Berendsen

Berendsen er en stor spiller inden for industriel vask og er repræsenteret i 14 lande i Europa på nuværende tidspunkt. Vi er den største spiller af vaskeriydelser i Europa.

Berendsen introducerede BI for rigtig, rigtig mange år siden, før det egentlig hed business intelligence. Allerede i slutningen af 90'erne udviklede vi data warehousing og har meget erfaring med det. Vi har bygget på det, og det har hjulpet forretningen i alle årene, så vi har aldrig været i nogen  tvivl om, at det var en forudsætning for at drive en effektiv forretning, at vi kendte vores data.

Vi har mere end 50.000 kunder, og de har rimeligt individuelle prissætninger og individuelle services, så derfor er det svært at få et overblik over data og drive forretningen, og det har vores data warehousing og vores business intelligence altid gjort for os. Så det er en naturlig del af vores forretning og har været det i 10-15 år allerede.

Så det er jo naturligt, at vores data warehouse-platform også skulle moderniseres på et tidspunkt. I den forbindelse var vi igennem en større proces, hvor vi identificerede, hvad der var på markedet, da vi skulle skifte platform eller supplere vores eksisterende platform.

We had originally invested in an Oracle platform with Oracle's tools, Discoverer and Data Warehouse Builder, and some other performance management systems, like Oracle Financial Analyzer, and we then looked at what Oracle had to offer. But when we saw it, we became curious about what was on the market, so we started a process where we went out into the market and tried to see what had happened on the particular business intelligence product page, which we experienced had exploded in the years when we started looking. That was in 2010.

So we took a walk out and looked at the large suites. From SAP Business Objects, and of course we looked at Oracle and IBM's Cognos world.

And we also saw what were of less specialized products on the market. Including Qlikview, who appeared at more or less a coincidence at a conference. And in the beginning it was just a weird system that they said could do a whole lot, but gradually we got more and more hot on it because we thought it looked at Business Intelligence in a whole new and exciting way.

You could say that the traditional way of looking at data warehousing and business intelligence is to go in and say, "I must first have created a common data model for the company and organized it into a data warehouse structure with star charts and so on. , "which is a rather complicated process, where you collect data from your major business applications and ensure that you can create statistics, where you" merge "data from both the financial system, the customer system and the production system. It's a pretty big process, and you could say in business jargon that "now there's project going in it again," because we happened to not have that combination of data in our data warehouse. There we saw that QlikView had options to take as a starting point the data warehouse, but if the data was not there, then we could still retrieve the data into the world of QlikView together with our data warehouse data, so we could in a fast and intelligent way introduce them to our business.

So "time to market" became significantly faster for us. We were quite worried about that possibility in the beginning, because we were well aware that it might well be a Klondyke of data, but we were also aware that we have to satisfy the business, and then we have to, in IT, hump a bit to get a handle on the underlying infrastructure.

So therefore we kind of saw that, well, things are happening, so let's try to follow along and look a little more at what is it that the business demands? Instead of being IT academic and saying it has to go through our traditional data warehouse environment before we get a BI solution on it.

This time we went a lot into the process, basically to create some "value" for the business relatively quickly and thus create a success story for IT as well. And what we saw was that we could create some solutions quickly, and we saw also a whole new way of presenting data to end users.

You could say that in the beginning, when we introduced business intelligence and data warehousing, we expected users to take some time to gather the data and organize the data, but the world is such that there has been less and less time, especially to the managers and so on so they just have to have things served and they will not wait for something to be constructed and they will not wait for response times at all when running their reports. Then they would actually rather have an Excel sheet of their controller again, which has then sat down and processed the data so that they can just start an Excel sheet.

But what we saw with Qlikview was that we could both produce a product for our business at the speed they want it to, and at the same time deliver a solution that they could operate out there themselves. Get some fast response times and superb usability, which was very intuitive compared to the tools we had worked with before. So that means it was something with "time to market", it was something with usability, and then it was that you could create a world so that the end user could actually examine the data and get more than what he actually asked for .

Originally, the purpose of Qlikview was to go in and replace the reporting base we had provided to the business at the time, and modernize it and create the reports they already received in a new and smart way. But it is the case that new needs are constantly appearing in the business, and what we experience a lot is that they are escalating in these years. So what we have actually experienced since we got Qlikview is that we are solving completely new needs with Qlikview. So we've really tried to live up to all the new needs the business has around business intelligence and reporting in general, and then they still have the old platform where they can pull the very operational and very static reports.

So that means that we have spread business intelligence much wider into the business and found completely new areas where one can actually utilize business intelligence. I would also say that we might have also expected that we should initially make some business intelligence solutions for top management, where they could see from the top how the business was going, and then click down and find out what it is. was for a boss they had to bang in the head, but what we have seen a lot is that we have made operational BI for a much broader part of our employees at the slightly lower management levels and even all the way down to the operational levels and in production and in customer service, etc.

