Our client is a top 10 global pharmaceutical manufacturer with offices in over 100 countries and manufacturing in around 20 of them. Qlik BI tools are very effective at supporting the stages of evolution from innovation to Enterprise deployment.
The Innovation
A key business requirement was to measure forecast completeness for each product category down to the individual SKU, identifying where the business units were not meeting the targets for forecast creation.
The analytical business team used their knowledge of the business to provide an innovative solution. They worked locally to build a QlikView app to produce reports and to respond to specific requests from individual business units. A member of the team exported specific reports to Excel, using VBA to cut and slice and then distribute static reports to each business unit.
The vision was to take this initiative and evolve it into an enterprise-ready deployment, by automating the QlikView app production and making it flexible enough for business units to perform their own analysis.
Taking it to Production
A key requirement was for Thorogood to take the locally managed QlikView solution and apply best practice to build a productionised version. Thorogood used a phased approach:
- To productionize the QlikView app while accommodating new sources of data and data structures, and applying security.
- To deploy the solution to the enterprise QlikView server environment.
Move away from the distribution of static reports and support the business users with direct access to the QlikView solution. - To ensure the business units had uninterrupted access to the information they needed to help them manage their business.
Further Evolution
Phases 1 & 2 of the vision have now been completed and phase 3 will start shortly. The biggest benefits of the system will be seen with phase 3 which puts information into the hands of the users, and enables the analytical business team to move onto the next innovative solution.
