EMARK & Inphinity Life

At the beginning of the year we all together set up ambitious goals. We wanted to follow pre-covid period time and re-start our growth after 2 years.  In terms of basic metrics such as #billings, #net revenue,  we committed ourselves to growth YoY within 15-20%. This course of action is hard to achieve without right people on right seats. Despite of the fact we have had quite hassles with hiring and struggling with lack of capacity our EMARK EMEA financial results are very impressive: 

• Billings growth for YTD Oct 22 vs 21 is over 17% 

• Net revenue for YTD Oct 22 vs 21 is almost on budgeted level (15% over YoY),
• Net revenue services for YTD Oct 22 vs 21 is almost on budgeted level (with less delivery team as we expected).

 

At the end of the year, only two months is remaining, and I am really convinced that we achieve the numbers as we budgeted and there will be also second reason for celebration 😊

Regardless of financials, I would like to emphasise one amazing thing that the exceptionality of our projects was authorized by independent consultant company and six of customer solutions realized in 2021 was qualified for Reseasch & development incentive. These solutions were eligible to fulfil strict criteria of the uniqueness of the solution and overcoming technical uncertainty.

Business in CEE

From the business development point of view we are discussing very interesting opportunities both for public and private sectors in Slovakia and Czech Republic. From the private sector there are several major new accounts and re-visited prospects, where we are currently closing first phase after PoCs. Companies like Muziker, Securitas and SIIX EMS would definitely be welcomed addition to our client base. In the Czech Republic, we are currently also in discussions (both direct and through our partners) with České dráhy, Správa železnic, Severočeská vodárenská, Vodafone and likes.

We made amazing additions on a service level successfully closing additional services for our major accounts Model Obaly, Porsche CZ, Enviral and won tender for Foxconn, just to name a few.

On a partner level I am delighted that our new partners share the same passion for innovative solutions. Good example may be company integritas, which is focused on delivery of integrated security solutions (both on physical and IT layer). Emark could be part of consortiums supporting Czech police and Fire Rescue Service of the Czech Republic. Here we want to build up on our IT Risk management solution for Tatrabanka and provide these customers support for data integration and data analytics use cases related to securing of Czech critical infrastructure and related Risk management frameworks.

Strategically and from the consulting point of view we see several major areas forming as our future focus stream, such as IT Security and Risk management – a topic is currently „HOT“ at almost all of our clients thanks to regulatory pressure from current and upcoming regulations like ESG, ZoKB, NIS2 etc…

Marketing

Our October’s Better BI conference in Bratislava together with Prague’s Data in Business conference in June were the two crucial marketing events of the year. After endless, two and a half years of event break, we have finally brought in-person events to our capitals. And what a happenings both conferences were! Prague’s event gathered over 50 innovators and it was packed with pure energy and positive spirit. The same energy we felt in Bratislava in on Better BI, where we had nearly 100 clients & prospects with a bonus of an extraordinary venue on Danube river with picturesque views of Bratislava Castle and Old Town. Both events brought brilliant content and EMARK, Inphinity, Qlik and Snowflake data innovation at its best. It is good to be back 😊.

We have also run a successful series of webinars starting in spring with Qlik SaaS webinar and a session for hospitals and healthcare providers. These two events alone brought us smashing 270 leads! An important marketing milestone throughout the year was a QlikWorld promo, where we run 3 breakout withour innovative customers – Dawn Meats, Model Group and Tatra banka. That was an awesome opportunity to communicate how innovative and competitive EMARK with Inphinity are.

Summer was an unusually busy season for marketing too.  Two webinars drew attention during slower holiday season. First was a reminder of our accoladed risk management solution in Tatrabanka (recognized at QlikWorld) and second was focused on SAP users and Qlik Gold Client promo. Summer events fetched us 90 registrations altogether. Not bad, for summer season, right?

Apart from events and lead generation, HR branding became a popular topic. We are preparing a special micro website to boost the hiring, it will be ready in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned.

Customer Success

ESET – a global IT company. 6 years ago, business managers in ESET were swamped with tables in Excel. One of the “excel ponds” was used to type in plans into pre-designed tables. Tens of partners around the world, multiple sheets for different product lines, at least 3-4 versions… Can you imagine the mess and headache the business analysts had when they consolidated it for top management? Months. And the validity (accuracy) of such plans? Nobody really cared.

The first iteration of Business Planning in Qlik was an eye-opener, 6th iteration from last year was borderline artificial intelligence, next year we’ll help them push it even further. 100+ partners around the world, 5 product lines each with tens of planning lines, 3 scenarios, 9 versions, all pre-calculated from 100+ million records. Planners just accept or adjust a few variables, all are consolidated into dashboards in minutes. Since the first version, they grew by 150 million, in 5 years to almost 600m in 2021. How much of that could have been lost, if they still drowned in excel?

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DAWN MEATS – one of the largest Irish meat producers, with GBP 800M revenue, where we managed to transform the planning process with Qlik and Inphinity. The goal of the project was to design and develop a software solution for automatic integration of data on prices and sales from source systems with a powerful forecasting capability. The solution includes automatic prediction of weekly sales using machine learning methods, even taking into consideration the fact that meat consumption is impacted by weather 😊.

The planning was previously done in Excel, with poor quality and huge manual effort, leading to considerable waste. New solution is aiming to dramatically increase the precision of the planning process on weekly basis, and thus having substantial impact on costs and overall efficiency of the company. Dawn Meats was the third project that made it all the way to QlikWorld.

