QlikView South Africa has teamed up with consulting engineers and software development firm Fourier Approach to inject future scenario planning into clients’ operations – beginning with the call centre operation of The Facilities Management Company (TFMC).Wessel van Heerden, professional engineer at Fourier Approach, explains how the QlikView/Fourier partnership came into being.
“Fourier Approach uses 3D simulation and modelling to run various scenarios and ‘what-if’ analyses for clients, providing detailed decision support for improvements to operations, capital expenditure decisions, continuous improvement programmes and other undertakings,” says Van Heerden.
Using FlexSim simulation software, the company can construct, in a 3 Dimensional environment, client operations, allowing it to break out, analyse and optimise discrete systems by tweaking various parameters and testing the effects.
When Fourier moved to simulate the call centre operation at TFMC – a QlikView customer – the opportunity for a collaborative development partnership with the vendor became apparent.
“Ordinarily we would run the analyses, but TFMC was able to do it themselves when we front-ended the simulation model results in QlikView, an environment that is familiar to them. In the end we integrated the software in a combined offering.”
Davide Hanan, MD of QlikView SA, says like other QlikView clients, TFMC prizes QlikView’s in-memory architecture and associative query logic, which supports powerful and rapid user-driven business intelligence from any data source.
The joint solution approach entails Fourier making its simulation data available to QlikView, enabling customers of both to run various analyses as needed and plan proactively, he says.
Hanan says the company embraces the idea of a simulation and scenario planning component to its software as a high-value extra dimension.
The companies will jointly market the combined solution. As a QlikView reseller, Fourier Approach will market it to its client base, even if they’re not already QlikView clients.
TFMC provided the ideal opportunity to show the power of the combined solution in its call centre operation, which offers in-bound and out-bound first-line support and maintenance services to clients.
Subject to strict service level agreements (SLAs) based on time to answer calls and log requests, TFMC wanted to proactively test the impact of various scenarios on its call volumes, such as the on-boarding of a new client or the advent of peak season.
In addition, it wanted to evaluate the impact of potential capacity interventions on resource scheduling and capacity, SLAs and costs, which would inform new design interventions.
