Johannesburg, 16 Mar 2009
The Spring Air Company, one of the America's largest mattress manufacturers, reports full return on investment in less than a month using QlikView analysis to guide management decisions.
The company acquired over $10 million in new business and reduced its estimated annual costs for business intelligence and management reporting by more than $1 million in its first two months of leveraging the power of QlikView across the enterprise.
Spring Air tapped QlikView analysis to provide senior management with real-time data to improve business decisions across its nine manufacturing facilities and departments, ranging from finance to sales and marketing and product quality.
After a series of mergers and acquisitions in 2007, Spring Air operated with up to nine different software platforms. While standardising the process of implementing its new ERP solution, the company needed easier access to data. In September 2008, Spring Air enlisted the help of SyncSite, a provider of customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) solutions. SyncSite recommended QlikView, the award-winning business analysis solution, which was implemented in less than two weeks.
“Because of the complication of having multiple technology platforms, it was at times arcane to quickly get critical data to make efficient business decisions,” said acting CEO Steve Cumbow. “QlikView enabled each user to create a personalised dashboard, with the real-time data they needed to better run their businesses. It is the best product that I have seen for quickly and easily understanding business drivers and performance metrics.
SyncSite provided implementation support, and their talented and professional staff anticipated our needs at every turn. With SyncSite's help, our full return on investment in QlikView took less than a month. From a company performance perspective, the payback will continue to grow exponentially,” continued Cumbow.
QlikView is being used across the enterprise to improve decision-making in several business areas:
Sales Performance - Pulling data from multiple sources, QlikView sales dashboards track KPIs, such as gross sales, product mix, margins and actual versus forecasted performance (down to the SKU level) for any time period. This visibility enables Spring Air to work with each customer to maximise success.
Financial Reporting - Risks are better managed with an enterprise view of P&L, customer AR aging, operational costs and financial exposures. Spring Air can now compare and contrast its material and labour costs, quality metrics, delivery expenses and more across facilities in seconds to detect and promptly correct cost leakages.
Product Quality - Product returns are monitored by SKU and customer to continually improve product quality and ensure plant-to-plant manufacturing consistency.
QlikView moves business intelligence from IT to business users, giving people the information they need when they need it to make optimal decisions. Before QlikView, Spring Air needed extra personnel and on-site consultants to collect data and create management reports. Now, company managers do the job themselves by connecting data that they want to see from multiple sources and systems with a few mouse clicks. Analysis is more detailed, flexible and faster, taking minutes versus days and weeks. This not only enables people to be more effective, but also represents significant productivity gains.
“Companies like Spring Air, which act promptly to clearly understand and track their costs and business drivers, gain a huge advantage in today's difficult economy,” said Bob Langer, president of QlikTech Americas. “While competitors wait for informational insights from their traditional BI systems or can no longer afford them, companies using QlikView can move proactively to optimise performance, capture opportunities and increase market share on, literally, a daily basis.”
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