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MODEL GROUP – This is one of our most important projects of all times. Why? For the first time ever we have utilized all most important technologies from our portfolio – Qlik, Inphinity, Snowflake, AWS to create system integration on the data level across several business applications incl. SAP. We provided access to the data for business users and also improved data quality and consistency. All of this in SaaS environment – and that is not common at the enterprise level. So it does not come as a surprise that this story have actually qualified made it to the global audience of this years’s QlikWorld. And that says it all.

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ORANGE BUSINESS SERVICES – a part of the Orange Group, supports companies and organizations through their digital transformation in 220 countries and territories. The multi-national Telco Sourcing team came up with a requirement for a tool to cover their dynamic project management workflow. They were facing issues from data quality, through delays up to uncovered tasks due to insufficient project handovers via Excel, Teams, and e-mails. OBS quickly and successfully covered the need by leveraging Qlik and Inphinity Suite – 1 internal developer delivered the first working prototype of the project tracking & handover tool in 2 weeks! Followed by 6 weeks of finetuning with end-users, they put the first version into production.

Crucial elements of the solution are a single source of data, uploading files through the Qlik app, and customizability for different teams. Daily used functions are interactive project tracking, handover of projects between people, difficulty/workload calculation and their trends, data quality monitoring, project-based and workload-based reporting. All of this results in faster, more efficient and more secure communication. The value is clearly proven by other teams demanding a customized version of the solution.

“We’ve built the whole Project tracking solution around Inphinity Forms in Qlik Sense. The development was much faster and easier than it would be with other technologies. A crucial part was the unique option to upload files to the server directly from the Qlik application by using Inphinity Forms. It is already used in production, saves time, and brings value also by having data directly in Qlik where we analyze it.” says Anton Bulik from Orange Business Services

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TATRA BANKA –  one of the leading Slovak banks. Main goal of the project was to implement centrally managed IT Risk management application. Underlying requirements were (1) To create one Risk management tool as a main source of truth within the Bank with easy administration and management, relevant security and access rights settings for all users (2) To enable proactive view on individual dynamic and static risks data that is directly related to particular complex assets (SW applications arranged around various business capabilities) (3) To be able to capture all changes in real time and always enable managers to see actual data with easy reporting of integrated and overall risk profile per whole bank (4) To support standard review and acceptance workflow with notifications and high level of interactivity among users.

The solution consists of 3 linked applications: Administration (for risk administrators), Risk management (for risk managers and risk owners to create, evaluate and accept risks) and Analytics (for every involved user who needs individual risk or risk profile overview and reporting). The solution includes complete methodology for evaluation of risks and pre-calculating impacts and probabilities based on certain combination of Asset x Threat x Vulnerability.

The main outcome is that the bank is now able easily manage the whole set of risks (approx 600 within 200 applications) and provides summarized ad-hoc reporting of complete risk profile attributed to 5 major risk areas as required from ECB (Availability and Continuity Risk, Change risk, Data Integrity Risk, Outsourcing Risk, Security Risk) in the matrix of Likelihood and Impact axes. Main business point being they had only particular solutions and Excels and now have unified workflow system with capability of immediate reporting of complete current risk profile per request, which is huge. It took several days before and now it is a question of 2 minutes. By the way, this was another project presented on QlikWorld 2022.

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2N – leading European company engaged in the development and manufacture of products in the field of ICT and physical security. The goal of the project was to develop an application for data collection and analysis of IoT devices and services connected to them, and to enable efficient access of developers and business users to large, voluminous data from devices using limited hardware resources. The solution helps R&D department to understand the use of IoT devices, decide on further strategy of the devices, and thus increase user experience.

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STRAMIT – it is one of Australia’s leading manufacturers and suppliers of roll-formed steel building products. The goal of the project was to find custom Forecasting solution which would fit their specific needs. They were choosing between SW specifically made for Forecasting or building custom solution in Qlik using Inphinity. After they chose the second option, we built quite a complex Forecasting solution with rolling months. Besides planning Sales Forecast, users can forecast and adjust price increase of Products, Standard Costs, Margin, Seasonality and more.

There are also 2 different forecasts, Forecast on Customer level and Forecast on Facility and Market segment level. We built many relevant insights and reports as part of this solution e.g. comparison of Customer Forecast vs Facility and Market segment Forecast vs Actuals, which significantly help their team. They previously use Excel for forecasting, which means a slow error prune forecasting process, a lot of manual effort required. This application and use of Inphinity Forms had a great positive impact on their Forecasting business process.

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PDP FINE FOODS (WICKED SISTER) – Australian producer of dairy desserts and snacks. The customer was looking for a solution that would help calculate costs and identify reasons of waste in production. Using Qlik and Inphinity Forms, we created an operations application, that joins data from their ERP system, production line sensors, and manual target inputs, which gives the users insight into every single step in the production line with focus on the waste cost. Including material, packaging, and employee attendance data, we were able to calculate detail cost per single cup of desert on a shift. All the new insights and reports built-in this solution has had a great impact on tuning in the production processes and expense reduction.

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NHS – UK’s healthcare provider for whom we have re-built a legacy application for HR case management (i.e. tracking of complaints, disciplinary proceedings, etc.) into Qlik with Inphinity. The customer had an old tool that was expensive to maintain due to the high costs of change requests – when any change was needed. The tool was siloed and was not connected to other systems. The goal of the project was to develop a complex application for entering, updating, managing and evaluating incidents in the healthcare sector, creating a single access point for creating and managing employee incidents with automatic notification of interested users. Now, the customer has an agile application, properly connected to their source data, where changes of fields are a matter of minutes, and larger changes in the structure of captured data are a matter of hours. This has led to considerable financial savings and much more agile management of cases and incidents.