UK’s largest bottled water company chooses Qlik to get a better view of sales performance and automate supply chain processes
Highland Spring is using QlikView® to give sales staff rapid insight into sales and marketing performance figures and gain better insight into the business. The company purchased QlikView through partner Data Technology, not just to streamline the way this information is analysed, but to give access to the data in real-time across the company so it can help inform business strategies at the top of the organization and see where promotional spend is best allocated.
Highland Spring Group is one of the world’s top 20 bottled water companies, and the UK’s largest supplier and producer of naturally sourced bottled water. Bottling over 500 million litres of water a year, the Highland Spring Group, produces one in every five litres of bottled plain water consumed in the UK. Founded in 1979, the group now consists of five bottling plants and employs over 500 staff throughout the UK.
Highland Spring was keen for its sales team to have access to business intelligence and to be able to drill down into sales performance data.
Using QlikView provides the sales team with all the data they need to engage in conversations with retailers about how their products are being sold in store and has allowed them to analyse the effectiveness of sales strategies. In addition, QlikView gives them the ability to cut and slice data in a way which helps them to solve and respond quickly to customer issues.
The previous BI system the company was using required a high level of expertise for employees to be able to extract data. This meant sales teams and executives often needed to use analysts at head office in order to extract the figures they needed. Instead of data coming from various sources, introducing QlikView gave staff a single version of the truth, which gave them the confidence to make decisions based on the data they were receiving.
Highland Spring’s executives were also looking for new methods to gain insights into their performance against a wide range of metrics, such as operating efficiencies, logistical costs and customer service targets. Whilst the finance team had previously been able to create dashboards for the executives using spreadsheets, the process was extremely time-consuming. Pulling together the weekly dashboards could take up to two days of work to make them insightful and understandable for the executives. By using QlikView, the company is able to significantly reduce this turnaround time and easily produce daily reports to track orders and sales.
Alison Hanning, Head of IS at Highland Spring said
“Our aim is to provide wider access to data around the organization and to save time. We believe our sales and finance users save over two hours a week, which is a huge achievement. We’re also saving time on calls and in meetings as the sales teams no longer need to be in constant contact with the financial analysts.”
“It’s about ensuring that the business is as efficient as possible. That not only makes us more effective, but also helps us to improve customer service.”
“We’ve got big plans for QlikView. We’d love to use it within our marketing department to pull in external market data. We’ve also got some ideas on how Qlik Sense could benefit within various other areas of the business. We’ll probably be exploring those later in the year.”
Simon Oldham, Group Commercial Director said “QlikView has step-changed the way that our sales team works. The ability to instantly access data and slice and dice it means that account managers rather than simply reporting on sales, are able to interrogate the numbers and understand what the drivers are. This in turn helps us develop better business plans with our customers.”
“We’re really pleased to be helping Highland Spring to better understand their customers using data analytics.” said Sean Farrington, UK MD and RVP Northern Europe at Qlik. “In such a competitive market, we’re delighted that they’ve chosen QlikView to drive innovative and data driven sales strategies. We’re excited to expand our work with Highland Spring in the future and are delighted that they plan to use our technology in more areas of the business.”
Interesting links:
- 3 Tips to Make Sure Your Tech Investments for Your Sales Team Aren’t a Waste of Money
- Bottled Water Market is Expected to Exhibit a CAGR of 8.7% to Rise to US$279.65 Billion by 2020: Transparency Market Research
- The fun sparkling spiral of a spinning ball drenched in water
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About Highland Spring
Highland Spring Group, parent company of the Highland Spring brand, is the leading supplier of bottled water to the UK market. One in every five litres of plain bottled water consumed in the UK is produced by Highland Spring Group. Bottling 460 million litres of water a year, the Highland Spring Group produces brands including Highland Spring, Speyside Glenlivet, Hydr8 and a range of private label flavoured and unflavoured waters for some of the UK’s major supermarkets and food service retailers. Headquartered in Blackford, Perthshire, the Group oversees four bottling plants in Scotland and Wales and employs over 400 staff. It has a current production capacity of over 700 million litres of water a year and has an available resource in excess of 2.2 billion litres a year. Highland Spring Group’s turnover in 2013 was £97.7m