically generate reports based on all three types of measurements, it has eliminated the need for everyone in the company to walk around with a calculator. The tool has also reduced inaccuracies inherent with computations using factors carried to different decimal places.
Perhaps the most surprising benefit to Pergo is that meetings are more efficient now. Before QlikView, there often were dueling reports because different people in different departments organized the data differently. "People didn't trust the data," Daly recalls. One reason for the distrust: Definitions were often inconsistent. For example, in some cases "available" meant "available to sell less open orders;" in other situations "available" meant "available to sell." Now definitions are consistent and everyone is looking at the same analysis.
Morale has improved too. Since QlikView has strengthened information sharing across the company, workers feel more empowered because they have the knowledge to make better decisions.
The QlikView system and its presentation capabilities are intuitive enough that it is easy for users to understand the data as well as how to drill down to a more granular level. As a result, QlikView users can spend more time performing their primary duties rather than trying to locate and organize information. "Before, a lot of people were just dealing with fires, they didn't have a chance to study trends," says Daly.
While Pergo has found QlikView to be an intuitive analysis and graphical presentation tool appropriate for use by non-technical employees, the company is not about to use it as a replacement for its Cognos data warehouse and report-writing tools. That's because, unlike Cognos, QlikView does not include a full-fledged OLAP data management engine and, as such, is not suited for more complex tasks such as what-if analysis. For that, Pergo will retain Cognos. In fact, the company is now developing hard copy reporting software in Cognos Impromptu.
Still, QlikView has proven to be an effective and popular product for many data analysis applications. So much so, in fact, that end users asking for new QlikView projects have created such a demand for data analysis that a moratorium has been placed on new requests. "We're going to complete the existing requests, [complete the Movex] upgrade and then move on to the next series of requests," says Daly.