QlikView Wins Healthcare IT Innovation Award

Posted on by Admin

QlikView was recently recognised with the IT Innovation Award in the Best New Technology Category at the Everything Channel’s recent Healthcare IT Summit in the USA.   The Summit brought together industry analysts, IT executives from healthcare insurer and provider organizations, and leading vendors for collaborative discussions on pressing issues, best practices and the latest technology that can improve the performance of their organisations.

QlikView is utilised by hundreds of healthcare companies and solution providers worldwide, including Medicalis, whose web-based analytics application allows business and clinical decision makers to improve the quality of diagnostic imaging in the patient care cycle.

“Traditional BI solutions are often too cumbersome, difficult to scale, expensive and slow to deliver value,” said John DeLong, Vice President Product Strategy & Clinical Content, Medicalis. “Leveraging QlikView has enabled us to deliver clinical knowledge in a quick and precise manner so healthcare professionals involved in patient care can make well informed decisions.”

Hundreds of senior IT executives attending the Healthcare Summit completed confidential ballots to select technology providers for the Healthcare IT Innovation Awards after previewing and learning about new technologies and services in private boardroom appointments.

“After years of seeing IT as merely transaction processing and distributing information, CXOs and external influencers now expect IT to be a key differentiator,” said Nancy Hammervik, Senior Vice President, Events, Everything Channel. “We congratulate the winners of the Healthcare IT Innovation awards.”

QlikView’s Customer Experience Continues To Lead In Business Intelligence

Posted on by Admin

QlikView software continues to lead in customer satisfaction of business intelligence products based on three independent user-survey reports this year from Business Applications Research Centre, Aberdeen Group and IDC. 

“IDC’s research has showed that there is a growing trend in Australia and New Zealand towards businesses giving customer facing employees BI tools to access timely and accurate information, to enhance customer experiences and to develop cross-selling opportunities,” said Louise Francis, Senior Market Analyst – Global Retail Insights, IDC.  “As a result IDC expects simple, intuitive applications, such as QlikView, will become increasingly popular with customers, particularly in the mid market.”

An IDC survey sponsored by QlikTech revealed that QlikView customers achieve significantly higher satisfaction with their BI systems than general BI users. When asked to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5, 96% of QlikView users indicated the top three levels of satisfaction. This compares very favourably with results from IDC’s 2008 survey (carried out in conjunction with InfoWorld) where 70% of general BI users indicated the top three levels of satisfaction with their BI implementations.  The survey found that QlikView is a BI customer favourite because of its average return on investment (ROI) of 186%[1] and a total cost of ownership (TCO) that is 53%[2] of other BI solutions.

QlikView Attains Highest Customer Loyalty Score in Software Industry
IDC found that the significant success QlikView customers are experiencing has resulted in many of them recommending it to others. Net Promoter score is a key measure of customer loyalty based on the question, “How likely is it that you would recommend a product/service to a friend or colleague?” QlikView ranked higher than the previous leader in the 2009 Net Promoter Score benchmark tests in the “Technology: Computer Software” category according to SatMetrix, the creator of the Net Promoter methodology[3].

Two other reports also found similar results:

  • Aberdeen Group named QlikView the sole “Champion” in the 2009 Aberdeen AXIS for BI/Performance Management report, applying its AXIS methodology through a customer-centric assessment tool.   As stated in the report, “QlikTech customers have consistently reported high praise and satisfaction with the company and its products, and are most likely to have achieved value from the purchase of the software for performance management projects. The software interface is known for its intuitiveness and this means that end-users are likely to adapt to its use quickly.”
  •  Business Application Research Center ranked QlikView #1 for Ease of Use and Customer Loyalty in its BI Survey 8 – the world’s largest independent survey of Business Intelligence and Performance Management users. QlikView received top honors in Benefits Achieved, Inclination to Buy More and Lowest Consulting Spend.

“These results consistently show that the QlikView customer experience sets a new bar in business intelligence,” said Stuart Barnard, Managing Director at Inside Info, Master Reseller of QlikView in Australia. “One which includes rapid time to value; custom dashboards with Google-like ease of use; minimal professional services; and fast query performance, even on very large data sets.”

 

[1] IDC White Paper sponsored by QlikTech, “Time to Value and ROI from BI: The QlikView Customer Experience, Doc # IDCWP16R3, October 2009

[2] IDC White Paper sponsored by QlikTech, “The TCO of BI: The QlikView Customer Experience, Doc # IDCWP16R, October 2009

[3] IDC White Paper sponsored by QlikTech, “Success and Value from BI: The QlikView Customer Experience, Doc # IDCWP16R2, October 2009

Managing Expressions in QlikView business intelligence software: the use of variables

Posted on by Juan Martin

In this post I want to share with you a good practice in handling the various expressions that exist in a QlikView business intelligence document. The most used expressions are the ones used in charts, where they hold measures such as Sum(Sales), Sum(Price*Quantity), etcetera. These are the ones more likely to be reused by other objects and in different sheets. There are many other expressions including Chart Attributes, Color Expressions and Show Conditions, you can see them all by going to the menu Settings/Expression Overview.

