Ivan Kjellenberg

HE PAINTS WITH DATA

Ivan Kjellenberg

Position at PostNord:

System Specialist at TPL Norrköping, Sweden. Closest colleagues: Jerker Måntelius, Fedja Imocanin, Richard Nilsson, Mika Ruuth and Björn Spångberg.

See Ivan’s work! Follow us on Instagram #peoplebypostnord

Ivan Kjellenberg is an artist. His brush is called Qlik Sense and his paints are numbers and data.

THE RESULT IS VISIBLE ON screens throughout PostNord TPL’s premises in Norrköping, Sweden. How many parcels must be loaded in the vehicle before 14.20? Check the screen! Is the temperature in the premises where the medicines are packed correct? Check the screen!

Because where others see columns, rows, fives, eights and percentages – Ivan

Kjellenberg sees colors, circles, curves and pictures. He paints with data.

His realization that things can be visualized and automated came at the office, when he was manually sitting and producing reports. Day after day after day. “But, I thought, why sit and do the same thing every day?” Ivan says. “You should be able to look and interpret the data directly. So I connected to a database with my Excel file instead – and it was much better and easier than constantly reformatting it. Numbers have that ability. In the right hands, they can illuminate, facilitate, guide and make a difficult task easier to tackle.”

AND THAT’S exactly what Ivan does in his role as a systems specialist. He learned about a software called Qlik Sense and convinced management to let him go on a training course on how to use it. Now he transforms large volumes of numbers into clear graphs, reports and charts, so that the right people get the right information and don’t have to think about anything besides what’s relevant to them.

“I build the things that are done automatically”, he says. “Those who want to see the data in a certain way will see it automatically and don’t have to produce manual reports.” Can you provide an example?

“It’s quite varied. But there’s a lot of warehouse data, such as orders and how much we have packed each day. If the truck is scheduled to leave soon, we can see how many orders we need to pack until it has to leave. And when we work with pharmaceuticals, the data can consist of temperature monitoring or making sure we have the right traceability.” Would you say that you are an expert in highlighting facts and processes?

“Yes, I’ve become engrossed in it. Your imagination is really the only limit to what you can do with data. You can show it where, how and when you want. It can be on people’s own screens when they log in, or on a screen in the production process.”

IT’S EASY to believe that people like Ivan Kjellenberg love math, counting and calculating. But he says the opposite is true.

“No, I can’t even be bothered to split the bill at the pub”, he says. “That's why I like this – you don't have to do the math yourself. The lazier you are, the better the solutions, ha ha!"

“The fun part is seeing the difference it makes for people. Most people are like me and don’t like to split bills at the pub or produce manual reports. When you’ve generated a report on how many orders we’ve packed in a day, people can focus on other things instead of producing this tedious data. It makes people very happy and that makes me happy.”

IVAN USES THE WORD

“nerd” to describe himself. He has always enjoyed research and science. When not at work, his usual pastimes are runs in the woods, trips to lakes and Star Trek.

“I’m on a mission to watch all the TV episodes”, he says. “I don’t even know how many there are, but I started in 2020, during the pandemic. I’m guessing it will take me a year in total.” Do you keep track of all the numbers in your everyday life, too? Have you made graphs for how to watch Star Trek or all your runs?

“Ha ha, no. Even I draw the line at that. When I go running in the woods I try to put things like that out of my mind. But when I took a course in the Qlik Sense software, the instructor had linked the Swedish Food Agency’s register of inspected pubs to the map in his car. When he went to buy food, he could check whether the restaurant had received any criticisms. That’s fun. There are lots of open databases you can use.”

“Your imagination is really the only limit to what you can do with data.”