Cook deploys Qlik to track Christmas sales

Frozen foods retailer Cook is using visual analytics to react more quickly to customer demand over Christmas.

The high street firm, which cooks then freezes homemade' meals, is using data discovery firm Qlik's QlikView tool to provide the latest information on its stock inventory.

By seeing which products are selling, it hopes to better anticipate festive demand.

Cook is using the QlikView Christmas Stock Tracker App to check which frozen food is selling well, so they can make more of it, and which isn't, so they can reduce its price.

The company had been doing this previously, but was poring through spreadsheets to make decisions, taking days to react to trends.

With QlikView, Cook said it gains visibility into its entire business, pulling in data from its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to make decisions almost immediately.

The stock tracker app, developed by Qlik with partner Informance, lets staff see how Cook's Christmas range is selling against targets, assess daily stock levels and if stores are ordering it correctly.

Jeff Turner, head of IT for Cook, said: "As all of the products we sell are prepared by hand in our kitchen, it's vital that we're able to effectively manage our stock.

"QlikView has provided us with the ability to make incredibly timely decisions about production during one of our key trading periods.

"It has been a massive leap for the company and we can see no shortage of opportunities for the future."

Cook now plans to introduce QlikView dashboards for manufacturing across the business to support its long-term IT strategy.