Every function in the enterprise now creates and uses enormous amounts of data. These resources are stored just about everywhere imaginable: on AWS instances, in relational databases, in edge-based IoT platforms and other sources across diverse topologies.

Surfacing, validating, and presenting data used to be complex, because insights that businesses need could come from real-time data as easily as from an archive. Organisations’ needs for trustworthy data on which to make crucial decisions means the challenges of data management are critically important to address.

The danger is that big data projects can end up as little more than large landing strips for corporate data; of little practical use and offering low return on the significant investment that has traditionally been involved. But Qlik is helping companies unearth the considerable value that’s hiding in plain sight, and its platform creates new use-cases for the data, right across the enterprise’s many business units.

One such company is Paccar, a Fortune 500 company that is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles. Like many modern enterprises, it has found value in core business-related diversification, offering a range of financial services to support its customers.

In addition to those areas, the company also operates a global parts operation, with multiple servicing events for its vehicles, a comprehensive sales network with multiple channels, and several manufacturing plants. In the latter and from each of its vehicles, the company draws real-time telemetry data.

Previously Paccar struggled to scale up operations both vertically and horizontally across existing and new business units, with no coherent way to use its disparate data silos. Since partnering with Qlik, it can now bring all of its sources of data into one central data lake. What the repository presents, therefore, is trusted data; information that’s 100 percent up-to-date, clean, normalized, relevant, and consequently capable of presentation. In Paccar’s case, it uses the Snowflake platform, which needs validated and consistent data to work to its optimum.

Source: Qlik

Paccar had to import data using complex manual, bespoke algorithms, building its own data routines. But with Qlik & Snowflake, data movements ready for large queries meant decisions could be reached faster and were more reliable – even with up-to-the-second IIoT data and on-vehicle telemetry.

“By using Qlik to stream data into Snowflake, Paccar has removed the manual work required to build the routines to transfer data. By using change data capture, we no longer need to figure out what data has changed – this is done automatically and streamed to Snowflake in near real-time. This has allowed Paccar to have all its data in one common environment where previously we’d have to have bits and pieces of data,” Dallas Thorton, Director of Digital Services, Paccar.

It’s the massive efficiencies and cost savings that make the business difference with Qlik and show real DataOps success. Manual processing of ingested data becomes a thing of the past, with smart, automated systems that process the information, refining information in real-time.

In the case of Paccar, Qlik Replicate™ is continually pulling data from silos, from the very latest cloud resources through A400 mainframes and legacy systems. Qlik is opening the way for true self-service data consumption right where it matters across the enterprise, with the company’s specialist data scientists finding their work aided and simplified.

Paccar’s teams analyze data, and as a company, it better serves customers and all business areas, in near real-time.

Isn’t it time you started using the data resources you have? With the ability to build virtual data warehouses in hours, not years, the Qlik platform is the tool-set that businesses that are serious about data need. To learn more, get in touch with an APAC business specialist here.