How Hapag-Lloyd Is Preparing Its Analytics Infrastructure for the AI Era

This isn’t your typical success story, or a neat before-and-after. We’re going to share what we learned to make analytics work at scale. Because at Hapag-Lloyd, we do everything on a global scale.

Hapag-Lloyd AG is one of the world’s leading liner shipping companies. We operate over 300 vessels and a global container fleet of about 3.6 million units across 600 ports, and our 20,000 employees span nearly 140 countries.

All this activity generates data constantly, from vessel operations to container tracking to customer interactions. We support more than 6,000 users, from our CEO to the area sales office employee, across over 800 frontend applications. A large, active analytics community of more than 220 certified developers and 70 certified business analysts backs our Qlik instance.

This is why scale is such an important part of our story. Our challenge isn’t collecting data — it’s making sense of it as a global enterprise. Now, as we migrate to Qlik Cloud Analytics, we want to impart three lessons to successfully scale data analytics and get ready for the AI era..

If We’re So Successful, Why the Change?

With 6,000 analytics users, it’s easy to question why we should switch at all.

The impressive stats hide the complexity of the operation: every additional user, every new application, and every one of our 40,000 reloads per month is another process the platform team has to keep from turning into chaos. That complexity grew organically. Our first big step into self-serve analytics with QlikView in 2015 expanded rapidly and left us decentralized, with 15 environments and more than 40 servers at its peak, until switching to Qlik Sense in 2022 consolidated us into a more manageable five environments and 22 servers.

Moving to Qlik Cloud was about where we want to go next. Four key reasons drove our decision:

1. Enabling new capacities: Most innovation will happen in the cloud. Qlik Cloud gives us features that were impossible before: automation, collaboration, governance, and AI-driven experiences.

2. Consolidate platforms: We see an opportunity to reduce dependencies and simplify our broader BI landscape over time.

3. Simplify operations: Moving from multiple environments to a single cloud reduces operational complexity and improves the end-user experience.

4. Reduce costs: Fewer environments and servers mean less infrastructure, maintenance, and operational overhead tasks.

This evolution wasn’t just moving dashboards to a different place. The real transformation happened behind the scenes, changing how we develop, govern, support users, and operate the platform. Here are the lessons we learned along the way.

Lesson #1: Prepare Your Organization

Moving to the cloud is an operating-model change, not an infrastructure project. The migration itself is straightforward and easy, but realizing the full value of Qlik Cloud goes beyond moving applications from one environment to another. To unlock that value, you have to prepare the organization behind the platform.

“Moving to the cloud is an operating-model change, not an infrastructure project. To unlock value, you have to prepare the organization behind the platform.”

At Hapag-Lloyd, our background ecosystem has been in a complete change process for the past three years. On top of our migration to Qlik Cloud, we are also migrating to SAP S/4HANA, building version 3.0 of our Freight Information System, and switching from a data warehouse to a lakehouse architecture. Our goal amid all this change is to create as little turbulence as possible for end users.

Especially in a context like this, start defining your operating model earlier than you think you need to. Making these holistic changes is also a good time to review your processes and standards.

Lesson #2: Get Governance Right, Before You Go Live

Setting up Qlik Cloud takes days. The bigger effort is aligning governance, processes, and operating models to take advantage of the platform at enterprise scale. You don’t want to have to fix governance mistakes after you go live, as that could take months.

Space structure, access models, development standards, ownership, and lifecycle management are not things to figure out later. Every shortcut you take here will come back as bigger problems.

We learned this the hard way during our Qlik Sense migration. Setting it up was the easy part. But overlooking stream structure and ownership created unnecessary operational overhead and we ended up repairing the vessel while it was already at sea.

This time around, governance was a top priority for us from day one. The technology migration was not the challenge. Making sure the right standards, access models, and ownership structures were in place from the start was what helped us create a foundation that can scale.

Lesson #3: Drive Enablement, Drive Adoption

Technology doesn’t create users, scale analytics, or catalyze a data culture — people do.

“Technology doesn’t create users, scale analytics, or catalyze a data culture — people do. If you want your business to get the most out of technical features, invest in your people.”

Hapag-Lloyd scaled to more than 6,000 analytics users by building an internal analytics community:

• Creating an internal certification program based on Qlik learning content

• Running quarterly update sessions to keep our Qlik users aligned and up to date

• Organizing an annual Data & AI Week, a series open to all employees looking to gain skills and better work with data

The result? More than just the number of analytics users, it’s the trust they put in Qlik as our single source of truth.

Destination: Better, Faster Decisions by More People

Ultimately, this journey isn’t about building a better analytics platform. The cloud isn’t the destination. Getting there wasn't about overcoming technical barriers to migration. It was about using the move as an opportunity to modernize the way we govern, manage, and scale analytics across the business.

We want to enable better, faster decisions for more people, and Qlik Cloud is the platform that gets us there. Qlik Answers, AI-enabled analytics, automation, and platform simplification are all steps in the same direction: making analytics more accessible, proactive, and embedded in everyday decisions.

“The cloud isn’t the destination. We want to enable better, faster decisions for more people, and Qlik Cloud is the platform that gets us there.”

Take our Smart Container initiative: 2.5 million containers with devices tracking location and condition in real time. The real value is turning that data into insight, identifying delays and anomalies as they happen. Even more important is turning insight into action, allowing teams to intervene before a problem becomes a customer issue.

It’s the difference between having data and being able to use it. That’s what Hapag-Lloyd’s journey with Qlik is really about. With Qlik Cloud we have a platform ready for the future, one that can continuously evolve, scale with our business, and support our people to make better decisions.