Johannesburg, 15 Apr 2010
Furniture giant Ellerine Holdings, a subsidiary of the ABIL Group, is standardising its business intelligence (BI) environment with the help of EnterpriseWorx, a local data management and BI consulting group.
Ellerines aims to empower an initial group of 25 users with direct access to a retail analysis model through the implementation of QlikView.
Through the QlikView implementation, Ellerines' users will have the ability to quickly access dashboard views that will provide them with actionable information. They will also be trained up to become self-sufficient in creating their own views over time, says Stefan Terblanche, IT executive, Business Intelligence at Ellerine Holdings.
"We needed to bring order to a highly disparate BI environment," says Terblanche. "Due to business rationalisation and an increased focus on customer, merchandise and supply chain efficiencies, we have a growing demand for information to be delivered rapidly.
"Our current reporting development had become problematic. Changing existing reports or introducing new reports depended on system development cycles that were clogged up due to the high frequency of change on the branch system.
"Ellerines' user groups do not have the appetite to wait for reports to be prioritised and developed. They have a pressing requirement to be more self-enabled to manage and farm their data. Ellerines' users needed a BI tool that could be applied on top of the group's multitude of data areas without getting lost in preparing the data for the toolset to function on."
QlikView was selected as a BI toolset solution after a referral, supported by the product's track record of rapid implementation in the local and international markets, adds Terblanche.
"We did a proof of concept with QlikView on a marketing dashboard implementation in order to evaluate the product as well as the company's delivery. We were so impressed by the product's performance and the hands-on, focused approach during the marketing implementation that the further rollout was easily motivated."
Ellerines has bought an initial 25 licences across its merchandise, marketing and real estate departments, with more licences to be ordered as per business demand.
QlikView will complement the company's Business Objects BI implementation, Terblanche notes.
Single branch system
Over the next six to eight months, the group will move to a single branch system, making it the appropriate time to commence with the creation of an enterprise data warehouse and operational data store in support of the new Ellerines. This will resolve most of the group's current data challenges.
"We use Business Objects for production reporting and for its InfoView function that allow users to pull data or reports per a set specification over the Web," adds Terblanche.
"We will also be contracting EnterpriseWorx to further unlock the full potential of our Business Objects investment."
Ellerines selected EnterpriseWorx as an implementation partner as CIO Ian Child had worked with the company on significant BI and IT projects at his previous place of employ and had high praise for their knowledge and execution ability, says Terblanche.
Terblanche is laudatory of EnterpriseWorx's role in the deployment: "Their knowledge of the retail market has been a critical success factor in this project. I found their grasp of our data environment and in particular the merchandise data highly favourable."
EnterpriseWorx also brings a wealth of knowledge regarding data warehousing and data management to the table.
"We have many years' experience in the retail market," says Michael de Andrade, MD of EnterpriseWorx, "and have worked at many of the market's leading chains. We see the implementation of QlikView at Ellerine Holdings as the starting point of a long-term relationship which will deliver enduring value."
Share