INHAUS HANDELS GMBH

Industry

Sanitary wholesaler

Department

Management, Purchasing, Finance and Controlling, Warehouse, Sales

Region

Hohenems, Austria

The Customer

INHAUS is the leading regional plumbing and heating wholesaler in Vorarlberg and Switzerland. The company´s success story begins on June 1, 2001: A strong Swiss entrepreneur SFS and two strong Vorarlberg entrepreneurs – Pircher and Ulmer – join forces with a common vision. The aim is to become the quality leader and to put the customer at the centre of attention with an excellent consulting service. Today, INHAUS is a reliable specialist as a complete provider of bathrooms, installations and heating systems and has long been the market leader for good reasons. The company employs over 200 people at various locations.

Focus on digitalization

For several years now, INHAUS Handels GmbH has been consistent digitalization to make the flow of goods faster, more error-free and more ecologically. One example of digital receipt processes with its own INHAUS app, which tradespeople can use to access all INHAUS receipts, availability and item information at any time. In addition, the Vorarlberg SME has built a high-tech logistic warehouse at the Hohenems location, which is unique in the Lake of Constance region with its automated small parts warehouse. To ensure the everything runs smoothly in terms of IT, INHAUS employs its own team – because the focus is on in-house rather than outsourcing.

Data transparency with Qlik ensures agility

The wholesaler has been relying on Qlik technology for 16 years in order to lay the foundation for the company to be as agile as possible with transparent data. “ In those 16 years, I haven´t even had to think about whether it might make sense to look at other solutions,” says Oliver Pritz, Head of Finance an Information Technology at INHAUS Handels GmbH. “We started with a classic sales report to keep an eye on contribution margins, sales and turnover”, continuous Oliver Pritz. “Qlik feed us from stacks of rigid paper reports, which were mainly used by our sales force to find out about current business. With Qlik, the first flexible report was available within two days, which visualized the data from our ERP system Microsoft Dynamics NAV clearly and quickly. That was our start into a whole new era of date analysis.”

Eleven streams with 45 evaluations

The application landscape has been further expanded over the years. The central data source is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Information from a fleet management solution and from the fully automated robot warehouse is also imported via a Microsoft SQL server-based database. Eleven streams with 45 evaluations for the areas of sales, purchasing, warehouse and finance are now being used by around 60 employees. The data is updated daily; in the warehouse area, updates are sometimes carried out every 5 minutes – for example for pick figures.

The analysis of sales and turnover from perspective such as customer, article, article group, region, responsible sales force, etc. is central to sales. In purchasing, Qlik Sense is used for classic purchasing analysis to show which items are on order, which have already been delivered, which items still need to be invoiced etc. It analyses warehouse key figures such as stock rotation, stock level and stock value, incoming and outgoing goods in conjunction with key personnel figures, etc. Qlik is also used to analyse errors in the goods-to-man system used in the warehouse. 

For the financial sector, the P&L and cash flow, among other things, are mapped in Qlik. Another major area of application is accounts receivable analysis, which examines how long the customer takes to pay, how long they are overdue, whether the credit limit is appropriate, how much revenue they generate, etc. It also checks which cash discounts are being realized and whether the workflow systems are working properly in the background. The process cost allocation is currently visualized in Qlik for controlling purpose. A comprehensive application for analysing bonus payments to suppliers at the level of effective economic profit (EP) per item was also implemented in Qlik. From these figures, the strategic purchasing department receives a dashboard with a preview of the bonus payments that can be expected per year in order to derive opportunities to optimize the bonus. “We can see at a glance, for example, whether it is worth increasing the order quantity in a certain product group in order to receive a higher bonus,” explains Oliver Pritz. “We don´t currently know anyone in the industry who can calculate the effective and expected P in as much detail as we can.”

Predictive Analytics

INHAUS has already taken its first steps in terms of predictive analytics – for example in the form of the automated calculation of house prices. Another example is the calculation of minimum order quantities for stock items bases on sales history.

Hybride Qlik-landscape

QlikView and QlikSense are currently in use. “QlikView offers me, as a very experienced Qlik user with in-depth expertise, a wide range of development opportunities, especially for special business cases, “ says Oliver Pritz. “In total, we still have around four users who use QlikView. We have no migrated most of the applications to QlikSense, and we want to replace QlikView completely with QlikSense by the end of the year.”

PPMC supports with specialist knowledge and best practice

Despite the in-house strategy that INHAUS pursues in terms of IT, external support is required for licence issues and more complex application requirements. The wholesaler’s partner of choice is ppmc as a certified Qlik partner, whose locations in Vorarlberg, Liechtenstein and Switzerland also provide the necessary proximity to work with INHAUS in person. “Despite our great passion for digitalisation, direct contact at eye level is important to us in order to work well together,” says Oliver Pritz. “ppmc is a local partner that supports us with in-depth technological and business expertise and a great deal of project experience in efficiently and comprehensively utilising the added value of our data as the basis for our corporate management. The many best practice examples from ppmc from other industries are particularly valuable to me, as they give us ideas on how we can use our Qlik solution even more strategically.” ppmc also provided personnel support when a short-term bottleneck arose due to a change in the internal BI team.

Control with figures

The greatest added value of Qlik for INHAUS is in corporate management. "We have just realized how valuable the data transparency provided by Qlik ist for the management of our company during the acqusition of two smaller companies", explains Oliver Pritz. “Initially, the IT systems had not yet been migrated to our ERP system, which meant we had no insight into inventory values and contribution margins in order to manage in the usual agile manner.” Qlik is also very important as a tool for analysing and managing process efficiency. “Using pattern recognition to find out why, for example, employees work with different levels of efficiency has great potential to sustainably improve our processes. This is where we will continue to develop consistently with Qlik in the future,” concludes Oliver Pritz.

About ppmc

ppmc has been a recognized expert for customer-specific business intelligence solutions and digitalization consulting since 2007. Customers from the Alpine Rhine Valley and the DACH region as well as international companies receive comprehensive support from ppmc, from consulting, licensing, installation, development and training to support in the areas of data integration and data analytics.