Overview

pWith a presence dating back to 1883, Benjamin Moore is a leading manufacturer of premium quality residential and commercial coatings, serving more than 5,000 locally owned and operated paint and decorating retailers across North America. The company has embarked on a digital transformation journey to pivot Benjamin Moore from a product-focused to a customer-centric enterprise, and is reliant on its analytics team, in partnership with IT, to drive data through every process in the organization. /p pThe Benjamin Moore analytics team is a cross-functional group of more than a dozen members serving the entire organization, from Executive Leadership through individual sales team members and retail staff, ultimately reporting to the CIO./p

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

pLeadership challenged the IT and analytics organization to drive the company’s move from product-centric to customer-centric through data and analytics. The intention was to ultimately deliver a better customer experience, serving current needs at a higher satisfaction level and better anticipating future needs. There were five main issues:/p pCulture: Long time reliance on paper and emailed static reports limited real-time and dynamic decision-making required a cultural shift to more real-time analysis./p pData Access and Data Integration technology: The pivot relied on creating a single source of truth with data. Like most large organizations, Benjamin Moore has information in a multitude of internal and external sources, ranging from ERP to a limited set of individual location POS systems. Getting all the right data into the right hands at the right time in a user-friendly way would require a new approach./p pData Literacy: Making this shift would be partly driven by technology. The team also recognized that data literacy would be a challenge – enablement via technology alone without data skills would stunt transformation./p pInsight to Action Duration: Analysts were spending 70% of their time trying to determine where to get data and how to present it in a meaningful way, as opposed to actually analyzing the data. /p pAdministration: Over time, it was becoming difficult to manage several static reports that contained repetitive or conflicting information. /p

The Solution

pBenjamin Moore needed one way for all employees from different functions to consume data for decision-making. The company used Qlik Sense as the platform to draw all of its key data together. Qlik Sense is enabling the organization to leverage data from systems like SAP, CRM and eCommerce in one view, speeding up the “data to action” timeline and making data a truly strategic asset. Qlik Sense is also being embedded into existing applications like CRM, making existing investments more valuable since that data is now delivered to where the CRM users can best consume it. /p pQlik Sense effectively answered executive leadership needs by providing the ability to drill down and analyze data to help make strategic decisions. Through the wide array of interactive TVs and available mobile platforms for sales representatives in the field, this provides Benjamin Moore analysis that allows them to further support the success of independent retailers.   /p

The results

pInitial deployment focused on sales applications to drive immediate and measurable impact. Qlik Sense eliminated several legacy sales reports, and is being deployed in many ways including sales reporting via mobile devices, pricing teams accessing data, driving sales velocity through offers and promotion options, and call center alignment with retailers on shared customer services satisfaction KPIs. This level of coordination and refinement for data from multiple sources was not possible before. /p pThe alignment between sales and management teams through the Sales Insight Dashboard is enabling proactive decision making for the first time. Sales representatives can now accurately evaluate purchase data from retailers daily to cross compare and tailor promotions and marketing initiatives to each customer. This is driven by Qlik Sense’s self-service capabilities, since through a single app, employees can now directly access data and insights from various departments in one place./p pBased on initial success, requests expanded across Benjamin Moore, including finance, marketing and supply chain. Now every function including finance, HR, marketing, sales, etc. has visibility into existing dashboards. Benjamin Moore has gained a major step towards single versions of truth through the integration of data from different sources, ensuring users see the same metric KPI regardless of their business function in a more visual way that lends itself to better analysis./p

Metrics

pBefore Qlik Sense, the sales teams relied on manual and traditional static reports that recap results upon completion of an initiative.  There was no way for management and decision makers to easily identify trends and outliers with a few clicks.  This greatly hampered the amount of time that sales teams had to do what they do best – sell – since a significant portion of their daily life was spent trying to figure out what the most effective course of action would be.  /p pFrom a simple set of two applications received from the sales team for the proof of concept, demand for Qlik Sense across the organization has exploded.  More than ten applications now directly support sales functions, and Benjamin Moore is working to further deploy more than 60 Qlik Sense applications over the next 6 months to support the larger organization. From the first set of 46 users, Benjamin Moore now has more than 300 sales users and more than 70 non- sales users, with the long-term vision of Qlik Sense being on every employee’s computer. Applications were originally only delivered through desktop PCs, but are now available on interactive TVs and mobile devices as well. The dataset that Qlik Sense uses also grew from 9 QVD (Qlikview Data file) to more than 45 QVDs – spanning various teams throughout the company./p

The Technology

pQlik Sense is Qlik’s platform for self-service oriented analytics, supporting a full range of use cases including self-service visualization/exploration, guided analytics apps and dashboards, custom and embedded analytics, mobile analytics and reporting, all within a governed multi-cloud architecture. Users benefit from associative exploration and search, smart visualizations, self-service creation and data preparation, geographic analysis, collaboration, and fully interactive mobility./p

Disruptive Factor

pi“The value is that Qlik gives us a sense of how the company’s doing in one glance. Instead of filtering through many sheets, and many Excel files, salespeople see everything at once. Within a few seconds they can quickly identify opportunities and risks to influence what they should be doing next.”/i– Alex Mendoza, Benjamin Moore Senior Manager, Data, Planning Reporting/p pQlik Sense’s ease of use helped the shift away from standard practices such as manually reviewing performance reports by region or downloading several static reports. The digitization project driven by Qlik Sense evolved the cultural attitude towards data, building a strong sense of curiosity amongst users. Per Mendoza: “So when users click on something it encourages them to interact with the data to inform what they’re trying to do.”  /p pAlmost a year into the transformation, all levels of the organization are leveraging Qlik Sense – from field sales teams gathering data prior to launching promotions to the leadership teams sharing insights on decision impact. i“Using Qlik really is a differentiator for Benjamin Moore. Having Qlik Sense sit on top of multiple information sources allows us to visualize data that we had never seen before and to make better business decisions at an executive level.”/i – Glenn Pinnel, Benjamin Moore CIO/p

Shining Moment

pThe rapid adoption of Qlik Sense and growing thirst for data has also motivated the company to launch an internal data literacy project for decision makers, along with appointing a data governance council. Benjamin Moore also plans to introduce Qlik Sense via mobile to everyone, enabling sales and executive teams to access Qlik Sense wherever a decision can be enhanced through data./p