What happens when a business intelligence expert with a big-company background (SunTrust, NCR, GE) joins the US arm of a 60-year-old Japanese construction equipment manufacturer as Director of Business Tech, effectively the head of IT?
In the case of Susan Dean and Takeuchi USA, the result was a dramatic upgrade in the data provided to Takeuchi’s 100 dealers—with 350 locations—and the replacement of out-of-date Excel spreadsheets with real-time dashboards delivered using Qlik technology.
When Dean joined Takeuchi, a Georgia-based manufacturer of innovative compact excavators and track loaders, she met the company’s lone data analyst, who toiled in Excel maintaining hundreds of spreadsheets that helped each dealer understand their business with Takeuchi.
These spreadsheets were emailed out twice each year; they were out of date by the time they were sent. After all, merging data from 10 sources and ensuring data accuracy and security was a lot of work.
Coming to Takeuchi from SunTrust, a local banking powerhouse, Dean was already familiar with Qlik and understood how the vendor’s data acquisition and quality tools, plus its powerful analytics engine and dashboard designer, could dramatically upgrade dealer information access.
Even though Takeuchi was far smaller than SunTrust, Dean says Qlik took a real interest in working with her to map out a solution and licensing package that met her needs. In her words, “Qlik really partnered with us.” And let me tell you—finding a big company willing to partner with a small prospect is increasingly rare these days!
Going from an out-of-date Excel spreadsheet delivered twice per year to an online dashboard that provides current information means that dealers know where they stand in real time—and that’s a competitive advantage for Takeuchi considering that dealers typically sell multiple brands of equipment.
Takeuchi also makes some use of Qlik’s AutoML to process IoT data from its products. Dean expects to make more use of IoT analytics in the future, and she’s excited about the AI investments and enhancements that Qlik outlined at Qlik Connect, where we spoke this week.
As far as Dean is concerned, “Qlik checks all the boxes” for Takeuchi. Moreover, “partnership is part of the Qlik experience.” And from my perspective as a CIO, a true partnership between vendor and client is key to long-term success.
