QlikView enhances SAB's performance management culture

SAB is the second-largest listed company on the JSE Securities Exchange, as well as South Africa's leading producer-distributor of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages and one of the nation's largest manufacturing firms.

The group runs SAP across its operations to manage its sales, finance, marketing and supply chain functions, producing high data volumes across multiple systems in a complex IT structure.

In this milieu, SAB struggled to measure and manage output and perform data analysis. Business users employed various reporting tools to extract and analyse data, but these solutions proved complex and ineffective.

The company set out 18 months ago to find a solution that would allow it to combine and analyse multiple data sets across different systems. The solution had to be easy to use, fast and insightful in SAB's ongoing quest to measure and improve operational efficiency. It also had to handle vast amounts of data (230 000 rows of data are added every day in the operational system alone).

SAB evaluated QlikView, introduced to it by the vendor's implementation partner, BusinessIntelligent. SAB's Operations department did a proof of concept against their requirements that outperformed the corporate IT alternative in terms of fit for purpose.

After the proof-of-concept demonstrations, test users indicated their satisfaction with QlikView on all counts. SAB purchased 500 licences together with the QlikView SAP Connector and proceeded to roll it out countrywide.

Users were most impressed with the extraordinary speed of implementation, saying the tool allowed them to start daily data analysis almost immediately, facilitated fast and accurate decisions and enabled root cause analyses on business issues.

QlikView partnered brilliantly with their performance management culture and empowered their users to develop and grow in their respective business areas through a better understanding of their information.

“We suddenly had reporting and analysis at the click of a button,” says expert business analyst Sonja Deyzel. “I now use QlikView for all my reporting and analysis. It associates all the information and lets us get into the key issues very quickly. Previous data queries took three hours for data extraction, more time to build a report, and more still to do analysis. Today it takes 10 minutes to find the issue and resolve it.”

Within a year of implementing QlikView, SAB reported an exceptionally high return on investment, due to users' improved ability to control and manage information and provide their own reporting and analysis.

Operations Excellence Manager Sean Milne says: “Our intention when purchasing QlikView was to provide superior customer service and productivity in the business. We have achieved that as well as an exceptional ROI through superior execution. QlikView allowed us to enhance our performance management culture with the power of our information.”

QlikView has been accepted enterprise-wide in SAB, with various other units leveraging the experience of operations to launch their own BI projects. A random sample of depot managers responded as follows to the new tool:

“For me, it's the ability for all to sing from the same hymn sheet... consistency in measures.”

“It has allowed us immediate access to data and analysis of our processes. Accountability is now much more defined.”

“It gives us more in-depth analysis on a daily basis, and it is easier to trend KPIs and detect potential problems early on.”

“QlikView has been a massive time saver, allowing us to be more responsive, flexible and strategic in our operation.”

“It has levelled the playing field by applying a single methodology across the business.”

Through progressive planning and a vision on where they wanted their business to be, SAB was able to use the unique and powerful technology that exists within QlikView to give their users actionable intelligence.

QlikView has found a quick adoption in other functional areas, including planning and sales, and has already assumed a pivotal role in enabling SAB's performance-driven culture.