March 11, 2014 - Qlik, (NASDAQ: QLIK), a leader in user-driven Business Intelligence (BI), today announced that mobile accessories company Proporta has selected the QlikView Business Discovery platform to gain a more holistic view of its product and customer relationship information. The software will be used by Proporta to analyze the performance of its existing products and to get a true overview of the cost of manufacture.
Founded in 1996, Proporta is one of the UK's leading developers of protective mobile device cases with products suitable for smartphones, tablets and personal music players. The company works closely with top fashion brands like Ted Baker, Quiksilver, Roxy and Barbour to create exclusive designs. Proporta's sales team had previously found running reports and gathering the latest customer information to be a cumbersome process – with it often taking days to pull everything together and to gain useful insights. It was also difficult to get a true idea of the landed cost of a product, making it hard to understand actual profit margins and see which ranges they should be investing more in.
As a growing business, having a current understanding of which items are selling well with customers is imperative to Proporta and also helps the company know which product lines to further expand on or develop. The company works with a variety of devices, manufacturers and products, and across a number of countries. With new handsets and devices being released all the time, Proporta needs to be able to keep abreast of which products are selling well in order to meet market demand. With QlikView, everyone across the business can get an insight into those products that are selling best – for example, whether a certain color or design is performing best and make subsequent purchasing decisions accordingly.
With this requirement, the accessory manufacturer ran a comprehensive review of the data analysis technologies available on the market, before deciding to deploy QlikView through Differentia Consulting due to the software being more intuitive and offering greater responsiveness than competitors such as Tableau.
"We needed software that could give us answers on market demand instantly and, since deploying, it now takes our sales team a matter of minutes to run reports that would previously have taken them days to pull together," comments Samuel Rodman, Head of IT at Proporta. "We now have good top-level reports of this nature, broken down by country, by device, by manufacturer, by product type, and by partner. With QlikView we can cross-reference this information, which is something we've not been able to do before. Now, we can see which partner in which country is performing best, or which color case for which handset in each region for example – and ensure we're ordering stock accordingly."
Proporta is currently using QlikView on desktops, but will gradually start taking advantage of the mobility benefits of the platform, with plans in place for employees to start analyzing company data on the go from their tablets and smartphones, adopting the Smarter.GNR application dashboard developed by Differentia Consulting. This will deliver immediate business benefit when it comes to reporting.
"Information is the backbone of any successful retail organization, and customer-centric companies use BI to improve decision making and enable people throughout the organization to drive overall enterprise performance," says Sean Farrington, Qlik RVP of Northern Europe & MD of UK & Ireland. "Through work with our global customer base, Qlik has gained a deep understanding of the key market drivers, emerging trends, and core opportunities that accelerate success at retail and wholesale organizations. We're dedicated to helping these businesses gain insights through intuitive software that supports their natural way of thinking and are thrilled that QlikView will be able to support Proporta as it continues to grow."
