Qlik, a leader in data integration and data management, has announced that the Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor), the acquisition agency for the South African Department of Defence and other state organs and entities, has used Qlik Sense to significantly improve the consistency of its financial data, as well as the quality and accuracy of its reporting.
Armscor is renowned for its acquisition expertise in providing defence turnkey solutions, which encompass technology development, product development and support, product upgrading and the disposal of equipment. Its research and development focuses on producing cutting-edge technology products. With more than six decades of acquisition expertise, Armscor is committed to driving creativity and innovation in collaboration with strategic partners.
According to Zimasa Fayo, Business Intelligence Manager at Armscor, the organisation went out to tender for a data analytics solution that could provide it with greater power over its data and the corresponding insights derived.
“Our decision to adopt Qlik was made based on the self-service and visualisation functionalities, data integration abilities, user friendliness and scalability. Another critical consideration was the fact that their implementation partner, Direct Insight Consulting was well established locally and could provide the right level of support.”
As a state-owned company, visibility on finances is essential for Armscor’s stakeholder reporting, he continues. “Prior to our Qlik rollout, Armscor had disparate, legacy systems in place, with no central view of our financial data and no documented business rules available.
“We had a pressing requirement for clean, accurate data that could be trusted and would allow for timely insights as, at that point, it would take easily two weeks to share month-end numbers with our executives. Even then, the source of the data was often unclear, as many people are involved in this time-consuming process and accordingly there was little trust in the numbers provided.
“Our objective was to empower users, so the self-service feature offered by Qlik was important, as was the ability to derive insights from data. Moving from a very much legacy-driven reporting environment to an analytics-driven platform was a big jump for both IT and business users alike. Thus, a large amount of time was spent on extrapolating and testing the business rules, getting them into a process and then documenting this, which meant that serious change management was required. This was driven from the top by Armscor’s executive team.”
Currently Qlik Sense and Qlik NPrinting are being used within Armscor’s finance department, a critical pillar within the organisation. “Now, we have one version of the truth available, with well-documented and tested business rules in place, and users who are able to deliver insights on the data with which they’re working.
“A key point to make is that these users are able to confidently use data for insights without having to question its quality or accuracy, and our turnaround time on management reporting has been decreased from weeks to just one day,” Fayo explains.
Armscor has seen particular benefits on its settlements – or accounts payable – side, he adds. “Previously, it was difficult to draw a consolidated report on how the business was performing, what was still owing or which accounts were behind; something that is not only vital for Armscor’s business operations, but can also affect the broader sector.
“Today, we have one view through Qlik, from which we derive weekly insights and also share these with our executives – a crucial exercise for Armscor, as reporting on funds spend to stakeholders is one of our key performance indicators.”
The improvement of data literacy at Armscor has been beneficial, Fayo adds. “As an organisation that has been around for decades, Armscor has taken a huge leap forward from an ICT perspective in more recent years. Part of this momentum has been convincing users not to be afraid of automation and, as mentioned earlier, this has required serious change management. Now, with a better understanding of what data is, how to action it, and also how to interpret results, users are more comfortable with analytics and the quality of our data has greatly improved.”
Armscor is currently finalising the use of Qlik for accounts receivable and the management accounting side. “We’d found many data discrepancies in our accounts receivable data, with the requirement for manual intervention, and are in the process of automating the reporting procedure as well as creating data processes.”
Looking further ahead, Armscor plans to use Qlik to improve its acquisition and project management processes, as well as its HR practices. A good example of where data analytics could ease this, says Fayo, would include tracking the effect of voluntary severance packages on its employment equity targets.
“By its nature, HR requires the collation and analysis of a large volume of data on industry-related salaries and packages comparisons. We’d like to unravel this process and allow these insights to be available at the click of a button, so it’s a natural next step for us.”
The organisation is also exploring the building of a data warehouse to leverage data from all of Armscor’s departments and entities for real-time analytics and improved decision making, potentially using Qlik Talend Data Integration to alleviate the high costs and need for resources associated with traditional data warehousing.
In addition, Armscor is planning for the broader use of Qlik within the business for its budgeting and planning features, as well as the rollout of targeted data literacy initiatives beyond the finance side.
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