Johannesburg, 30 Aug 2007
Capespan, one of the world's leading marketers and distributors of fresh fruit, has implemented a leading in-memory business intelligence solution to help it manage its complex international business.
The company has its roots in South Africa and sources most of its produce locally from around 450 local suppliers. The South African export operation represents around 1 350 individual farms that produce 35 million cartons of fruit per year.
Fruit is a perishable product and to maintain quality control, Capespan needs to be able to track every pallet of fruit to its final destination in a supermarket anywhere in the world. Similarly, to complete its payments to farmers for their produce, Capespan must track exactly how much it received for each pallet, in what currency and at what exchange rate with South Africa's rand.
Until recently, Capespan managed these complex data requirements using a widely available financial system interfaced with a disparate set of custom-built sales, payments and logistics systems. Extracting management information was a time-consuming task requiring managers or technical staff to run complex SQL queries that frequently changed. This often led to disagreement about what was going on: "It was too easy to make mistakes with the SQL queries and people would get different results," says systems development manager Eugene van Vuuren. "There were too many different views of the data, resulting in disagreements."
Capespan's CIO was sceptical about the introduction of new business intelligence products following poor use of a second-generation OLAP-based product, but rapidly became enthusiastic about QlikView's revolutionary technology and approach after seeing a proof of concept demonstration using Capespan's own data. QlikView was implemented for 30 users across Capespan's South African operation in 2006, with the first model up and running in a month.
The major benefit of using QlikView at Capespan, says Van Vuuren, is that it has removed guesswork and disagreement about the company's operations and finances. "Everyone always has the same information, and it's always up to date," he says. "By 9am every morning, the MD can get precise information about the previous day's sales, payments and stock right down to the level of individual pallets."
More effective reporting has also enabled much more effective trend identification and troubleshooting. "We have six years' worth of data in QlikView, which has made it much easier than ever before to make comparisons from day to day and from season to season," says Van Vuuren. This has enabled the company to spot potentially troublesome trends in time to fix problems or take preventive action. An unexpected drop in prices per carton, for example, can be quickly analysed to see if there's an underlying problem with fruit quality, packaging or any other factor.
User uptake has been enthusiastic, says Van Vuuren. "Most users took to it immediately," he says. "It's saved a huge amount of time and made managers less reliant on administrative or technical support staff for their information. Some of our managers report to weekly meetings straight off QlikView."
Training needs have been light, with new users needing no more than a two-hour introductory session before they're able to start using QlikView effectively. Capespan also runs frequent refresher courses whenever a new model is introduced, to ensure users are familiar with all the features available.
Capespan has found QlikView to be remarkably cost-effective. Not only is QlikView far less expensive than many rivals, it takes less time to implement, saves time and resources once operational and is extremely light on both server capacity and bandwidth. "We're tracking 30 or 40 variables for half a million pallets a year, with some variables going back seven years," says Van Vuuren. "The entire database is compressed down to about 57Mb and fits on a small memory stick."
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