Success Story - Valorec

About the customer

The disposal and recycling of waste as well as energy services and facility management are the core business of Valorec Services AG, a member of the global group Veolia Environnement. With 320 employees, the environmental services provider, which was founded in 2001, operates resident and foreign companies in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries at four industrial sites in pharmaceutical chemistry cluster Basel.

Initial situation

For data analysis, the service provider previously used a program of their own design, SAP sat-Queries A.

With the increase in analysis requirements, this proved to be inefficient, as John Martinussen, Chief Information Officer of Valorec Services AG explains: "Query generation is time-consuming and subsequent modifications cannot easily be entered. That is why I was looking for a solution which allowed more flexible, timely analyses and could also be operated without IT expertise. "

Decisive factors usability and performance

The analysis and reporting solution QlikView proved effective. Decisive factors were its intuitive usability and the speed with which data could be displayed and changed. The user-driven business discovery approach of QlikView enables self-service BI for all users, while the IT ensures the provision of data and the corresponding data model. The user interface is graphically appealing and has a self-explanatory design.

Its high performance is provided by the patented in-memory technology: via an integrated ETL feature, data can be extracted from any source, converted and loaded.

The data remains in memory receive, so that it can be evaluated at any time and the analysis angle can be varied by adding new KPIs or hierarchies.

Plus point: dedicated authorisation concept

"Our next eye-opening experience was when one of the service chiefs asked whether the client could also be provided with available data, to which the answer was a resounding “yes”. QlikView Publisher ensures that users only have access to documents and reports which are based on their associated data. Previously, this information was printed out and posted in the works. There was also a self-developed analysis solution available for major clients. However, this was no longer up-to-date.

Solution

After just two weeks, QlikView had been implemented and the first applications were available. Informatec Ltd.liab Co., based in Muttenz,  is supporting further developments, much to the satisfaction of the CIO: "Informatec is very quick to implement and has come up with a real IT gem, particularly by providing client access to QlikView."

All order items with detailed information will be evaluated from 2008 on. Data sources are SAP, SQL databases and Excel spreadsheets. Diverse energy and waste statistics are used. Energy consumption is represented, for example, according to type of fuel, buildings, works or period and waste amounts and types or delivery location. External clients use evaluations for cost centre-related further charges for consumption and invoice control in the waste sector. Analyses in this area concern, for example, how much waste of which kind has been delivered where and when and by whom.