K3 AX customer Synseal Extrusions is a UK leader in PVCu extrusions. The 30-year old, £75 million turnover, award-winning company manufactures and supplies a wide range of high-quality energy efficient window, door and conservatory roof systems to the construction trade. In 2004, Synseal installed a new Microsoft DynamicsTM AX enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to match its IT requirements with the rapid growth of the company.

This integrated system runs the majority of Synseal's processes and the information gathered and held in its database is invaluable. Synseal needed a quicker and simpler way to access this information and share it across the various parts of the business.

In response to Synseal's real-time information requirement, K3 AX recommended QlikView as a cost-effective, flexible, easy to use to business intelligence (BI) solution that would dovetail with the Dynamics AX software.

"We needed a strong BI tool to replace our old software. The OLAP [online analytical processing] system we were using was limited and inefficient in terms of time and flexibility. In comparison, K3 AX's QlikView product enables us to benefit from the real-time data capture and communication capabilities of our ERP system and it gives the opportunity to expand BI across the business," says Jez Newton-Hewlett, Synseal's IT Manager.

"Traditional BI tools are generally limited to tabulated views like you find in spreadsheets. Some do offer additional features and functionality, but these come at a high price. The beauty of QlikView is that you can set up tabulated views if you need them and you can use so many different other views quickly and easily. It's also very cost-effective for a company of our size and type," he adds

QlikView is fully configurable, allowing Synseal to tailor the software to provide precisely the information each user needs, together with an easily customised look and feel that makes using it a pleasurable and rewarding experience.

"You have a lot of functionality and flexibility at your disposable within the QlikView software. Importantly, you don't need to employ external experts to bespoke it nor do you need to send people on lengthy and expensive training courses to learn how to use it. If you are familiar with standard office IT, then you'll soon be up to speed with this system. It is an impressive BI tool that has infinite possibilities," says Jez Newton-Hewlett.

Having rolled out QlikView to 20 internal users, Synseal is developing the software to provide BI to roving field-based sales and technical staff who will use it on Apple iPads. This is an innovation for mobile workers and by the time the work is complete a further 20+ Synseal staff will benefit from QlikView.

"We're excited about using the software on iPads. It will bring an additional dimension to how we use QlikView. The iPad gives near instant access to data as there is no waiting for the system to boot up, so this is a faster and more flexible way to use QlikView while on the move. There's no laptop to power up and you don't have to worry about looking for suitable power points should the battery be flat," says Jez Newton-Hewlett.

Working with K3 AX, Synseal has set up a main customer dashboard view that brings together all the key information into one place. This is a live view of business data that previously would require collating 10 different screens and embedding them into a spreadsheet - a process that would take around 30 minutes to complete for each customer. Moreover, this process was repeated several times a day, every day of the working week.

"The software provides a single view of all the information needed to deal with each individual customer. It combines 10 important information items, including a pie chart showing product groups;  a graph of margin and revenue over different periods and the last 12 months of sales broken down by product group or item. In another area of the screen we can see the last 12, six and three months' sales performance to analyse trends by product group and item and we can also display the last 12 months overall business performance against other periods. It gives a very powerful overview of sales, revenues and margins so that you can track every area quickly and easily," says Jez Newton-Hewlett.

"The colour coding gives an immediate visual guide to whether trends are tracking up or down and at a click of a button you can have cyclic views to further analyse trends over time. We generally view trends and analyse them using four different views and you can go through these instantly. The dashboard also provides static information, such as contact details, trading terms, credit limits, the customer's current balance on the account, credit limits and the industry sector in which it works," he adds.

Synseal has also developed views for its Global conservatory roofing division. This helps to manage the thousands of quotes it receives each week for prefabricated roofs made to a mass of different designs and from different materials, with all kinds of glazing options.

"We receive a lot of quotes each week and keeping on top of them can be challenging. At present we are converting these quotes slower than we'd like and so we are limiting ourselves to supplying around 400 roofs a week. We have the capability to do more. QlikView will enable us to keep tabs on the remaining quotes, giving us a clear understanding of our pipeline of roofing systems work. Ordinarily, you'd need additional CRM software to do this, but QlikView provides an answer to our quote chasing requirements," says Jez Newton-Hewlett.

The system also allows the roofing division to interrogate the production software to provide a clear view of the types of roofs the company is selling without having to extract the information manually.

"This is another exciting area for us, as getting this information automatically was impossible. In fact, we couldn't get it easily without employing someone to manage the task of extracting the information from the production software. It would have taken weeks to do this manually and by the time it had been produced it would be out of date, so, we are saving a lot of time and money," says Jez Newton-Hewlett.

With the advantages that Synseal has gained using QlikView it is easy to appreciate why Jez Newton-Hewlett would recommend it to other companies that need comprehensive BI.

"QlikView is a very good tool. It allows you to get the information, quickly and easily from your ERP system to the people who need it. It is easy to implement; in our case, it took just four weeks and there was no need for more than two days training. Users soon gain confidence in using it and because it is view-only there is no danger of information being altered by the user. We'll even be able to use it for helping our sales forecasts as it will allow us to check what we are predicting via the ERP against what the customer actually says they will be buying. We'll be able to input the field-gathered data to update our systems to give a more realistic view of our business going forward," he concludes.

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For further information, please contact:-
Editorial - Ellen Hoefste, Marketing, K3 AX on 0161 876 4498, or
Gary Lillistone, Bridge PR on 024 76 520025, or e-mail garyl@bridgepr.co.uk.