UPL chooses Qlik to drive business strategy and enable self-service analytics

Qlik has announced that UPL Ltd. is leveraging Qlik’s data analytics platform to empower and inform business users across its organization. The Indian multinational has been working closely with Qlik to streamline its data operations and enable data-driven decisions to drive growth.

A Data-Driven Vision

UPL had a clear analytics vision from the start to make data central to its operations. The company had worked with legacy vendors, but found that adoption and usage levels were not where they wanted it to be. Additionally, employees were spending a lot of time working with data but were just not getting the insights they needed.

UPL first started working with Qlik in 2014, when they first integrated QlikView® with its Salesforce portal. After a few years, as data consumption and usage of the dashboards increased, UPL wanted to modernize its analytics strategy to provide its users with a self-service option and greater visibility around the data sets they had available.

“Data is very important to us at UPL. Given the scope of our operations, our business users – from the junior-most employee to mid-level managers to senior leaders – were previously working extremely hard to make sense of the data in front of them,” said Bhushan Narsinghani, Head of Analytics, UPL.

“Historically, our analytics operations used to take up a lot of time. We realized that, even after putting in so much effort, the insights generated were limited in scope and didn’t have the kind of accuracy, consistency and agility that we expected. This changed, first with the implementation of QlikView and then with Qlik Sense.”

Making Data Accessible

Initially deployed as a proof-of-concept, Qlik Sense® quickly differentiated itself with a unified, intuitive, and seamless dashboard that provided real-time, explorable insights at the touch of a button. The platform’s innovative approach to combining multiple data sources and Qlik’s practical licensing proposition made it the most viable solution.

In fact, for UPL, the decision to move to Qlik Sense was not made once, but twice. When the company acquired Arysta LifeScience Inc. for US$4.2 billion in 2019, UPL found that Arysta was also a user of both QlikView and Qlik Sense. Because of UPL’s clear analytics strategy and vision, the company decisively standardized the business to Qlik Sense.

With Qlik, UPL stakeholders found that they could dive deep into their data and get multi-level reports, from an overview of the entire organization to the financial performance of individual business units. Business users are also able to discover highly contextual insights, personalized to their specific needs. Moreover, users can conveniently generate and securely share multiple reports based on different parameters, thus making information more accessible and useful. By democratizing access to data and providing the ability to work with it, Qlik has empowered employees to be more data literate.

“Our business users had varied skill levels and were surprised by the ease-of-use and intuitive nature of Qlik Sense. Here was a powerful BI tool that presented ready-made insights in an interactive visual format right in front of us,” said Sudhanshu Gupta, Global Head – Business Excellence, UPL. “With just a few clicks, we could zero-in on the information we needed to answer the questions we had. A key highlight was the ability to leverage customer analytics into our decision-making processes – something we did not have visibility into before, and the results have been impressive. It has, in a way, become a key driver for our global growth.”

The Road Ahead

Today, Qlik is implemented across multiple business-critical functions such as finance, sales, marketing, supply chain, inventory management and collections. Business leaders have access to five management dashboards that provide them with a single view of the performance of their business. Qlik also supports UPL’s strategy for new launches and portfolio optimization at both the global and regional levels, enabling the organization to make better and quicker decisions to respond to market needs. Additionally, UPL uses Qlik Nprinting to share reports around the globe, and the latest in Qlik’s AI-driven capabilities through Insight Advisor.

Given its positive impact on business goals, UPL is now developing a Qlik dashboard for its HR function, as well as a centralized data governance framework to deploy Qlik across multiple international markets at national and regional levels. This move is aimed at helping UPL’s various LOBs self-serve their region-specific data requirements at the local level, thus boosting the speed, accuracy, and efficacy of their decision-making process and allowing them to be more agile and nimble.

UPL also plans to further adoption levels by tracking utilization of the different dashboards, extending their basic training to cover more users as well as identifying regional champions to do advanced training.

“As data leaders, we have always been ahead of the curve in using analytics to transform our business. With a strong data strategy in place, we now plan to shift from a reactive approach to analytics to one that is proactive,” said Balaji Aravamuthan, Global Chief Information Officer, UPL. “We are focused on leveraging the tremendous opportunity that lies before us to utilize and explore insights using more varied data – by combining structured and unstructured data as well as internal and external data. Qlik is central to our data culture and has been a catalyst in bringing the power of analytics to the next level.”

“Qlik is committed to democratizing data analytics and providing powerful active intelligence for organizations across the globe,” said Varun Babbar, Country Manager, India at Qlik. “With our unique complete analytics platform offering, we are making insight generation and decision-making more intuitive, convenient, accurate, and agile by allowing business users to translate their data into actionable insights for better business outcomes at speed and scale. More importantly, we are raising the level of data literacy across the board and catalyzing a cultural shift towards a more informed and data-driven ecosystem. We are delighted to be a part of UPL’s data transformation journey and are motivated to meet and exceed the high bar that we have set for ourselves in the future.”