Medair Aims to Expands Its Global Humanitarian Work Effectiveness With Qlik Sense SaaS

Founded in 1989, Medair is a leader in committed humanitarian support focused on saving lives and relieving human suffering in the world’s most difficult-to-reach and devastated places. Along with fellow NGOs, Medair is an important lifeline to countries in crisis, such as Sudan, Yemen and Jordan. The organization’s mission has become even more important during the COVID pandemic. Already strained healthcare systems and a lack of infrastructure have contributed to and exacerbated existing problems, such as unequipped medical facilities, food shortages, overcrowded refugee camps, inadequate shelters and unsafe drinking water. During this time, Medair has taken strategic actions with the help of Qlik.org – Qlik’s corporate responsibility arm – in anticipation of a future characterized by continued and growing major crises caused by disease outbreak, climate change, mass displacement and natural disasters.

One of these strategic actions has been continuing to improve on data collection and analysis. Medair has been working with Qlik to gain more value from its data since 2014. With increasing reliance on data to inform its work throughout the world, Medair recently transitioned to Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS to mirror its overall shift in modernizing its IT strategy to drive more use of data at every level of the organization. As a long-term partner, Medair’s leadership looked to Qlik to understand how to make the best use of its data and analytic capabilities to meet the demands of a more challenging global environment. Through high-caliber consultations to define and drive the scope of the platform migration, Qlik team members helped Medair assess how to best deploy Qlik Sense at an enterprise level in the cloud to bring the greatest benefit to all users.

“Data saves lives – plain and simple – and the move to SaaS with Qlik Sense will better position us to do so,” said Reine Hanna, an Impact Project Manager at Medair. “In our work, we need to be able to answer three basic questions: where, who and what – where are our beneficiaries in the most need? Who are they? And what do they actually need? Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS will help us better answer these questions by enabling everyone at the organization to work off the dashboards and apps we develop and then can share across the entire organization.”

One of the organization’s major goals with its move to SaaS is to increase the availability of various dashboards and solutions to Medair’s staff and country programs around the world. With the move, Medair has already realized various benefits in data collection, analysis and administration processes, particularly when registering new beneficiary households. Through the use of SaaS Qlik Sense apps, Medair has reduced the average household registration time from 55 minutes to eight minutes and registration costs by nearly 95% ($70 to $4), while simultaneously increasing the number of household registrations per week from 36 to 300.

And it won’t be just office staff that will benefit from the change. According to Philip Indlekofer, GSO Enterprise Architect at Medair, Qlik Sense SaaS will drive impactful efficiencies and enhancements for those working on the ground. “Qlik Sense SaaS is a key component in our data transformation journey and will enable analytics and machine-learning capabilities that we, as an organization, urgently need,” noted Indlekofer. “Our journey will involve a new enterprise resource plan (ERP) and much more, from implementing augmented analytics, natural language processing and leveraging intelligent alerting through Qlik to help us focus our resource use and more proactively manage challenges we face in the field. This translates into better operations throughout the world and demonstrates the profound and unmistakable value of data-driven decision making.”

Humanitarian crises will, undoubtedly, continue to beset the world, with dimensions unknown and situations not amenable to a clear plan of approach. Regardless, Qlik and its work with Medair demonstrates that a road forward is achievable with heart, passion and data.

“As I said before, data saves lives,” said Hanna. “And we are proud to leverage Qlik software in saving them.”

Watch the video capturing the work we’ve done with Medair.

@MedairInt's move to @Qlik Sense #SaaS will better position the humanitarian org to help those in crisis

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