Lintech International Reduces Business Churn and Creates Efficiencies With Qlik
Lintech International LLC, a specialty chemicals and minerals distributor headquartered in Macon, Ga., offers a range of products within the coatings, adhesives, rubbers, plastics and composites markets, among others. Established over 35 years ago, the company has grown to service a national geography of clients, with 13 warehouses across the United States. This growth presented distinct opportunities for the company to track and leverage a variety of trend data internally and with external suppliers. However, like the very traditional industry in which it operates, Lintech relied heavily on manual processes when using its data and was looking for a way to modernize its approach
Lintech first turned to Qlik in 2016, searching for a way to enhance its reporting processes to better communicate with sales representatives, reduce business churn and create efficiencies. Prior to implementing an analytics solution, Lintech relied on a variety of document types, including Excel files, pivot tables, Word documents and PDFs, to share data internally. This mix of sources was manually pulled and blended every month, along with information from the company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, requiring a significant time investment. Lintech also identified that its CRM system was not providing the in-depth analytics needed to best position its sales team to drive growth.
After experimenting with Qlik to create initial applications, Lintech quickly realized the potential for Qlik to improve business operations. The first formal effort to implement analytics required developing a data architecture, complete with a file naming nomenclature to reconcile over 2,000 products within its CRM and ERP systems. Once finished, Lintech rolled out the Enterprise version of Qlik Sense.
For the Sales team, Qlik Sense minimized and simplified the team’s reporting workload and complexity, with an automated prompt that informed team members which metrics needed updating to stay within regulatory compliance. Previously, sales representatives tracked these metrics manually, taking time away from other value add activities. Other departments, including Customer Service and Supply Chain, also benefitted. Customer Service can more easily examine order complexity for potential efficiencies, and Supply Chain has greater visibility over product nonconformities.
Qlik Sense also helped enhance Lintech’s relationship with its suppliers, many of which are billion-dollar companies that still relied on manual reporting. Prior to implementing Qlik, Lintech managed the manual creation of two reports per month, as well as a quarterly business review report for each supplier, tying in point of sale, call summary reports and more detail with hundreds of data points. These reports were printed and reviewed in face-to-face quarterly meetings. Now, through Qlik Sense, Lintech can pull even more data for suppliers in a faster and easier to consume form that has taken “what were good conversations and made them even better,” noted Jason Webb, Director of Sales for Lintech. This is driven by the integration of Qlik NPrinting with Qlik Sense, enabling Lintech to be more responsive and deliver automated custom reports with greater frequency and polish.
“Qlik Sense surpassed many of our expectations, enabling us to revamp some of our more cumbersome processes, which added value to our company, our team members, our customers and our suppliers. Perhaps the biggest win for my team was our ability to dramatically decrease business churn, bringing the rate of customer attrition to below 10 percent in an industry that typically experiences around 20 percent attrition.”
— Jason Webb, Director of Sales at Lintech International LLC
Using Qlik Sense, Webb could better understand sales variances down to the transactional level by reviewing which products lines were selling at the highest and lowest volumes. This helped Lintech identify areas that needed focus or a new sales strategy. The visibility through Qlik enabled Lintech to reduce business churn from 17 percent to 7 percent within the first year, with projections to be below 5 percent in the near future.
Lintech is also evaluating its data collection processes, pinpointing areas where data quality needs improvement. Now, Lintech has access to more and higher quality data, and has actually increased the volume of reports teams are generating with much greater insight and less effort. “We are able to challenge decisions from years past with confidence. We are making better decisions, and our teams spend more time not only selling, but selling more intelligently,” said Webb.
Lintech is looking for additional areas where Qlik can add value, including creating a path for suppliers to access their reports directly via login. This will enable even more proactive and constructive conversations that could further reduce churn while improving partner relationships.
