QlikView on expo in NY

According to the company, more than 1000 global retail and wholesale companies using QlikView include Alessi, Body Shop Italia, Eden Park, Fila Europe, Grotto (Gas Jeans), HR Group, Magasin, National Frozen Foods, Robinsons Group, Stonefly, Siba, The Cocoa Trees, Verdecora, VIP Auto, Visionlab, and WH Smith.

"Prior to QlikView it was impossible for us to get at detailed operations, merchandising or supply chain data without laborious manual slicing and dicing from transaction systems into spreadsheets. Now we can juxtapose data from these systems - which we bring in at the item and transaction levels - any way we want and at any granularity," said Dan Grosz, vice president of information systems at VIP Parts, Tires and Service, a US-based automotive retail chain. "It has been a real eye opening experience for the business and a great success for a relatively small IT shop with limited resources but very tight deadlines."

Satisfaction survey

Retail and wholesale distribution is its the second largest vertical market and has grown steadily year over year. The down economy has actually played favourably to its strengths and the company has experienced less resistance to invest by retailers and wholesalers based on its rapid time to value and ease of use.

In a recent sponsored survey, IDC found:

• 98% of retail and wholesale users reported customer satisfaction and marked business value after implementation
  
• 56% Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to other solutions evaluated
  
• 250% Return On Investment (ROI)
  
• 42% deployed it in 1 month; 69% in 3 months
  
• 30% increase in employee productivity
  
• 22% increase in cash flow
  
• 20% decrease in operating costs
  
• 13% increase in revenue

"In a year where many retailers and wholesalers fell to mergers and acquisitions or were closing their doors, we find the survivors have a sense of urgency for maximising sales opportunities and driving agile and efficient operations," commented Rebecca Braverman, global sector director for consumer products, retail and distribution. "By delivering proven ROI and reduced TCO, the system is a prudent business intelligence choice for both the business and technical teams at retail and wholesale companies."

High adoption

Retailers and wholesalers know the secret to a successful implementation is in achieving high adoption from the user community. The fact that the system is so simple means any user can build an application for the business decisions specific to his/her function, without having deep technical or data modelling expertise, makes a huge impact on both customer satisfaction and related training and service costs.

For example, retail buyers using the system can build applications to self-select any number of data elements pertaining to sales and product performance, pricing and promotions, inventory sell-through and open-to-buy.

With it, the buyer can visualise the analyses in a series of bars, charts and graphs and proceed to identifying trends, patterns and anomalies in performance. This allows them to ask any number of follow-up questions immediately to get answers needed to improve product performance and preserve gross margin.

QlikView South Africa is the local representative and distributor for QlikTech and can be accessed on www.qlikview.co.za.