Serving primarily business customers with a philosophy of "Nobody Takes More Care," the company's service focus has built a core base of 5,000 accounts, which includes over 20 FTSE 100 companies and market leaders in key business sectors. Approximately 96% of customers acquired over the last ten years continue to depend on Target Express as a valuable link in their supply and parcel delivery chains. Many new accounts come by way of customer referrals.
Recognition for exceptional service performance has also been accumulating, with business awards extolling "Customer Care," "Business of the Year" and other coveted accolades. Among them is an "Award for Excellence in IT" that acts as a reminder to how the customer focus and Target Express' transportation of urgent documents, parcels and freight, entails much more than vehicle fleets and depot networks.
Most Target Express customers view the company as an extension of their business. A key account recognised that a huge repository of information residing in Target Express' systems would be valuable for conducting their business more effectively. The customer requested access to the data which would disclose what it cost them to operate in a specific area, move specific products, during a specific time of year, and numerous other operational insights.
"At the time, we provided logistics KPIs to customers on spreadsheets, which are standard in our industry, but the request was for information far above and beyond that type of reporting," said Chris Bale, Group IT Director at Target Express. "We agreed, since we enjoy strong working relationships with customers and make every effort to adapt to their needs and provide a superior service. The challenge was how to cost-effectively unlock the data from our systems for the customer."
Target Express explored options to open access to the information in a format that could be readily delivered without a great deal of investment. An evaluation of business intelligence products brought them to QlikView.
"Other products took too long to develop and would have been too much for the customer to use," said Bale. "We could spend years with ETL transfers, normalizing data and building OLAP cubes. Instead, we chose QlikView for the speed at which the data could be delivered and the ease of use for the customer at their end to just click and view what they want to see."
A key reason for selecting QlikView was the capability to create customer dashboards with very small data files. QlikView's 90% data compression added speed and portability to working with massive data sets, enabling delivery via an Internet posting or email.
"We manage about 56 million customer transactions annually, which can add up to several hundred thousand transactions per year for one customer," said Bale. "QlikView made it possible not only to fulfill the customer's request but offer dashboards across our base to anyone who wanted the capability. Visual applications, with multiple, personalised views for each customer, could be delivered quickly mining all the same core Target Express data.
That idea posed a challenge for QlikTech in software licensing. "QlikTech approached the issue in a very innovative way," said Bale. "As we do with our customers, they listened to our needs and responded with a creative enterprise licensing solution. That was another huge selling point for us."
The 64-bit QlikView solution was implemented to enable the creation of dedicated dashboards for any customer who wanted access to every aspect of their transaction data in Target Express systems. As of this writing, 500 customers have opted for the service. As many as 150 customers can be online simultaneously, each with access to their records - collectively, millions of records at once. For customers who do not have or want the Internet access, the dashboards are delivered in a simple email.
With the dashboards, Target Express' customers know definitively how to better respond to their own customers' needs and how express delivery expenditures affect operational costs and profit. They can view information such as the cost to deliver to each of their customers and Case Study the extra redelivery cost when one of their customers is unavailable to take a delivery and requires repeat attempts. The feedback enables them to recognise any weaknesses in their process, explore a problem, and resolve it with decision making based on facts, not suppositions.
Customers can also look at their historical data at Target Express to predict future delivery needs and costs, as well as make any adjustments in their operations, from supply chain and parcel delivery perspectives, to increase their profitability. The more accurate forecasting helps Target Express plan services more effectively, leading to benefits for customers and the carrier.
"The standard logistics KPI spreadsheets used throughout the industry are somewhat superficial because they are a 'one size fits all' solution and always portray a positive view of what the carrier does for the customer," observed Bale. "Our dashboards allow customers to dissect and view their transactions to better understand how they are using our services and what drives their costs."
There is little risk in doing this according to Bale because of the trust shared with customers. Openness is a key factor in the strong relationships. "To provide a superior service, we need to understand their business and they, ours," he explained. "Working this way, Target Express and customers can continually increase their respective business value."
In addition to some of the benefits above that Target Express shares with customers, QlikView helps the carrier's competitive position. The dashboards contribute significantly to the company's incredible customer retention rate and help to win new accounts.
"QlikView has added massively to our value proposition and we know that we have won business as a result. Some of our newer accounts may not have chosen Target without the dashboards," said Bale.
Whereas QlikView has introduced a new business dynamic with customers, a parallel dynamic is at work among the 150 QlikView users within Target Express.
Explains Bale: "Everyone within our organisation is working with the same information and when communicating with customers they are also viewing the same information. Anyone in a company depending on spreadsheets alone will appreciate how novel this is and difficult to achieve, but not with QlikView."
Bale points out how spreadsheets become "soiled" as they pass through an organization. One colleague's view of data can differ from another's so that everyone may speak the same statistic but assign or interpret different numbers for it.
"For example," said Bale, "we may ask internally 'how much did we bill this customer?' and get a half-dozen different answers. With QlikView, everyone now sees the same answer. That eliminates resources that used to be applied to validating numbers and rationalising how we arrived at different answers. Externally, when working with customers, you certainly want to be talking the same number they are whatever the statistic may be."
Reflecting on the selection of QlikView, Bale muses how companies can sometimes try so hard to be perfect about their IT choices that they lose site of the objectives.
"No business thanks you for being perfect, only for improving business performance," he said. "We couldn't afford to develop complex applications while our business was moving forward in the meantime. Why spend years building OLAP cubes when you can get the reporting value out of QlikView in days? We made the perfect decision for time to market, ease of use, and the way we can deliver customer dashboards online and through email. After three years, we have yet to hear of any other product even approaching QlikView's capabilities."
Target Express can get customers up and running with custom dashboards in a mere 72 hours, which includes two days of customer interviews and business needs analysis. The rest of the time is devoted to building customer-specific data views from which to drill down into specific transactions. "Training takes only one day at most," said Bale. "Our only difficulty during training is to stem the flow of ideas that come pouring from customers upon seeing what QlikView could do and how it could be applied to other aspects of their business."
Product names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.
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