Johannesburg, 17 Sep 2008
One-and-a-half million line items of data totalling 450Mb, all compressed down to a 17Mb file the MD could take home for analysis on her laptop - Business Technology Manager, Matthew Chaplin, of leading educational publisher Oxford University Press, was impressed with QlikView from the first time he saw the demo.
"From the proof of concept it was clear this was an extremely powerful system with fantastic performance; we were surprised to find it was so compact," says Chaplin. "It's proved to be a far more cost-effective implementation than another, more traditional solution we looked at, and it has been absolutely perfect for what we needed."
Oxford University Press (OUP) in South Africa publishes a range of textbooks for learners and students from Grade R right through to tertiary level, with thousands of titles in print. The company's primary information need, says Chaplin, is for sales analysis.
"Our commissioning editors, publishing managers and sales staff need detailed information on the sales history of each title to predict future demand," explains Chaplin.
The task is complicated, says Chaplin, because titles are allocated to different "lists": Titles in their first year of publication are on the frontlist, moving to the new backlist in the second year and the backlist in the third year. A new edition will move a title back onto the frontlist, with a new ISBN. "In the past, this made it very difficult to track the performance of a title across multiple years and editions," he says.
"QlikView's flexible analysis has made it much easier and given us a far better view into the underlying data. Our users, from the sales staff through to the MD, took to the system very quickly when they discovered that a task that would previously have taken a day could now be achieved in five minutes."
"Getting one's hands on information to make management decisions is now possible all day and every day," says MD, Lieze Kotze.
OUP's QlikView sales model now allows users to analyse sales history down to the level of individual transactions, by any of several variables, including series, language, grade, subject, ISBN, origin and more. The company also recently implemented a turnaround time model that allows fast analysis of the process from order placement to delivery.
"With our experience of the first model, we built the second ourselves with very little help," says Chaplin. "It's been easy to learn and the system pretty much runs itself: since we implemented the turnaround model in November 2007 there's been no further supplier involvement. We're entirely self-sufficient with the software, which also helps to keep costs down."
QlikView's offline capabilities have been the cherry on the top for its users, concludes Chaplin. "People love the fact that they can use it at home, and they can't break it. It's saved us all a lot of time."
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