When work becomes frustrating, it can often become all consuming. We’ve all been there. Whether it’s a tight deadline, a difficult client, or a complex deliverable that isn’t going right, the frustration can take over and often lead to decreased productivity.  A few years ago,  that was the situation in my household.

My husband is in medical sales. Like most jobs, he is dependent on data to do his job effectively. At the time, his company did all their sales reporting in Excel. I could often hear him swearing at his computer, because the massive Excel document he needed to access would not open. When it did open, it was extremely slow to navigate, the data was static and filled with errors, and it provided him with very little insight into what was happening in his territory and where he had opportunity for growth. This lack of insight was causing him great frustration.

For those of you familiar with Kenway’s “Why” of “To Help and Be Helped,” you know that we are wired to jump in and solve problems. This scenario was no different. One night after dinner, I sat down with my husband, connected his massive Excel spreadsheet to my personal favorite data analytics platform, i.e. Qlik Sense, and built him some dashboards. Suddenly, he had the insight he was craving, and his frustration quickly turned to excitement.

He shared the prototype with his colleagues, his bosses, and his bosses’ boss. Eventually, my husband’s company asked Kenway to help them build a true reporting solution. Kenway used its iterative approach to Information Insight to help their Sales Organization do the following:

Define Requirements

Kenway spent time with the Sales Organization helping them understand what data was available to them, identify what types of information would provide them insight, and document a set of clear business requirements.

Data Cleansing

The Sales Organization received sales tracing from a variety of distributors of medical supplies. There was little to no consistency in how the distributors formatted the names and addresses of customers, making it nearly impossible to identify a “true customer” and their associated sales. Kenway helped develop a master data management solution to clean the data and create a mapping of “true customers” for the Sales Organization.

Business Intelligence

Using the defined business requirements and the newly cleansed data, Kenway built sales dashboards in an interactive business intelligence application using Qlik Sense to show a holistic view of sales, trends and opportunities.

Predictive Analytics

Kenway leveraged an external data set to define sales potential based on number of surgeries at hospitals across the country. This data was used to predict how much of each product a hospital would buy, if the hospital was buying solely from this Sales Organization. That data was married up with actual sales to help set a strategy and identify opportunities for growth.

After successfully using Qlik Sense for the past year, the Sales Organization was told that their entire company was being forced to migrate to Power BI. Not surprisingly, this concept of change made them uneasy. The level of insight the Qlik Sense application provided was extremely valuable and had led to increased sales. Would Power BI provide the same?

As discussed in our “Data Wars” blog post, there are plenty of business intelligence tools from which to choose, and they are not one size fits all. The key to success is understanding the business requirements and ensuring the data is well formed.

Because Kenway and this Sales Organization had taken the appropriate amount of time to document the business requirements and ensure the data was well formed, it was a fairly easy exercise to determine whether a migration from Qlik Sense to Power BI would meet all requirements. With proper change management, the team was able to smoothly migrate to Power BI and continue to get valuable insight from their new business intelligence tool.

Do you need help unleashing the power of your sales data, or determining which application is best to do it? Kenway can use its Information Insight expertise to help. Reach out to us at [email protected] to learn more.