General Shale & CHAMPS Analytics implement Qlik

General Shale is one of North America's largest brick, stone and concrete block manufacturers. They operates 14 manufacturing locations, in addition to a network of 25 General Shale-branded retail showrooms and over 200 affiliated distributors across North America.

General Shale's Finance team struggled to make decisions to efficiently operate their plants. As a result, they couldn't optimize which plants to run at full capacity and which to run at half capacity to optimize work schedules and reduce freight costs.

They partnered with CHAMPS Analytics to deploy Qlik to simplify decision making. CHAMPS' data engineers built dashboards that ingest data from their complex Oracle ERP system and external freight management systems.

Today, the Finance teams can quickly determine which plants to run for multiple shifts based on product orders while optimizing freight costs around the country. In addition:

• They quickly predict which plants to operate at the lowest costs based on labor availability and employee health.
• Plants run more efficiently
• 60% less downtime
• Freight costs were reduced by 1.2M annually.