How More Trusted Data Leads to Smarter Decisions and Greater Adoption throughout the Enterprise

Key takeaways

Background

FREJA is a privately-owned transportation company specializing in road transport, but offering sea and air freight as well. Established in 1985, it is headquartered in Denmark, with offices in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Poland, Slovakia, and China. The company employs 800 people and owns 2,600 trailers, working with trucking companies to drive the trailers. FREJA handles two million shipments a year, with its trailers driving 270 direct routes every day or every other day.

The challenge

Until recently, FREJA did not have a clear business intelligence strategy. This led to more work than was necessary in many cases, where every time a report was needed it was started from scratch. Some other challenges included:

• The interfaces were difficult for users to navigate, and the information was presented in a confusing way.
• There were too many report pages, and some had old, outdated information.
• It was slow, and there wasn’t a lot of trust in the data.

FREJA also needed a better way to work with its customers. Some of its larger customers wanted to see their data in a certain way that the company had not been able to provide to them. FREJA wanted to be able to customize its reports to present data so it could meet customer demands.

The goal

In order to meet its goal of making better business decisions and delivering better results to itself and its customers, FREJA:

The solution

FREJA had been a Dimensional Insight customer for years, but when it gave its Finance Business Partnering department the job of centralizing its business intelligence work, it began to use Dimensional Insight’s platform to its full potential. FREJA also added Dimensional Insight’s Measure Factory as part of its business intelligence strategy.

“With this new investment in Measure Factory, more and more people are using the Dimensional Insight platform, so it’s becoming more important for our employees and our management team,” says Alexander Skaarup Kristensen, the head of finance business partnering at FREJA. “For us, data is the new gold. It’s really important for us now to make decisions and to have the right knowledge about our company to make those decisions.”

“Because we do everything through Measure Factory, it’s possible for the user on each page to see the description of a measure, so it’s much more transparent for our users to see how we have calculated a measure, how it’s described, and what it is,” says Skaarup Kristensen. “In that way it’s always the same no matter where you see it, and you can get the description just on the page you are on.”

FREJA works with Dimensional Insight distributor Infotool to implement the technology. “Infotool has been a fantastic business partner from the start,” says Skaarup Kristensen. “The team is always ready to help, and they are proactive. We have a close, collegial partnership. It’s a very nice way of working together.”

The Dimensional Insight dashboards are easy to use. If FREJA’s users want to do more complex analysis on the data, it is easier for them to do than before. Skaarup Kristensen has also set up video tutorials for many pages to increase that self-service ability, and he intends to do that for every page. “It’s flexible,” he says, “so it’s a good fit for our mission as a company. We want to be a flexible partner in transportation, and the Dimensional Insight product is also very flexible. That’s a good match between what we promise our customers and what we can deliver with Dimensional Insight when we talk about data.”

The Dimensional Insight platform allows FREJA to display information that is relevant to the specific user, so there are fewer pages to navigate and the information is displayed much faster. It is not just easier to look at, but it is also easier to maintain. With Measure Factory, the data is also more dependable. FREJA has worked to make its definitions consistent, and Measure Factory allows those definitions to be distributed across the platform.

The results

FREJA prides itself on being that flexible partner, and Dimensional Insight allows the company to create customized reports for its customers. “Nearly every customer wants statistics and reports,” says Skaarup Kristensen, “so we value the fact that we can be flexible and make the solution special-made for the exact customer. A lot of the big customers, they demand that we report in very specific ways to them, and that is only possible because we have a product like Dimensional Insight, where we can do these customized reports.”

FREJA uses Dimensional Insight to deliver daily reports to different departments throughout the organization. One such report is delivered to the key account management department, which handles FREJA’s largest accounts. The reports are delivered first thing in the morning, allowing the company to be proactive if it needs to address a problem with a shipment.

“They spend less time getting the information and can deliver better service to our customers,” says Skaarup Kristensen. When other departments see the time savings and business improvements from these reports, they want similar results. Skaarup Kristensen says many employees at FREJA are eager to be onboarded because of the results they have seen, and he has seen an increase in users.

What’s next

Measure Factory is forcing FREJA to have important conversations about its data, and the continuing conversations around data quality are part of the company’s next steps. The company wants to clarify its definitions and make sure everyone knows how to enter them into the system to ensure that its data quality meets the high standards it has set for itself.

FREJA has also been working to continue to share the successful stories the organization has had using Dimensional Insight so that other departments can think about how the platform might be able to benefit them. The data collected will also play a role in a project FREJA will undergo to automate some of its processes. “Dimensional Insight is a big part of that project to make us a more effective organization,” says Skaarup Kristensen. “Overall we are very happy about Measure Factory and happy about Dimensional Insight as our main BI tool.”

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