QlikView enables supply chain excellence at Atlas Copco Power Technique Service

Atlas Copco Power Technique

Power Technique Service division (PTS) is responsible for handling all aftermarket activities for the Atlas Copco Power Technique business area. The Power Technique business area offers a core portfolio of products including portable compressors, generators, light towers and pumps along with dedicated construction products including handheld pneumatic, electric and hydraulic tools and compaction and concrete products. In addition, it continues to provide products and customized solutions for drilling, oil and gas and geothermal exploration applications, among many others.  

Spare Part Proposal Project

As part of the vision that Atlas Copco wants to be a partner that is easy to do business with and combining that with the mindset that there is always a better way, Atlas Copco PTS has been developing a spare part proposal project in order to make sure that upon a breakdown of an Atlas Copco machine or when reaching a service interval, all needed spare parts for repair or maintenance have been pro-actively created throughout their whole distribution flow and the most important parts are immediately available for the customer.

During the development of the Spare Part Proposal project, Atlas Copco PTS encountered many Product Lifecycle Management challenges such as how to improve their parts introduction process, how to make it more transparent, how to identify priorities and how to early identify and steer away from pitfalls. While in a next step, Atlas Copco PTS also wanted to have an easy way of following up on these newly created parts and manage stock levels in a responsible and sustainable way.

Product Lifecycle Management

Product Lifecycle Management of spare parts has a business value for the entire supply chain. Logistics and purchase departments work closely together to offer the best customer minded solution while controlling the costs.

Invited to the project element61 – Moore Belgium Business Analytics accepted the responsibility to coordinate the requirements analysis, do the data modelling, deliver maintenance of the databases, and deliver an easy to use application for the whole Atlas Copco PTS division.

One did not start from a green field. However, the application in use faced issues related to the way it was built. The technology was Microsoft based, with SQL Server as a copy of ERP and other transactional systems, containing scripts that were filling numerous tables with no or little documentation on hand.

There was a dashboard hosted on Microsoft SSRS and available to multiple users. End users had access to some basic dashboard information to control processes such as the Spare Part Proposal that allows to know which parts were created in which of the systems, the availability of the stock and some other confidential data.

These simple reports were based on a data model created on the fly responding to urgent demands from the business.

When reviewing the business processes, it was clear that there was a lot of potential for improvement by evolving to a new way of working. The dashboarding tool in use did not sufficiently respond to the company’s demands. The ability to connect to various databases and to create a unique data model had become obvious. “We had noticed that our information was spread over a lot of different technologies. Data was duplicated and we had to make choices to consolidate data to be useable in a front-end dashboard”, says Pieter Sourbron, Team Leader Global Logistics at Power Technique Service.

Guided Analytics

Many Atlas Copco group members started using QlikView dashboard applications in the past few years, which is considered as a flexible business intelligence platform fitting the needs of the Atlas Copco business areas and employees. Also in Belgium QlikView had become an enterprise standard. So, element61 leveraged the power of the QlikView analytics software for the conception of a homogenous data model that helped the business a lot to choose master tables and fields that lead the information flow, to correct misleading information and add quality to the processes. Once gathered, imported and cleansed, the data was then enriched by various formulas used by information workers.

QlikView’s guided analytics set up with the help of element61 prepare business applications featuring dashboards, charts and calculations that are automatically updated based on user explorations via clicks and selections. “QlikView application users enjoy rich functionality in an intuitive manner and at speed of light – thanks to in-memory technology” says Pieter Sourbron. “They get actionable insights in trustworthy data such as the needed time for parts creation, an overview of available stock and movements in the warehouse.” Qlik’s applications allow better management of parts introduction, creates the needed transparency on item level (creation, pricing, stocking, availability) and offers flexible and fast pro-active insight in the stock healthiness.

The historical data is now periodically generated without user interaction, shown on an easy-to-understand dashboard.

“The result achieved at Power Technique Service meets our expectations”, concludes Pieter Sourbron. “New business challenges are awaiting us and QlikView will help us find adequate answers.”

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QlikView enables supply chain excellence at Atlas Copco Power Technique Service

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                 

 

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