Ewals Cargo Care, the Dutch transport and logistics company, has chosen to collaborate with Qlik® and Snowflake, the Data Cloud, to drive essential improvements in efficiency within the company by eliminating the gaps from raw data to actionable insights.

 Ewals Cargo Care operates in 15 countries, owns 3,400 trailers and 500 trucks and handles over 3,400 shipments per day. Consequently, it generates masses of extremely valuable data from its operations. However, its old data infrastructure could not respond to demands of the growing business, and the company embarked on a data modernisation strategy to improve results.

 

Improving Efficiency with Qlik

Prior to Qlik, Ewals Cargo Care outsourced the creation and management of its legacy data warehouse, resulting in little agility or flexibility when it wanted to make a change. Adding new data sources took over 20 days and creating new data marts – a subset of a data warehouse focused on a specific topic or goal – took weeks to complete. This was a significant hurdle for a logistics company looking to work in real-time. Ewals Cargo Care searched for an alternate solution and chose Qlik’s Data Integration Platform to improve the efficiency of their data warehouse.

Qlik Data Integration supports the company’s modern data integration strategy. Qlik’s data warehouse automation solution enables the company to move its data easily and securely into the data warehouse in real-time. Qlik then transforms the data into analytics-ready data sets for consumption by downstream analytics processes. Ewals Cargo Care also opted to use a cloud data warehouse from Snowflake. The combination of the two solutions has allowed the logistics service provider to achieve a much higher level of improvement and efficiency in its analytics environment.

 

Four Times as Fast to Set Up a Data Mart

“In 2015 our data warehouse looked very different,” said Maikel Jaspers, BI Engineer at Ewals Cargo Care. “We liked to compare it to a bowl of spaghetti. Only a small change could result in an avalanche of other changes within the database. When we outsourced the creation of our data warehouse in 2016, we thought we had made the necessary changes regarding efficiency. That turned out not to be the case.”

Jaspers sees the new partnership as more promising. “Since the start of our collaboration with Qlik and Snowflake, we’ve seen some immense results. By moving the database to the cloud and having it work with Qlik’s automated solutions, we can unlock new data sources in our data warehouse within five days, instead of 20, and create new incremental data marts in days rather than weeks. We also achieved a 75% cost reduction on ETL development. Now not only can we run reports more efficiently, but we can also fulfil more requests. This has given us more agility, and ultimately makes the entire company much more effective, something we’ve been striving to do for a very long time.”

“The agility of Snowflake’s platform drives successful business outcomes to thousands of global enterprises,” said Coen Bos, RVP Benelux and Nordics, Snowflake. “Our partnership with Qlik maximises data-driven value to the business, accelerating digital transformation.”

“The combination of Qlik and Snowflake is what companies need, especially for those the size of Ewals,” says Ted Orme, Head of Data Integration Strategy EMEA at Qlik. “In the world today, companies need to become more agile, especially as it’s hard to respond to situations where you have to wait more than 20 days to complete a report. The fact that Ewals is now able to set up a data mart four times more quickly as before is crucial to their success. This gives the company even more insight into how processes and freight traffic are progressing. It is the next step for Ewals to take data-driven processes to an even higher level.”