ELECTRICITY AND WATER PLANT OF THE CITY OF BUCHS (EWB)

Industry

energy and telecommunications

Department

Controlling, IT, sales, project management, infrastructure, human resources, customer care

Region

Buchs, Switzerland

The customer

EWB supplies Buchs with energy, water and communications. Around 100 employees install and operate solar plants and hydroelectric power stations, they take care of smart home solutions, renewable energies, grid construction and the specialised electrical trade. At the same time, the company offers innovative telecommunications services in the region with “Rii Seez Net”.

Initial situation

In its function as provider of the regional telecommunications provider Rii Seez Net, EWB wanted to optimise the possibilities of collecting key figures and analysing company data as a basis for business-critical decisions. In particular, the mobile area, with which the provider completed its communications offering in 2018, was to become easier to analyse.

"For us as an innovative, digitally oriented company, business intelligence is clearly a strategic issue," says Stefan Frei, project manager at EWB. "We wanted to use the potential of our data simply and better and provide management-relevant information simply and centrally. In a first step, the topics of provisioning, financial analyses as well as employee and order evaluations in the area of electrical installation work were to be mapped.

"In the medium to long term, applications for other application and business areas should follow."

They were looking for suitable software that was both easy to use and powerful in terms of linking large amounts of data from different sources and evaluating them. "Due to our broad range of services, we are very heterogeneous. This also affects our IT system landscape," Frei explains. "For the communication services, IDMS is used. For the energy and water business areas, EWB relies on the is-e information system. In addition, there are various internal tools and Excel tables. In addition, we have data bases in the telecommunication sector that in some cases comprise a billion data lines. Connecting and analysing this amount of heterogeneous data reliably, flexibly and efficiently requires more than just Excel."

The project was to be realised in cooperation with a business intelligence-savvy, project-experienced partner from the region.

Solution

EWB found what it was looking for in Liechtenstein: ppmc analytics ag, which has specialised in the implementation of customised business intelligence solutions since 2007, convinced EWB with its expertise, customer orientation and the Qlik Sense data analysis platform, which enables visual, fast data analysis across various sources.

As a certified Qlik Solution Provider, ppmc analytics is very familiar with the development level of Qlik products and also has broad expertise in the functioning of business processes in various industries. Experience that also paid off for EWB: within three months, the data model had been created, Qlik had been installed and the first applications had been developed and put into production.

"ppmc very quickly grasped our needs and developed targeted solutions," says Frei. "The fact that they have a large Qlik team also ensured that we always had a contact person who dealt with our concerns promptly. This is still the case today, because ppmc continuously supports us in our further development."

Areas of application and benefits

Currently, 26 users from Controlling, IT, Sales, Project Management, Infrastructure, Human Resources and Customer Care use various Qlik applications to analyse data from the Communication division.

Qlik is used, among other things, for the provisioning of partners. This is particularly helpful where data from different systems need to be linked. For example, when billing data of basic connections in one system and billing data of services in another system.

Furthermore, employee key figures are evaluated. Absence days can be called up according to criteria such as sickness, holidays, etc. Work productivity is also determined and analysed according to criteria such as period or department.

The solution is very well received by users, not only because of the time saved, but also because of the easy handling and the comprehensible graphical presentation. "The Rii Seez Net community of interest consists of 17 regional cable network operators," Frei explains. "If you want to compare key figures of these partners, it is difficult in a table. With Qlik, we can visualise values in the individual regions with symbols in a map."

Classic controlling reports are also mapped in Qlik. The employees responsible for customer care use the software for a clear and comprehensible presentation of customer relations.

Future

A cockpit is also being implemented that will provide various key financial figures. In future, users will find answers to questions about turnover and revenue there. "Determining the turnover per cable network operator per product area used to be very time-consuming," Frei specifies. "Just pulling the figures out of the system took two days of work. If we wanted to look at the figures from the last three years, it had to be done monthly." EWB can find out how much turnover was generated per customer with which product in which business area in which region by which cable network partner with just a few clicks.

Qlik is also used to analyse connection records in the mobile phone sector and to check invoices.

The implementation of Qlik applications for the energy and water division will follow. A core topic in this context is the analysis of smart metering data.