Radiall is an electronic components manufacturer, with over 3,000 employees based throughout the US, Europe and Asia. Over the last few years, we’ve been growing at an impressive rate – our yearly revenue doubled between 2012 and 2019, from €200 million to around €400 million.

To support this growth, we had to quickly scale and adapt our processes. This included introducing a more powerful analytics solution and ensuring our employees swiftly upskilled, so they were able to get to grips with all the new data.

Teaching data curiosity

As we transform our approach to business intelligence, a major focal point for us is instilling data literacy and a curiosity for data. Without a genuine sense of wonder for what we can learn from the data, our employees will never be able to truly maximize the potential of business intelligence. We’ve found that this is perhaps the slowest frontier to conquer in our transformation journey. Changing our systems and data collection tools is relatively easy compared to changing human minds and behaviour.

Tools can be powerful, but they don’t matter if we can’t get people to use them properly

Finding our data heroes

We have found that most people don’t learn by analyzing widgets. Establishing data heroes within the company has been a key part of our company’s data success. Our heroes fully embrace the potential of learning to analyze data for use within each of their own parts of the business, and it has started to completely change how many of our teams operate.

We have already seen significant benefits and are still only scratching the surface of the tools at our disposal. To scale the data side of our business, we are working on getting all employees on-board. We have our data pillars in place and by empowering data literacy across the organization, we can engrain a data-driven culture.

A key factor in this is the integral role played by our Finance department as our team of financial controllers led the platform deployment, shifting and modernizing our approach. This means that developments are carried out much more quickly and match up with business expectations right from the start. As a result, our business intelligence deployment strategy is both agile and reactive to business needs.

Excitement + data literacy = the winning formula for data transformation.

Tackling the reporting headache

While we’re still in the early phases of the company-wide data initiative, we’re already starting to see a lot of promise, fueled by the increased data literacy among our employees.

For example, reporting used to be a very time-consuming task. With our new Qlik data analytics tool, it has spared us weeks of back office work. As the team becomes increasingly adept with handling all our data, we’ve set ourselves a goal to reduce the time spent on reports by a full day each month. Imagine what you could do with twelve extra days of work each year!

Our productivity gains have increased significantly due to the shorter reporting and planning production lead time. The shared control of a database between IT and financial team has also given us greater agility to adapt to changing environments.