HSK Ward, home to McKenzie's Foods and FTA Food Solutions, partnered with Notitia to progressively modernise executive and operational reporting through Qlik Cloud Analytics.
Qlik Cloud® Analytics • Executive Reporting • Operational Reporting • Design-Led Development • Analytics Modernisation • Managed Services • Supply Chain • Logistics
HSK Ward, home to McKenzie's Foods and FTA Food Solutions, partnered with Notitia to progressively modernise executive and operational reporting through Qlik Cloud Analytics.
Qlik Cloud® Analytics • Executive Reporting • Operational Reporting • Design-Led Development • Analytics Modernisation • Managed Services • Supply Chain • Logistics
A business that sources, imports, manufactures and distributes food products across retail, foodservice and industrial markets, HSK Ward relies on timely and accurate information to optimise supply chain performance, while supporting strategic planning and operational decision-making.
As the business continued to grow, reporting requirements became increasingly complex. Executive leaders required greater visibility into financial performance and organisational KPIs, while operational teams needed trusted reporting across procurement, inventory management and inbound supply chain costs.
HSK Ward recognised the opportunity to modernise its analytics environment and establish a more scalable approach that could evolve alongside the business. The organisation faced several challenges limiting its ability to fully leverage data:
• Limited executive visibility: Leadership required clearer, more interactive reporting to support strategic and financial decision-making.
• Evolving operational reporting: Operational reporting had evolved across multiple processes and business areas, creating an opportunity to improve consistency, consolidate insights and establish a more scalable approach.
• Need for a scalable analytics capability: Rather than implementing standalone dashboards, HSK Ward wanted a long-term analytics platform supported by governance, continuous improvement and evolving business priorities.
While improving reporting was a key objective, HSK Ward also recognised the opportunity to strengthen and further develop its existing data foundation. Building on established internal systems, data knowledge and analytics capability, HSK Ward partnered with Notitia to consolidate, validate and transform data into trusted information at greater scale.
The project focused not only on reporting, but on evolving the data governance and architecture required to support HSK Ward’s broader analytics strategy.
HSK Ward engaged Notitia as a strategic analytics partner, combining HSK Ward’s internal business, systems and data knowledge with Notitia’s Qlik and analytics expertise to deliver a scalable platform for executive and operational reporting.
The project combined executive reporting, operational analytics and ongoing managed services to establish a modern analytics capability tailored to the needs of different business users.
Rather than beginning with dashboard development, the engagement started by understanding HSK Ward's data landscape and how different teams use information to make decisions. This ensured the solution was built on trusted data while aligning reporting with real business processes.
Building the data foundation
Building on HSK Ward’s existing data environment and analytics capability, HSK Ward and Notitia worked together to evolve the underlying data architecture required to support consistent and trusted analytics across the organisation.
This included:
• Confirming source systems and data availability within the Qlik environment
• Building raw data pipelines and QlikView Data (QVD) storage layers
• Developing transformation pipelines to prepare reporting-ready datasets
• Creating reusable master dimensions and master measures to ensure reporting consistency
• Validating business mappings, including department, business unit, channel and account structures
• Reviewing and adapting existing data extraction processes to improve reliability and scalability
By investing in the analytics foundations first, HSK Ward established a trusted platform capable of supporting both current reporting requirements and future analytics initiatives.
The solution included:
• Executive Profit & Loss reporting designed to provide drill-through capability from financial summaries to account-level detail
• Executive KPI dashboards to provide visibility across key business performance measures
• Operational reporting supporting roadmap initiatives
• A governed Qlik Cloud Analytics environment providing trusted reporting through a single analytics platform
• Feature Driven Development enabling new functionality to be delivered incrementally as business priorities evolved
Designing around users
A design-led methodology underpinned the delivery of executive reporting.
Co-design sessions, extensive use of stakeholder collaborative design platforms allowed Notitia to develop low and high-fidelity wireframes that ensured dashboards reflected how different users interact with information before development commenced. This iterative design process reduced development risk, aligned stakeholder expectations and supported stronger adoption across the organisation.
Operational reporting followed an analytics-led approach, enabling rapid delivery of reporting aligned with established operational processes while maintaining governance and consistency across the broader analytics environment.
Building capability through partnership
Beyond implementation, HSK Ward established an ongoing Analytics as a Managed Service partnership with Notitia.
This model provides continuous analytics advisory, solution enhancement, governance, technical support and Feature Driven Development, allowing the analytics environment to evolve alongside changing business priorities.
Regular governance meetings, roadmap planning and collaborative prioritisation ensure new functionality continues to deliver value while maintaining a trusted, scalable analytics capability.
The platform has also been extended through Inphinity write-back capabilities, enabling users to update operational information directly within Qlik Cloud Analytics. This moves the platform beyond traditional reporting to support operational workflows and decision-making.
Expanding alongside the business
As confidence in the platform has grown, the engagement has continued to expand into additional business areas through Feature Driven Development.
Beyond the initial operational reporting delivered for Supply Review Metrics and Inbound Cost Review, the partnership now includes executive financial reporting, executive KPI dashboards and an expanded Supply Chain & Operations reporting program. This incremental delivery approach allows HSK Ward to continuously prioritise new business requirements while building on an established analytics foundation.
HSK Ward has established a modern analytics platform that is progressively improving visibility for executive and operational decision-making across the organisation.
Operational teams are benefiting from trusted reporting across procurement, inventory management and inbound supply chain operations, while executive reporting continues to expand through the staged delivery of Profit & Loss reporting, KPI dashboards and additional Supply Chain & Operations reporting.
With Qlik Cloud Analytics in place, HSK Ward can now:
• Improve executive visibility into financial performance
• Deliver trusted operational reporting through a governed analytics platform
• Support faster decision-making with interactive analytics
• Continuously introduce new reporting capability through Feature Driven Development
• Maintain alignment between analytics investment and business priorities through ongoing governance
For an organisation managing complex sourcing, manufacturing, warehousing and distribution operations across multiple brands and markets, access to trusted, timely information is critical. By establishing a scalable analytics capability, HSK Ward is strengthening visibility across its operations, enabling faster and more informed decisions while creating a foundation that can continue to evolve alongside the business as it grows, adapts and responds to changing customer and supply chain demands.
Rather than delivering a one-off reporting project, the engagement has established a long-term analytics capability that continues to expand as new business needs emerge.
“Our goal has always been to make data genuinely useful across the business, not just build more reports. Partnering with Notitia has helped us turn that strategy into practical analytics that our teams can actually use to make better decisions. Together, we’ve built a capability on Qlik that we can continue to expand and evolve as the business grows.”
HSK Ward is a leading Australian-owned food trading, manufacturing and supply chain business, home to McKenzie’s Foods and FTA Food Solutions, servicing retail, foodservice and industrial markets. The organisation continues to invest in technology and analytics to support informed decision-making, improve operational performance and enable long-term business growth.
