This article was written by Joe DosSantos and originally appeared on the Qlik Blog here: https://www.qlik.com/blog/make-your-business-data-fit-with-qlik-part-3
Data is like water to fuel a big workout: its hydration gives businesses and individuals what they need to hit their personal best. To help you turn data into insights that lead to better business decision making, we created a 30-60-90-day data integration fitness plan with expertise from leading Chief Data Officers (CDOs).
Parts one and two of our three-part blog series focused on the importance of data integration and the 30-60-90-day fitness plan. This final part compiles three amazing success stories to inspire your data work out.
Shire Health: Delivering Better Patient Care with Data Integration
Shire, a global research pharmaceutical company now acquired by Takeda Pharmaceuticals, put tremendous effort in getting into shape and maximizing their gains with Qlik and data integration. In the early 2010s, Shire experienced exponential growth and saw significant opportunities to improve patient care and operations with data. This was no easy task – with numerous teams using dozens of platforms over the years, Shire ‘gained weight’, generating heavy silos of data of diverse formats. Whipping this massive volume of data into shape to uncover insights quickly became a huge challenge.
To overcome this, Shire’s analytics teams envisioned a Connected Care Model which pulled together data from many places into a single, organized, clean and lean data source. The team was able to realize this vision by creating the Shire Analytics Marketplace, which consolidated commercial, corporate, financial, manufacturing, supply chain, as well as R&D data, and streamlined it into manageable sets. Thanks to Qlik View, Qlik Sense, and close integration between the Shire Analytics Marketplace and third-party services such as Datameer and Microsoft Cloud Services, Shire’s staff can rapidly obtain information the information it needs and discover never-before-seen insights.
Since Shire started getting data-fit with us, over 40% of their workforce – around 10,000 workers – have used Qlik and created 738 homebrewed apps which have contributed to massive efficiency gains. Departments from corporate finance, HR, and IT are seeing improvements across the board – especially when it comes to patient services. With comprehensive, anonymized, and protected data at their fingertips, Shire’s medical teams are providing an outstanding, personalized standard of care to patients with rare diseases, while respecting and safeguarding their privacy.
Vancouver Airport Authority: Accelerating Transit Times with Data Integration
Vancouver International Airport (YVR) aims to be the TransPacific hub of choice, which drove them to further improve passenger experience.
Like Shire, YVR ‘put on weight’, witnessing massive growth in data generated over the years brought by waves of digitization across the airport’s infrastructure. As the airport’s current IT architecture couldn’t handle the numerous, heavy streams of interconnected data generated, YVR’s data analytics teams envisioned how a new data hub ecosystem, coupled with cutting-edge data integration and real-time data analytics, could help the company and employees train their agility and quickly uncover insights on how passengers, bags and planes move through the airport.
Thanks to Qlik partner GINQO, YVR achieved this vision and obtained immediate insights on many intertwined sub-processes throughout the airport, enabling staff to substantially reduce connection times for passengers in transit. Keeping their process improvement goal top of mind helped YVR to shape their data diet – enabling them to ascertain which data was important for their data fitness. YVR’s data analytics teams even used these insights through Qlik to optimize their gate assignment systems and improve situational awareness of cargo loading, ensuring that passengers and cargo took the most efficient route to their destinations while keeping ground staff alert to any potential bottlenecks and delays.
YVR’s new data hub ecosystem, which combines Qlik and Snowflake, has also helped cut time to run a report from 33 hours to under one minute, positioning the data infrastructure for future growth and agility.
Aggreko: Personal Data Training Powers Better Customer Experience
Aggreko, a leading global provider of power and energy services, shows how working with the right data integration trainer can help businesses overcome the biggest obstacles and build competitive agility. Aggreko wanted to put insights at the heart of their decision making and needed a way to provide the right information to the right people at the right time. The company’s business intelligence team envisioned this as a platform which contained numerous visual insights created from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) data. To do this, Aggreko needed to get lean with data integration.
With their existing data architecture, Aggreko’s data engineers struggled to consolidate multiple information pipelines to a central depository cleanly and consistently. Building an efficient change data capture (CDC) solution for all these data streams would take months, and quickly became an unmanageable, full-time overhead. Aggreko’s data engineers needed a solution which was easy to implement, simple to manage, and lightweight enough not to slow down their ERP and production lines.
Aggreko collaborated closely with our data integration division (formerly Attunity) to build a custom CDC solution with Qlik Replicate. Thanks to the hard work of our team, what would have taken months to develop and implement was done in a single week, enabling Aggreko’s teams to vastly speed up the data integration process and accelerate the creation of insights to near real-time.
This new rapid delivery of analytics-ready data and insights to decision makers has had a widespread impact across Aggreko’s teams. Frontline staff are now able to actively monitor the performance of deployed assets in real-time, and are building predictive models to understand if these assets are being used to their full potential. While logistics teams are discovering newer, more efficient ways to deliver assets to clients, customer service is better at identifying customer needs and closing gaps. Aggreko is now more data-driven, agile and responsive - all thanks to personal training in data integration.
Getting Data Fit: You Can Do It!
You too can realize success with data fitness once you get off that starting line. While you can train on your own, there is nothing better than working out with a guide and a personal trainer in the form of Qlik.
Download our e-book for our 30-60-90-day plan to make your business data fit with Qlik today. Now it’s your turn – put on your workout gear and kick off your data integration project!