Before starting the project, Jim has to know the data sources on which he needs to work. He needs to know the existing landscape and what kind of analytics is being used. Jill sets up a meeting with Jean to understand the details. Based on the discussions with Jean, Jill makes the following observations.
AWC, as mentioned earlier, is both a B2B and a B2C company. It gets orders from retail stores or via the e-commerce portal. To cater to this scenario, AWC has good systems in place. The landscape can be seen in the following figure:
As seen in the previous figure, AWC has Microsoft SQL as the centralized data warehouse to store the data. Present in the de-militarized zone are two applications, namely, the e-commerce website and the dealer management system.
The end customer can directly buy by visiting the e-commerce portal. The order placed will finally flow into the SQL server database after the ETL process. If customer visits a retail store and buys, the sales is captured via point of sales. The dealer management system allows retail stores to place bulk orders on AWC. The data from POS and DMS will finally flow into the SQL server database after the ETL process.
AWC does not use any BI software. The reporting is done via Excel. Jean has a team of two people, who on a periodic basis take export from the applications and thereafter prepare these reports manually. A lot of time is spent in getting these reports. Jean gets lot of ad-hoc report requirements from the users and he is very keen to have Qlik Sense implemented, as this will reduce the burden on his team.
Jim also discusses with Jean about tech savviness of the business users. He gets to know that there are different categories of users. Brian is good at technology, and in his earlier company was using analytical tool. CEO and CFO are traditional users and have been consuming Excel. They however love to use iPads and would be happy if they get Qlik Sense on their hand-helds. This information is useful to Jim for when he plans UAT with the business users. He needs to cater to all types of audience.