Tes Global is a digital education company and market-leading source of news and information covering schools and the wider education sector. It employs around 600 people in 7 countries and has offices in London, Sheffield, Dubai, Hong Kong, Sydney and Melbourne. In 2015 Tes received an accolade of ‘Best Company to Work for’ and in the UK, Tes is ‘Number 1’ for teaching jobs and education hiring solutions.
Informance delivers a business intelligence (BI) platform with QlikView
Tes manages its worldwide education portal with QlikView having been introduced to Qlik in 2009 but aware of the BI solution since 2006. In 2009. Tes was using a bespoke tool linked to News International, which it was part of at that time, with a recommendation for Qlik to come on board for BI. Tes engaged with Informance at the outset as they conducted their research, including online, and through personal recommendation. Tes took the decision that Informance stood out as the right consulting partner for a Qlik implementation.
The original use of QlikView was reporting for the commercial team with an application delivered within 2 months. The Informance approach and work was solid with the right data models built from the outset, with Tes embracing results immediately in finance and commercial from the data insights it gained. While the sphere of commercial has changed, QlikView is, without exception, still used for BI, as it is a robust tool.
QlikView powers tes.com
In 2012, Tes started using Qlik to report analytics on its web-based resources market place with teachers (tes.com) as the solution had already proven itself as agile, flexible and quick, coupled with its ability to handle big data easily. Downloads went from five downloads per second to 10 to 15 downloads per second, globally. Qlik has helped grow this part of the Tes business from zero to mainstream and once the business matured, TES introduced other tools such as Looker for ‘live’ analytics. During 2015 and 2016, TES integrated QlikView with the third-party subscription platform, Zuora and the Salesforce CRM platform with quick connection.
Ion Martea, solutions architect for Tes Global says:
“QlikView has been outstanding in delivering the insight about business growth and we’ve now gained even more ‘live’ insight from remote working, globally. In addition, QlikView has always been a winning tool as it connects to multiple data sources and not just one data warehouse and we’ve introduced Salesforce, which meant the immediate use of the Salesforce Connector. We have very complex dashboards and a lot of business logic and Qlik is great for architecture as it always provides the right answers with good business logic.”
Ion continues,
“Qlik has helped Tes and we have matured with data analytics and insight on many levels as lots of users want to develop more of their own apps and dashboards and modify to suit their needs, backed with the right information. Qlik Sense enables us to do more with the underlying data models and with the data governance already implemented and has provided the team with more time to make sure this is right. We also have Qlik NPrinting for automated reporting with a very slick ‘value report’ for clients in PDF including detailed data. I have been a BI specialist since 2008 and advocate Qlik as a number one BI tool, and would recommend Qlik to anyone. In Tes, Qlik has definitely stood the test the time.”
Introducing Qlik Sense
Informance subsequently recommended adding Qlik Sense to the Tes environment as sales holds a lot of data in Salesforce and Tes didn’t want to store all the data in management information (MI) and BI. Qlik Sense apps have now been built for sales and sales management teams to analyse targets and Qlik will be leveraged further for internal and external customer-facing activities.
Ion says,
“Qlik Sense is great as we can put a lot of analytics in front of sales to use with Salesforce and CRM but from the user perspective they are working entirely within Salesforce. Qlik Sense delivers good visualisations on how the sales team work with their clients with the right information as they can access Qlik Sense offline with no restrictions and have smaller apps with relevant data and dashboards for their day-to-day work.”
Gareth Frederickson, principal dashboard developer says:
“QlikView has been an excellent tool for Tes since we do not use a single data warehouse to store all our data in one place. There are few tools with the power and flexibility of QlikView in terms of being able to handle both visualisations and complex database extract, transform and load (ETL). Now, Tes has implemented Qlik Sense to deliver more reporting to the business, primarily the sales teams at this stage. Qlik Sense has enabled us to push out dashboards faster and with more consistency than before by providing some additional features to QlikView, whilst still working on the same core data files. This gives us the same version of the truth across our reporting, but with the bonus of being able to integrate the dashboards within Salesforce and soon, our own portal too.”
Benefits of working with Informance
With the help and guidance of Informance the Qlik Sense platform will be a 360-degree view of sales and will deliver the right information to sales in the right format and manner so that sales users can make informed decisions and deliver them to the management daily.
Ion says:
“Informance has been excellent with the right level of consulting and best practice with associated budget. Tes has an exceptional relationship with Informance as it understands our needs and makes sure we use the right features. After 4 years, Informance provided a lot of resource onsite, which has been invaluable, and helped Tes find the right resource and with quality far beyond our expectations for development and support. In addition, Informance’s support desk is very effective, particularly whenever there are any issues, more so server-related or internal issues, and come back to us with advice very quickly. Our longstanding relationship with Informance is definitely more like a great partnership”.
Gareth concludes:
“We continue our excellent relationship with Informance so that we can meet the needs of our business and ensure we have the right license mix, specifications and training needs across our Qlik environments both now and in the future.”