The Client
All Arms Marketing & Manufacturing Organisation. (Or Ammo for short) is a well-established business serving the needs of Armed Forces worldwide, supplying a range of ceremonial and uniform equipment. They can trace their history back to 1850, when they first started supplying silver canes to the gentry. Over the years, through acquisition and expansion, the company has grown into becoming one of the foremost manufacturers and suppliers of ceremonial equipment in all its pomp and panoply, together with the development and supply of Field Service equipment. Success breeds success, and as a result, the Group was approached by British army regiments to explore the benefits of a professionally managed organisation who understood the quality and quantity of military equipment in all its various formats. “REGIMENTS DIRECT” was established which embraced The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, The Rifles, The Royal Gurkha Rifles amongst many others. The intellectual rights of the website belong to each regiment. The management comprises an advisory committee from delegates from the regiment together with representatives from the Group. All items of equipment featured are authorised by the regiment. An agreed ratio of the profits is paid back into the regiment’s welfare fund.
The Challenge
One of the strengths of the modern business is the wide variety of different Regiments that the business supports. However, that entails the collation of a many different management reports to publish to each client as to how the partnership is progressing. The reports were all collated manually and consisted mainly of word files. The aim was to employ a reporting tool that could take the spreadsheet outputs from the core eCommerce Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and display them in flexible, low-maintenance and visually appealing reports.
The Solution
Supl's solution uses Qlik, the innovative Swedish reporting engine. Its revolutionary architecture pioneered "in memory analysis" - the ability of a reporting engine to hold vast quantities of data "in memory" and hence readily available. This is a vast improvement on the traditional tools that offer expensive, fixed reports to PDF that are costly and time-consuming to change. In addition, Qlik offer their services in the cloud as a "Software as a Service", allowing relatively small businesses to gain access to the very best enterprise software with just a web page.
The aim was to produce a series of graphs and tables that offered Ammo staff the flexibility to look at how sales were progressing, cutting them by period, partner and item (or all three). One of the great strengths of Qlik is its ability to load up a series of structured excel sheets (from another system) each month that could be "joined" inside Qlik and offer the user a seamless query across all periods.
Supl spent some time with Ammo understanding the various potential sources of data, and then building the upload area with all the graphs to show the trends in the underlying data.
The Outcome
With very little adjustment to their technology infrastructure and existing setup, Ammo has been able to add a flexible and light touch reporting engine that offers a streamlined process for the production of standard reporting sets to a wide variety of clients, is available for use by those working from home during the Pandemic, and offers great flexibility to answer queries that differ from the norm. This has all been achieved using a low-outlay rental model, thus maximising value at a time of uncertainty.