About SunExpress
SunExpress was founded in 1989 as a joint venture between Turkish Airlines and Lufthansa. It is jointly headquartered in Antalya and Frankfurt, with offices in Izmir and Ankara. With over 4,000 employees, it carries more than 12 million passengers a year to over 200 destinations in 35 countries.
SunExpress chose Qlik Sense® to deliver new levels of efficiency in its digital transformation process. Working with Qlik Partner, BI Technology, it now has a powerful and effective data and reporting environment that is gaining support and delivering results across a growing range of business units.
“We have been able to automate manual processes, ensure standardization and display data accurately using Qlik Sense’s visualization capabilities.”
Süleyman Özer, Data Platform Team Leader, SunExpress
Customer Name
SunExpress
Industry
Transportation and Logistics
Geography
Türkiye and Germany
Function
IT
Challenges
- Maximize use of a growing pool of business data
- Enable inter-departmental collaboration and reporting
- Replace time-consuming and error-prone processes
Solution
Working with BI Technology, SunExpress implemented Qlik Sense to develop new data pipelines and handle business-critical analytics and visualizations.
Results
- Effective reporting enables accurate decisions
- Automated processes save time and eliminate errors
- Data is accessed quickly and easily
An important step on a critical journey
SunExpress has come a long way since its launch in 1989. With over 35 years of expertise, it has cemented its position as a tourism ambassador between Türkiye and Europe and was recently named Best Leisure Airline in Europe in the global Skytrax survey.
It’s a growth trajectory that the business wants to continue and doing so successfully means making the best possible use of data and analytics.
When SunExpress implemented a wide-ranging digital transformation project in 2019, it began to gather data from a range of different sources. Sharing this data between business units and managers became an important priority but for Süleyman Özer, Data Platform Team Leader at SunExpress, the process presented some key obstacles.
“Data analysis used to be done manually,” he explains. “This was a very labor-intensive and error-prone method that required a lot of time. As an organization, we were unfamiliar with ETL processes and data warehouses.”
SunExpress enhanced its business intelligence capabilities by partnering with BI Technology, a leading Turkish specialist in business intelligence solutions.
Enabling close coordination in reporting
SunExpress tasked BI Technology with a primary objective: to enable key departments including flight operations, ground operations, safety, quality, finance, procurement, commercial and HR, to work in close coordination to deliver effective reporting.
Working with BI Technology, SunExpress developed a flow by which data from databases is obtained and processed using SAP Data Services ETL and Python pipelines and stored in a Vertica database.
Analytics, visualizations and report-generation
Processes are then handled by Qlik Sense.
“Qlik Sense can manage the ETL stages of obtaining data and using the Qlik data format (QVD) for edited and linked data sets significantly reduces the risk of errors,” says Özer. “Keeping the data required for visualizations in the applications’ memory also ensures very fast access. Qlik Sense stands out from competing products thanks to these features.”
A dynamic solution delivering important outcomes
The result is a transformed data environment that allows SunExpress to build on its ambitions to use data and analytics to drive the business forward.
“As we have improved in the area of business intelligence, we have been able to automate manual processes, ensure standardization and display data accurately using Qlik Sense’s visualization capabilities,” Özer says.
And as use of Qlik Sense spreads across departments, the platform’s value is growing in line with the business.
“With Qlik Sense, we are now using static visuals and reports in a dynamic way,” Özer adds. “Qlik’s user-friendly interface has helped to generate interest from multiple business units and built a very positive atmosphere. We’ve built various solutions for a range of projects thanks to the developer capabilities we’ve defined for our users.”
Thanks to Qlik, SunExpress has boosted the efficiency and quality of data analysis, ensured data consistency across departments and accelerated decision-making processes.
Özer also highlights the contribution of BI Technology to the project’s success.
“Our collaboration with the BI Technology team not only provided technical support but also allowed us to work together in project planning, application and assessment,” he adds. “It’s allowed us to use Qlik to develop dependable, quick solutions that deliver high-quality results for important projects.”
SunExpress considers Qlik to be a strategic partner, while BI Technology continues to support the business in using Qlik Sense and related products, as well as system maintenance, architectural changes and application development.
“Increasing the functionality of our Qlik solutions will allow us to streamline our processes even more,” Özer concludes. “Separating the development and production environments is one goal for improving system performance and speeding up data analysis. We also plan to integrate DevOps techniques by improving the management and performance of our Qlik Sense platform in collaboration with BI Technology.”