An example of doing operational BI has been that we faced a challenge: We had bought a new business area; we call it "private washing", where we wash for the elderly and for health care. We wash unique clothing, ie Mrs Nielsen's silk underwear, etc. A very complicated business, where we had to build a new business ERP system ourselves, and in that context we considered how we should present data to our customer service and production staff, etc.

So we've actually built the entire data presentation page in Qlikview. Instead of creating a reporting frontend of menu items in a development tool, we have created the entire broad side for customer service. This means that customer service today, when our customers call in, they look up in Qlikview and not in our ERP system to investigate, well, what have we delivered to Mrs Nielsen last time, and what do we need to deliver , and what's going on and what do we have in stock and stuff like that. So completely traditional customer service tasks they look at in Qlikview.

And even out in production, we have done performance monitoring so we can look at the different work processes, what the work efficiency is, where bottlenecks occur, and where extra staffing is needed, etc., so it is completely down-to-earth. It is simply hourly wage earners who use the tool today.

So, competitive advantages ... I think we are pushing the industry to be able to provide more services to our customers, so in the start-up we will have a competitive advantage, but what will probably benefit the customers is, that they can also expect our competitors to introduce such tools in order to deliver a better quality, perhaps also at a better price, and also deliver better reports to our end customers, because we also use the product here. We have just made a solution for our service organization, so when we have repeated visits to our customers, we actually now automatically send out a Qlikview report to the customer service manager, who gets a total overview of all the customer's commitments, so that it customer service managers know where we can make some improvements and where we can address some new needs for our customers. Such solutions are new in our industry and there is no doubt that it will create a need when customers know they can get those things.

We can also provide customer-specific statistics that Qlikview can produce, and customers will be able to subscribe to it. These are some of the services we are looking at today. We have many systems that the customers are in, and creating a whole for the customer, the Qlikview platform will definitely help us with that.

One of the solutions we had created, where we have directly reduced our resource consumption in our business - run a more efficient business - is an example we have from our distribution, where we have implemented a solution that gives our distribution managers a quick overview over how efficiently they utilize their fleet. This means that we both visualize how this route is actually laid out, where you integrate Qlikview and Google Maps, so you can draw the route in a flash.

We have made some key figures for them so they can see revenue per. drove km and looked at volume in relation to driven km and made some quick, simple key figures for the distribution manager, which has made him reorganize his routes in a very, very simple way, and we have created a saving in our hotel and restaurant business on - Yes, what was it we figured out? - Approx. three times around the earth per. quarter, we save on diesel on this, and this is in line with the fact that we want to be an environmentally friendly company, and that is a lot of liters of petrol, we burn less of, and at the same time it also has a positive effect on our accounts.

So it has been a place where we had not seen it coming. We have bought some expensive, fine systems to optimize our routes, but this was very low practice - more that the distribution manager got a picture of how skilled he really was, and then found out that he could be a 20- 30 percent more skilled.

The actual implementation of Qlikview - originally it was one of the reasons we chose the system, also because it has a very easily accessible infrastructure. Among other things, we did such a three-day workshop when we measured Qlikview against the Cognos platform, where we gave a Qlikview consultant three days' work and a given task and a lot of data on installing the platform and understanding data and generating some reports, to be presented to our business. And Qlikview sat and bored after two days and asked if they could show these reports to our business right away, because it is a very simple server installation and a very simple linking to our business systems, whereas some of these big ones required a larger server installation, several servers had to run simultaneously, and rather hefty installations, so after three days, the competing vendors sat and asked for more time and provided some solutions that we could not really use directly.

In fact, one of the solutions we have alive today is one of the solutions we got made during one of these three-day workshops so the complexity and getting it integrated into your back-end platform of applications is surprisingly simple, I would say.

We chose at one point to replace our freelance consultant with the company Capana. And the reason we chose Capana was actually that during the evaluation process we had been out to greet Magasin, where our CFO has previously been a systems consultant and has great respect for the amount of data and the complexity of data that they have in Magazine. And we were presented with a solution that showed the data you needed in a surprisingly simple and fast way, so we went hardcore after those who had now built this solution and found out that it was Capana.

So we actually chose Capana, and since then we have been able to get confirmation that Qlikview could solve the needs we had and the dreams that we have. They have absolutely ensured that it can be done, so it is essential that you choose specialized consultants who have a track record of making some business solutions that can also be used in operation. It's lightning fast to make something that looks super fancy, but if the data is now correct, and can it grow, and can it develop ... If it is to be something that is sustainable, then it must be built on a solid foundation.

The pedagogy in QlikView is such that one just has to learn to understand their way of thinking because it is a little different than it once is. But if you have learned to operate an app, as we call it, then it is incredibly easy to operate the next app, because the starting point is the same: When you have chosen something, it appears very, very clearly, and what you have chosen , goes again when you choose to look at data from another page.

And it's incredibly easy to delineate your choices and dive in depth with what you're finding out along the way is interesting. So what we see is that end users who previously lay on their backs and asked for an Excel sheet, they can today use for goals, and thus avoid an extra link of preparation staff for this data , plus working directly on the source and avoiding the errors that can occur when pulling data out of an Excel sheet to get it presented with gantry charts and with odd percentages, etc.