Business intelligence boosts ambulance operations

St John Ambulance Australia’s National Business Centre (NBC) has chosen QlikView business intelligence software, which will bring additional operational and financial focus to the management of its business.

St John Ambulance Australia is a self-funding charitable organisation active in all states and territories, dedicated to helping people in sickness, distress, suffering or danger. St John is Australia’s leading provider of first aid training, first aid services at public events and supplier of first aid kits and equipment. It also runs the ambulance services in Western Australian and the Northern Territory.

The St John NBC provides its St John state and territory partners, along with an ever-increasing number of major commercial organisations, with access to quality first aid supplies, first aid kits and associated equipment through a centralised purchasing, assembly, warehousing and distribution service.

“As one of Australia’s best known organisations with a proud 125-year history, our primary focus will always be on the provision of help to our community. We provide 1.4 million hours of voluntary service and we treat 86,000 casualties a year. However, as a self-funded charity, it is essential that we pay very close attention to our operational and financial performance,” said David Leek, Chief Executive Officer of the St John NBC.

“St John NBC distributes more than 2500 items to over 420 outlets and retailers and generates revenue in the range of $20m a year. Our business is like any other, our customers expect high levels of service and we work hard to exceed those expectations.

“We wanted to extract greater insight about our business performance and margin contribution across the business and QlikView enables us to be rich in both data and information. We are now able to focus on interpreting reports rather than producing them,” said Leek.

Following an extensive team-based evaluation of several competing products, St John NBC turned to Inside Info and QlikView.

Mid-market organisations need technology that supports and simplifies their path to change, instead of adding time and complexity to the process, explained Stuart Barnard, Managing Director at Inside Info.

“We are absolutely delighted with QlikView. It delivered real benefit to St John NBC in only a matter of weeks. We have already been able to implement a number of changes to our operation which have had a profound effect on our performance and this is almost entirely due to the use of QlikView,” confirmed Leek.