Part of The Toro Company (NYSE: TTC), a leading worldwide provider of outdoor maintenance and beautification products for home, recreation and commercial landscapes, Toro Australia has rolled out QlikView to over 40 operational, sales and management staff with its first application delivered in just six days. With just two days of developer training, Toro has consolidated data from SAP BW, as well as its service centre, freight and CRM management systems to deliver an interactive view of customer profitability at a product line, item and material level. All QlikView development is managed in-house by Toro.

Toro's strategic imperative is to 'grow lean' by developing processes and business support systems that ensure company resources are directed at the right level to improve customer and product profitability. This needed to be achieved in an environment where Toro's ERP system and data outputs are managed overseas from head office.

QlikView allows Toro for the first time to freely explore and analyse sales and margin impacts of in excess of 5,000 individual products from every conceivable angle of the business. This includes margin rates per customer, sales per quarter by salesperson, sales per product code by district and salesperson. Toro's operational teams can also better manage freight costs, analysing freight against sales at a customer level.

The speed and ease of deployment, competitive pricing with better long-term total cost of ownership and the availability of a robust and proven SAP connector, were decisive factors in Toro's choice of QlikView over other BI platforms.

QlikView is even used to monitor the resources an individual customer uses in the business and the amount of time a Territory Manager spends face-to-face with a customer compared to the value that customer delivers to ensure an equitable balance.

"We realised value from our QlikView investment within days," said Tim Hogan, Manager, Business Intelligence, Toro Australia. "We put QlikView's ease-of-use to the test ourselves by taking one of our Business Units and extracting five years of data. With only one internal resource and support on hand from Inside Info, we built a powerful profitability analysis application that was back on the desks of business managers in six days. The result was an integrated view of customer profitability at a material level - and it's the first time we've had this."

"Toro is a prime example of how QlikView really does simplify analysis for everyone," said Stuart Barnard, Managing Director at Inside Info. "QlikView is extremely powerful, but still so easy and fast to develop and use because it's based on in-memory analytics rather than OLAP. Enterprise level users can be up and running within days. Consequently, the business is receiving benefits within days and weeks rather than the indefinite period traditionally associated with BI software, now it can also be with minimal consultancy attached."