Coverguard Safety steers its business with Qlik

Protecting men and women in their workplaces around the world: that is the mission Coverguard Safety has set for itself.

The Group designs, sources and distributes, at competitive prices, personal protective equipment that is comfortable, reliable, attractive and suited to each risk. Present in more than 100 countries, this family-owned company has grown over time into one of the leaders in its industry.

Three years ago, the company changed course: Coverguard Safety was acquired by a Lyon-based shareholder. To run the company, the new owners wanted to build on an analysis of past strategies and optimize how the business was managed.

Their goal? Better prepare for the future and go further, faster. Better control of data and Business Intelligence proved to be the keys to getting there.

First step: taking stock

“I started by identifying the priority data sources and structuring how we used them in Excel,” says Jean Seguy, the group’s CFO. “We quickly exceeded the maximum number of rows Excel can handle!” One person was then put in charge of managing these files, updating them and sharing them daily with the rest of the teams.

Despite this new organization, problems soon emerged, such as this employee being overwhelmed with requests from teams that were less comfortable with these tools. For the company, this created too much dependence on a single person. Whenever she was absent, it was impossible to keep the data flowing on a regular basis.

On top of that, the risk of errors in updating and processing the data, due to human intervention, remained very real. Too many unknowns to allow simple, pragmatic management. So Coverguard Safety took things to the next level and launched a BI project.

A project carried out with Synolia and Qlik Sense.

Step one: integrating all the data sources into the tool. “Today, we have loaded part of our product database, our customer database, our inventory and our sales, and we are working on purchasing,” says Jean Seguy. This work was made much easier by the processing done beforehand on the Excel files.

The tool was then configured to meet the expectations of four internal audiences:

To make it truly effective, the company supported each of its teams in adopting BI and building new habits.

“We set up training so that everyone could get to grips with the tool quickly and easily,” explains Jean Seguy.

“It was very important to train as many people as possible so that everyone understood how and why to use it. The fun, visual side of the tool really helped. It was an extra selling point.”

Synolia advised and supported Coverguard Safety in taking ownership of data management and the administration of the Qlik tool.

Coverguard took the time to prepare, scope and implement a BI project that is now essential to running the company. The company wants to continue down the data path by integrating its PIM data into Qlik in the coming months. That will certainly not be a problem, thanks to the Synolia and Coverguard Safety teams and the flexibility of Qlik.