Johannesburg, 30 Apr 2010
Within three years of deploying QlikView's business intelligence (BI) tool, Mondi Packaging SA (MPSA) has grown its installed base from 100 to 400 users. In another four years, the firm may have as many as 2 000 users, which would make it one of QlikView SA's biggest customers.
Murray Cubitt, Business Systems Manager for the Mondi subsidiary, says despite its reputation as a midrange vendor, QlikView scales to large enterprise level.
“And it has wide application - I want everyone to use it, from executives, divisional heads and business managers to key operators. QlikView is an enormously innovative and valuable product, and going with it has been one of the best things I've done in my career.”
The beginning
Cubitt recounts coming across QlikView while implementing an ERP suite at Mondipak Corrugated and scouting for BI decision support. ”QlikView contacted me at the right time and we arranged a presentation.”
Cubitt says it was not a tough call to give QlikView a chance. “The group had had a challenging experience with another BI product. Its support requirement was enormous and the quality of data poor.”
Within 10 minutes of being shown how QlikView works, he was sold on its value, he reports. “I ordered a proof-of-concept trial with 100 users working within the sales arm of Corrugated.”
Compelling
What was so compelling about the product? “I liked the ease of use and speed of development,” Cubitt comments. “User training takes five minutes, because we built small, purpose-suited data models, avoiding a top-heavy, integrated approach.”
This quick-win approach allowed QlikView to build the first sales data model, containing five years of sales data, in a day-and-a-half. “QlikView did the more complex, upfront development, but soon my staff did a lot of development themselves. This is QlikView's typical engagement style, one made easy by the technology.”
Cubitt says in selecting the sales deployment, MPSA had given QlikView a tough task. “The sales system is distributed on nine servers countrywide,” he adds. “But deployment was within a matter of days. QlikView proved it will connect to any database, anywhere in the enterprise.”
He says unlike some OLAP tools, data from the sales programme is never simply dropped when not recognised. “This gives you a great deal of confidence in the quality of BI data.”
In addition, QlikView allows offline mobility, allowing sales staff to download customer reports for sales calls, as opposed to risking login failure and delay over a 3G network.
On the subject of download ability, he says aggressive compression in QlikView allowed it to squeeze five years of sales data into a 14MB file - a phenomenal feat.
Cost benefit
Having thus far saved 50% on the cost of the competitive product over a comparable period, Cubitt says MPSA is happy with QlikView's pricing.
Running smoothly
Looking back on a smooth implementation and a trouble-free experience ever since, Cubitt says the first BI data models have hardly changed. “We have added to them, but most of our efforts have been spent on building new ones, perhaps 100 in all.”
Some duplication exists, he says. As the company's ERP is upgraded in some divisions - with significant modification in some areas - it will re-deploy QlikView [the most recent Version 9.0], at the same time standardising data models.
Looking ahead
Looking to the future, Cubitt says Mondi Packaging remains convinced of QlikView's ongoing worth. “We believe that QlikView can easily accompany us on our journey of enterprise-wide standardisation of our BI.”
MPSA has few complaints about the functionality it has enjoyed over the five years of the association, and lauds the light-touch, responsive support it gets from QlikView, whenever needed.
“This is a company and product that cannot be praised enough. I'd recommend them in virtually all instances.”
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