Blyth HomeScents International Illuminates

Case Study
Blyth HomeScents International Illuminates
Their Enterprise Data with QlikView
“Using QlikView has become a way of life in our company.”
In Brief
Company
· Blyth HomeScents
International
Industry
· Manufacturer of candles,
fragranced products, and
related household
accessories
Enterprise System
· Movex and BPCS on IBM
AS/400 (iSeries)
Challenge
· Consolidate enterprise data
from two merged divisions
· Improve the speed and
quality of decision making
· Create a reporting and
analysis solution that is
easy to use for both
developers and end-users
Solution
· QlikView – a set of Webbased performance management, analysis and
reporting applications with
approximately 100 users.
QlikView-based applictions for analyzing and
reporting on sales, logistics,
retail point-of-sale data, and
more.
Benefits
· Analysis/reporting capabilities
available across the organization, supporting faster and
more accurate decisions
· High user acceptance due
to ease-of-use
· Complete integration and
dissemination of data from
disparate sources
· Easy, fast and cost-effective to develop and maintain analytical applications
· Reduced costs and pressure on IT staff
– Steve Kosmalski, President, BHI – North America
Most enterprises have constructed their information technology and systems piecemeal,
driven by departmental solutions, mergers and reorganizations, and changes in technology
and needs over time. Often, companies end up with different divisions using different
systems for capturing and analyzing sales, budget, and financial data. When that occurs,
there are significant difficulties in conducting analysis on the wealth of data available.
Generating insight for end users from enterprise systems is challenging, and that effort is
compounded by the number of sources and types of data and the general lack of reporting
capabilities in such systems.
Blyth HomeScents International (BHI) had such a problem. A division of Blyth Inc., BHI
is a consumer products business, primarily focused on the manufacturing and distribution
of candles, fragranced products, and related accessories to beautify the home, including
such brands as Colonial at HOME™ and Florasense™. They had merged two divisions
that ran two different ERP systems – Movex and BPCS – and were having serious problems
consolidating the data to provide consistent, accurate sales and financial reports and analysis
to support sound business decisions. This changed with their deployment of QlikView.
Rapid Deployment and Fast ROI
“We used to pull sales data from the ERP systems and then add in some budget data from
elsewhere, combine those, and then summarize everything in Excel,” said Oleg Troyansky,
Director for Application Services at BHI – North America. “It was lengthy and tedious work
and any change we had to make was very time intensive. With QlikView, we save hours on
every update or addition to the system that we carry out. QlikView is a fast and easy tool to
use for both our developers and our many end-users.”
BHI runs QlikView on a dual processor
Windows 2003 Web server. They have
dedicated a workstation to perform
the extract, transform, and load (ETL)
functions and, through a nightly reload,
pull data from the various sources
into QlikView’s unique “data cloud”
structure – the non-redundant, nonaggregated associative database residing
in the computer’s primary memory
that is the heart of QlikView. Most
of the data is loaded from the Movex
and BPCS systems with some budget
data pulled from Excel spreadsheets.
“I have worked with other major BI systems, and
they generally take days or weeks just to define the
metadata. With QlikView I’ve developed some of our
applications in just hours.”
– Oleg Troyansky
Director for Application Services
BHI– North America
After the reload, the workstation publishes the updated QlikView applications
out to individual power users and to the Web server where they become accessible
for the end-users via standard browsers over the company intranet, based on their
specific access rights.
It was this ease of development that was a major factor in BHI’s decision to
purchase QlikView. Only three weeks after Troyansky and one of his programmers
received QlikView training, they had designed, developed and implemented their
first QlikView application for sales performance analysis. QlikView isn’t easy just
for developers either. “The most used word to describe QlikView around here is
‘awesome’,” said Troyansky. “Previously, Sales and Marketing needed a lot of help
trying to get the information they need; now it’s right at their fingertips. QlikView
provides them with answers they need to do their jobs better, and in seconds instead
of weeks.”
Finally – Data Turned into Insight
QlikView has met BHI’s challenge of combining data from disparate systems
and turning it into actionable information for a wide range of users across the
enterprise. These users, after only a couple of hours of training, now have the
ability to track, analyze and understand their business better to support faster and
more accurate decisions. At the same time, strained IT resources have been freed
up as they need to spend less time reactively running reports and have more time
available to work on strategic IT issues.
All of this is why Steve Kosmalski, president of BHI – North America has said,
“Using QlikView has become a way of life in our company.”
QlikTech North America
5400 Trinity Road, Suite 107
Raleigh, NC 27607
Phone: +1 (919) 532-1300 Fax: +1 (919) 532-1301
Email: infous@qliktech.com Web: www.qliktech.com/na
BLYTH-US-05/04
QlikTech International
Science Park Ideon
223 70 Lund, Sweden
Phone: +46 (0)46 286-2700 Fax: +46 (0)46 286-2681
Email: info@qliktech.com
Web: www.qliktech.com
© QlikTech International AB. QlikTech, QlikView, and AQL are trademarks of QlikTech International AB.
Colonial at HOME and Florasense are trademarks of Candle Corporation Worldwide, Inc.