SCA Normande optimizes its Business Intelligence with Synolia x Qlik

SCA Normande, part of the E.Leclerc Group, is a cooperative whose members are both owners and customers. Founded by 14 members in 1981, SCA Normande now employs 670 people across 10 hectares of warehouses and generates annual revenue of €1.7 billion. Its role is to handle logistics for 35 stores and 54 Drive pickup points in Normandy (as well as 24 stores in Réunion and the French Antilles) and to negotiate with regional suppliers. To manage its operations, the cooperative relies on the Qlik Business Intelligence tool. But with around sixty users, more than 100 applications and 1,300 published dashboards, the data is often hard to put to use…
In 2024, SCA Normande brought in Synolia for a consulting engagement. The goal: audit its Qlik instance and processes to optimize its Business Intelligence platform and how its teams use it.

The phases of the Business Intelligence consulting engagement with Synolia

Workshops with every business team

For this consulting engagement, Synolia’s teams met with every team at SCA Normande: logistics, merchandise flow, sales, IT, technical services, administration and finance.
These interviews helped us understand how they use the Qlik instance, assess how satisfied they are with the tool and get a clearer picture of their expectations and needs.

Analyzing the tool

These workshops showed our teams that the platform is widely adopted by its users. However, the environment is dense and hard to read. It is also a difficult system to maintain, and daily data is sometimes available too late to support timely operational decisions.

• The data is hard to put to use (level of detail not always appropriate, calculations that are hard to understand, update frequency too low…)
• Some KPIs differ from one application to another, which calls the tool’s reliability into question
• Some data access needs were never formally submitted to the technical leads (leading some employees to stop using the tool…)
• The sheer number of applications and dashboards makes it hard for each user to find the information they need
• The departure of the people who set up the solution at the start of the BI project gradually built up significant technical debt, limiting the solution’s ability to evolve and the trust placed in it
• Etc.

Analyzing the people organization

Synolia’s work with the SCA Normande teams also uncovered some organizational weaknesses. The technical team faces a bottleneck: there is no tool to centralize requests and no functional owner per team, so there is no arbitration on which requests come first. In addition, the lack of functional documentation has gradually eroded knowledge of the tool over time and as the teams changed.

Support on prioritized topics

Following the workshops and findings, our teams drew up a list of recommendations for SCA Normande across 5 prioritized topics:

1. Maintainability

   Optimize and rationalize/consolidate existing applications. Regain control of the environment.

2. Glossary / Lexicon

   Write and share a glossary defining each KPI and how it is calculated. Keep only what is useful, and master it to put it to work.

3. Project organization

   Strengthen the technical team with additional resources to centralize, qualify, prioritize, track and handle change requests for the tool.

4. Data

   Resolve users’ issues accessing data/KPIs.

5. New needs

   Structure the project methodology around new needs to ensure the tool’s long-term viability.

Toward better data control

Building on our recommendations, we helped SCA Normande define a detailed, end-to-end roadmap. Beyond the phase of optimizing and rationalizing the Qlik environment, this roadmap also recommends a medium- to long-term review of the data architecture built around a Data Platform:

The Data Platform

To meet the top-priority need for maintainability, Synolia proposed that SCA Normande rethink the architecture of its solutions to place a Data Platform at the heart of its information system (between the data sources and its data visualization tool).

A Data Platform is a tool that collects, centralizes, stores and historizes data from multiple sources. It also provides a view of the data built around business needs, regardless of the source.

Given SCA Normande’s information system, Synolia recommended a tool aligned with GALEC’s technology choices. We also recommended that SCA Normande set up a Data unit within its IT department, hiring dedicated resources who will each play a key role in future data initiatives. We can also provide advice and support for this hiring (profile selection, knowledge transfer, technical assistance).

Thanks to our functional and organizational audit, SCA Normande now has a clear view of its Business Intelligence strategy and concrete actions to optimize its organization and data platform.
As a Qlik partner agency, Synolia was selected to implement the recommendations and integrate Qlik at SCA Normande.