A SUCCESS STORY
An industry leader in natural resources, Esan has begun utilizing Qlik Sense business intelligence solutions for managing vital and intricate business operations, from manufacturing to sales, exports, and supply chain management.
Esan was founded in 1978 to supply the natural resources industry with premium raw materials. It began with industrial raw materials and has since made several advances, including the first Feldspar Flotation Plant and the first Clay Enrichment Plant in Türkiye. Currently, it is the 125th largest industrial organization of Türkiye (ISO 500). Its portfolio currently consists of approx. 150 items, which have been diversified over time. It carries out its operations in 10 plants and 40 quarries in Türkiye. It maintains liaison offices in Italy, Ukraine, China, Portugal, and Kazakhstan, and exports to about 50 countries
Employing a total of 2,500 employees, Esan is the largest producer of sodium feldspar in the world and the top mineral exporter from Türkiye (TIM 1000). It carries out its operations in line with the demands of the present, being mindful of the environment and the future, and treating people and society with respect thanks to its sustainable mining strategy and operational excellence viewpoint. Apart from comprehensive exploration and R&D processes for an efficient, value-added, and sustainable business model, the company undertakes ongoing efforts to enhance all aspects of its operations from an operational excellence standpoint. In all these endeavors, digital transformation is positioned as a technology lever.
Esan attaches great importance to the digital transformation process. Esan focuses on this process with the Qlik Sense platform, which implements business intelligence solutions at the most affordable prices.
Let’s have a look at the comments of Figen Demirhan, Esan IT Director, regarding Esan’s technological strategy and business intelligence practices: “One of our main priorities has been digital transformation since 2014. Since then, we have undertaken about 70 projects ranging from exploration, occupational safety, supply chain, finance to manufacturing, license management, sales, and human resources, and we have dozens more projects in the planning stages. These projects are all a part of our continuous digitalization effort.
Esan
Türkiye’s 125th largest industrial enterprise, having almost 150 products, operating 10 facilities, 40 quarries, and providing the natural resources industry with high-quality raw materials; having achieved a great number of innovations
Sector: Natural resources
Expectations
- Monitor production, sales and supply chain efficiency
- Measure costs and returns
- Analyze problems and risks
- Identify new business opportunities
- Make short-term or future-oriented plans
- Transition to data integrity and easy management
- Increase the utility and visibility of data
- Streamline operational tasks
- Control critical businesses and processes
- Create senior management reports
Achievements
- Easy cost and return measurement
- Easy problem and risk analyses
- Easy future-oriented planning
- Increased data utility and visibility
- Easy critical business and process management
- Increased service and operational quality
- Maximum efficiency achievement
- Contribution to fast decision-making processes for the senior management
Esan’s digital transformation vision aims to transform from a mechanism, in which each component carries out its function independently, into an organization that has fully integrated processes from source to customer and repeatable business models backed by intelligent mining applications, generates instantaneous data and improves its operations by deciphering it, thereby contributing to both its own life and the environment in which it exists. We are making quick progress toward building a framework that will enable us to connect the aboveground and underground, our head office and the construction site in the mountains, our planner in the facility and the field geologist, and enable their respective fields of expertise to communicate with one another. Despite a number of obstacles, including inadequate infrastructure, unfavorable environmental circumstances, and even cultural barriers,
we have adapted several technologies. In certain projects, we have customized pre-made solutions to fit our needs; in some projects, we have combined various technologies to create new approaches for the industry; and in other projects, using our own expertise and capable technology suppliers, we have developed applications that are not offered in the industry.
Applications for business intelligence play a significant role in data collection and analysis to determine the utility of all of these applications. Business intelligence applications are necessary to uncover several managerial concerns, including measuring costs and returns, analyzing problems and risks, identifying opportunities, and preparing the short- or long-term plans and presenting the information to decision-makers in a clear and concise manner.It provides tremendous opportunity to manage this complex and transitive structure well for a company like ours, which works in a demanding industry, across many countries, and with a diverse portfolio.”
“Business intelligence solutions play an important role in the digital transformation journey from comprehending the past to viewing the present and then forecasting the future,” Figen Demirhan said and continued commenting on the process of selecting Qlik solutions as well as the significance of the business intelligence solution for the company: “With the emergence of projects utilizing IoT and analytics and the introduction of technologies that allow us to measure production efficiency, our focus has shifted toward the future. In this period, we concentrated on our business intelligence applications. Using a variety of data source systems, we performed a POC (proof-of-concept) research and benchmarking with the key business intelligence-dependent functions—supply chain, manufacturing, and sales. In this POC research, we assessed three distinct business intelligence solutions from different angles in an effort to determine which application would fulfill our needs at the lowest possible cost. As a result of all these evaluations, we decided on the Qlik Sense platform and started our work.”
We received comprehensive training on Qlik
The Master Data Specialist in the Supply Chain was initially designated as the key user for this structure which is managed by the organization’s Information Technologies unit after selecting Qlik Sense, according to Sinan Türkmen, Data Analytics Manager and Project Manager, who provided general details about the project completed with Qlik applications. Türkmen continued: “They were involved both in designing according to the requirements and served a technical user. On the other hand, for a project we named Kristal, we assembled a team from diverse functions (R&D, production, sales, research, corporate communication, etc.) and used agile methodologies and design thinking to develop our designs. Naturally, our managers in different functions as well as our team members received several training courses on how to quickly create an application on Qlik Sense in order to exploit the self-service capabilities of this application. In these training courses, we had the ability to explore the potential of Qlik Sense in practice and developed our first applications using Qlik Sense.”
Qlik analyzes data on our behalf and delivers it to our email inbox
At this point, Levent Eğeryılmaz, Esan Purchasing Manager-Project Key User, outlines the procedures they want to become proficient with the Qlik solution for and the advantages they have gained as a consequence:
“The day-by-day growth of our company and in parallel to it, many-times faster development of our data mean that traditional methods for processing our data will soon become invalid. Our objective in using Qlik was to make our data more visible and useful. In order to achieve this objective, we identified three primary stops. The first one was to streamline operational tasks. Standard ERP reports were already in use. In addition to these, we have several development reports. But instead of this independent report system, which may be difficult, time-consuming, and discouraging for the user, we had envisioned something more: Systems that need users to go through screens in order to get information should be replaced with designs that can perform these tasks for them and, once they have been visualized, bring the information to their attention on a regular basis.
With Qlik’s user-friendly framework, we were able to swiftly build and start using these designs, which we refer to as operational reports. These days, when we get up to work in the morning, Qlik handles the data processing and forwards it to our email rather than us attempting to get it through ERP. Our second stop was to provide operation managers the ability to control critical tasks and procedures. We determined the critical process control points, and we gave Qlik the task of controlling these points using our designs.