Success Story - JET Services

The customer

JET Services Marketing GmbH & Co. KG is a German, internationally operating agency for trade marketing. With around 420 employees, the company specialises in the specialised trade, retail and eTail sales markets with clients from the B2B and B2C sectors. The focus is on the information technology, telecommunications, consumer electronics, automotive and sports, health and fitness lifestyle sectors. JET Services optimises the distribution channel from the manufacturer to the retailer and ultimately the end customer. The service portfolio ranges from leased external sales forces and high-quality promotion campaigns to sustainable trade fair appearances and events. One of the main emphases is on the Sales Force and Promotion services: On behalf of manufacturers, JET Services provides specialised trade retailers with sales representatives and promoters who support everything from sell-in to sell-out.

www.jet-services.com

Online-client reporting from heterogenous data systems

The sales and promotion teams collect valuable information in discussions with clients and prospective clients on a daily basis. JET Services wanted to tap into the value of these data for their producers as a basis for strategic and operational decisions. "In the past, we provided our customers with Excel analyses containing information on the quantities of products sold to and by the markets. But Excel quickly reaches its limits, especially if, like us, we aspire to map key figures and analyses in different granularities and on the basis of data from different sources", Product and Process Manager at JET Services. "Other features are the quantitative and qualitative information that the field service, merchandisers and promoters receive about their work in the markets via a third-party mobile tracking tool. For example, employees collect information about the products and shelves for each product, take photos of the placement and presentation of the goods, etc.”

Qlik Sense is remarkably flexible

JET Services decided to use the flexible data analysis platform Qlik Sense. The decisive feature was the in-memory-based architecture, which enables data from any source to be processed, intuitive handling and its drag-and-drop function, which enables even the absolute novice to create visualisations and helps employees throughout the company to make sustainable improvements in their data literacy.

Due to the required flexibility for changing customer requirements and its own high demands on security, performance and scalability of the reporting provision, the agency decided to outsource the entire issue of online customer reporting to the Cloud.

Qlik Sense ready-to-use and “fully managed”

Qlik Sense was designed to operate on a cloud infrastructure in the software as a service model, complemented by fully managed services. JET Services was looking for a managed service provider (MSP) to implement it, one that was established as a Qlik Sense expert in the market and also has the necessary expertise and experience to take over operations in the Cloud.

The choice fell on the Swiss IT service provider Informatec, the Qlik Elite Solution Provider and Qlik Expertise and Qlik Managed Service Partner with customers throughout the DACH region. Furthermore, as a full service MSP Informatec has extensive experience in realising projects in public cloud environments such as Microsoft Azure and AWS and its own "Swiss BI Cloud".

Operation and maintenance from a single source – 365/24/7

Informatec provided support in procurement, operations, hardware and software maintenance, security and governance, monitoring and support, Qlik training and license ordering and management. "You can just really tell that Informatec has a great deal of experience in the MSP environment," Belov summarises.

As a public-cloud solution, Informatec recommended Microsoft Azure because of its special requirements for global availability and international data protection requirements. The platform serves customers in all time zones, around the clock, 365 days a year.

Application development was in-house, supported by Informatec best practices, both in terms of applications and data literacy. "We stored a master element in different languages for each key figure and each dimension. New applications or extensions of existing applications can easily be created by drag-and-drop of the master elements. This flexibility is for me the biggest advantage of Qlik Sense. Once the data model is properly set up, I have virtually unlimited analysis options", says Belov.

Limitless analyses

JET Services clients can access the data relevant to them online. Depending on the reporting package they have booked, they will receive key figures and analyses on the quantity of products in the stores, on backorders and on sales. The information can be displayed in different dimensions, such as market category, market group, region, etc.

"Our clients can inspect their data at the aggregate level of several KPIs down to the detailed level of the individual product, not only gaining insight into the market success of the product, but also the ROI of distribution through the retail channel. In addition, statements can be made as to what sales measure can be used to generate additional sales potential in which market", explains Below.

The future

Currently, the rollout of the reporting solution to the entire customer base is taking place. Further applications – for example for the event sector – are in the planning stage.