Noble Group Improves Business Efficiency By Deploying QlikView

• Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
• Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

• Agriculture
• Metals

• Human Resources

• Inventory Management
• Predictive Maintenance
• Supply Chain Visibility

• Software Design & Engineering Services
• System Integration

Noble Group, a global supply chain management company, was facing challenges with its business reporting and data mining processes. The company was using a multitude of traditional reporting tools, SQL extracts, and Excel spreadsheets to source, manipulate, and present business data. However, these tools did not provide a holistic view of the business. Data was highly fragmented with similar and same data type held across multiple systems, resulting in uncoordinated, repetitive, slow, and costly business reporting and data mining. The reports generated were not graphical, interactive, mobile, and collaborative. The only ‘business intelligence’ (BI) came from pivot tables using Microsoft Excel. The company was looking for a specialist BI software that is globally scalable, browser-based delivery model, and one that is reputable and in the leaders section of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for BI.

Established in 1986, Noble Group (SGX: N21) is a commodity trading and supply chain management company with a diversified portfolio of soft, hard, and energy commodity products. Headquartered in Hong Kong, the company operates from over 140 locations, employing more than 70 nationalities worldwide. Apart from managing a diversified portfolio of essential raw materials, the company is also responsible for integrating the sourcing, marketing, processing, financing, and transportation of those materials. Noble Group owns and manages a portfolio of strategic assets too, sourcing from low-cost producers such as Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and Indonesia and supplying to high growth demand markets including China, India, and the Middle East. Today, Noble Group has interests in grain crushing facilities, coal and iron ore mines, fuel terminals and storage facilities, sugar and ethanol plants, ports, vessels, and other key infrastructure facilities.

Noble Group chose QlikView, a BI tool, to improve its business reporting and data mining processes. QlikView was deployed by QlikTech partner Velocity Business Solutions. The solution was able to consolidate and aggregate data from various sources and provide an interactive user interface, making it easier for employees. The associative search also puts the user in control. Using QlikView, the Noble Group created a dashboard for use by Human Resource professionals to access & analyze employee data from anywhere in the world. These reports are more in-depth as QlikView enables HR employees to highlight present data by country, business unit, legal entity, role, age, sex, and tenure. This in turn helps the company analyze headcount and better manage resources. Dashboards for the finance department were also made using QlikView. General ledgers are consolidated into real-time finance dashboards and the department can now group and slice data by Profit Generating Unit, Legal Entity, Chart of Accounts, and Cost Centre.

• Better support for Operational Improvement programmes
• Increased efficiency opportunities
• Improved revenue generation