Case study
QualiTru and Sage Data & Analytics
“Thanks to Sage Data & Analytics, I’m now relieved of a lot of my ongoing reporting requirements to the board as they can simply go and view it themselves in the system real-time as and when they need to”
Industry:
Manufacturing / Quality Control
Website:
Requirements:
Automated reports, easy-to-access data, detailed analysis for forecasting
Data Sources:
Sage 100
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Background
Established in 1983, QualiTru is a family-owned business located outside St. Paul, Minnesota, which manufactures sampling devices for the food industry which are then sold to businesses across 30 countries.
The product allows the customer to put a hypodermic needle through a silicon membrane and take a sample from a tank or pipeline; this is then sent to a lab and tested for contamination, quality control or whatever the customer’s requirements may be.
Challenges
Even before the pandemic struck, CEO Calvin Guyer was working both offsite and onsite, and he’d found the company’s data source, Sage 100, was easier to manipulate onsite than off. Therefore, when he wanted to get information out of it whilst working from home, he would typically download data into a spreadsheet and then use pivot tables and other utilities. Not only was this time consuming, when the pandemic hit which forced him offsite even more frequently, the process became more and more inefficient.
“It's very difficult to VPN into Sage and download the data and update the spreadsheets so I was looking for an online data warehouse that would solve this problem, do it automatically for me, and then allow a connection to a platform.” The company deployed Power BI and started looking for online data warehousing products, favouring the idea of automation of connections and flexibility. The need to update manually had to go, particularly when accessed through a slow VPN, and the case for a cloud solution had become obvious.
It was at this stage that Guyer stumbled across Sage Data & Analytics.
Solutions
Sage Data & Analytics appealed to him immediately because it instantly got rid of manual elements and had analytical capabilities without the need for extra coding and development. QualiTru is a family business (although Guyer is not part of the family) so the ability to update the dashboard and provide the family and other directors access to vital data about their business in real-time was key.
Another benefit was the accuracy of the data, said Guyer. "Data in Sage gets a little dirty; there’s full stops, commas, mis-spelled names and other messy things." However, thanks to the connector built into Sage Data & Analytics which enabled the data to be consistent, due to it being entered once rather than multiple times, the scope for human error was all but eliminated.
The business has seen a significant improvement as a result of implementing the new system. “We were never really tracking this detail of data before – when we made sales, who we sold to, when they would be likely to buy again and what markets we were in,” said Guyer. In fact that was only the start; the company wasn’t looking at what it had sold to particular clients the previous year either, but it now has a better defined budget cycle based on facts.
But this is only the start; QualiTru is able to apply analytics and forecasting to individual products and is looking at new markets and goal-setting for 2022. It’s going to be based on solid data and facts about the company’s performance – and this is thanks to deploying Sage Data & Analytics.
Benefits
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Out-of-the-box data on cash conversion cycle, days of inventory and a great many other business elements for better insight.
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Access to close-to-real-time reporting for family, directors and other stakeholders.
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Ability to forecast more confidently and make substantiated plans for business development.