 The use of expressions can be intensive in QlikView, especially when having a sophisticated user interface. There is a growing need to handle these expressions in a more efficient way, and this can be accomplished by the use of variables.

 Reasons for holding expressions in variables:

  • To achieve reuse: the formula for a measure such as Sales usually remains the same across a QlikView document, so it doesn’t make sense to write it on every chart.
  • To enforce consistency in the formulas: by avoiding the risk of having different formulas that calculate the same measure.
  • To provide an single point to apply changes: if and when a formula needs to be changed, you only need to change one variable and all the charts and other objects that refer to that variable will follow.
  • To allow the end user to make changes through an input box, when needed. This could be the case of targets for KPIs or general parameters.

Variables can be created manually by going to the menu Settings / Variable Overview or by using the SET/LET statements in the script. They have a name and a value, which can hold any sort of strings or numbers, and they can be used as a reference from every sheet object. The Input Box is the object designed to show variables in the user interface.

If you want to start experimenting with moving your expressions to variables try the following:

  1. Go to the Expressions tab on one of your charts and copy one of the formulas, for instance Sum(SalesValue)
  2. Go to the menu Settings / Variable Overview and click on the “Add” button to create a variable. Give it a name such as vFormulaSales (it is a best practice to have all variable names starting with a v to help differenciate them from Fields).
  3. Select your variable from the variable list an paste the formula from the chart in the “Definition” text box.  If the formula starts with an = sign, remove it. Finally click on “OK” to save the changes.
  4. Go back to the Expressions tab of your chart properties and replace the formula with the following: $(vFormulaSales)

 The $ sign expansion indicates the string contained in the variable is a formula that needs to be calculated.

The final step is to replace the cloned formulas in all the other objects so they all refer to the same formula contained in the new variable.  Every new object that needs to show Sum(Sales) should also refer to the variable.

 You may already have quite a few QlikView business analysis documents where you didn’t apply this practice, but it’s never too late to get started.  In the long term it’s really worth it.

Inside Info Appoints Retail & Wholesale Provider Markinson, QlikView Reseller

Posted on by Sonia Johnson

Australian retailers and wholesalers are set for state-of-the art inventory, customer and sales intelligence following a new partner appointment by Inside Info, the business analytics specialist.

Inside Info, Australia’s master reseller of the world’s fastest growing business intelligence software QlikView, has appointed specialist partner, Markinson, an Australian provider of enterprise management and point-of-sale software solutions, to extend existing reach into retail and wholesale companies.

Markinson which counts JB Hi-Fi, T2, Haigh Australia and Rexel among its customers, will resell QlikView to provide its customer base with access to powerful and instant visual analysis, dashboards and reporting of stock, sales, financial and marketing data with measurable ROI in just weeks.

QlikView analyses hundreds of millions of cells of data at a transactional level in seconds, irrespective of the number of users, offering Markinson customers a highly scalable business intelligence solution that is simple to use for any employee of wholesale distribution and retail businesses across Australasia.

“We’ve used QlikView to power reporting for our retail management solution, Shopkeeper, for some time and have now taken this to a new level.  QlikView will also be used to complement our MomentumPro enterprise management solution which is why we sought to extend our relationship with QlikView and Inside Info.  Customers can now reap the benefits of one-click analytics without the cost and complexity of traditional BI software,” said Ian Whiting, CEO at Markinson.

“We’re excited to have Markinson as part of our local QlikView partner program,” said Stuart Barnard, Managing Director at Inside Info.  “More than 500 retailers and distributors use QlikView globally because it provides simple access to a rich, interactive  and holistic view of demand and supply metrics and performance.    Sales, inventory and management dashboards can be custom- built and modified in weeks designed to help retailers and wholesalers make faster, more informed decisions.”

QlikView Expands into China, Hong Kong & Taiwan

Posted on by Sonia Johnson

QlikTech today announced that it has launched a comprehensive go-to-market strategy in Greater China, following its recent success expanding in Asia Pacific with its Japan launch earlier this year.  QlikTech is poised to make significant inroads into the BI market in China (where IDC estimated that the total market had a value of US0 million in 2008 after growing some 15%), as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

QlikTech has underlined a major commitment to servicing the Greater China market lead by Shanghai-based Master Reseller Commit Info, who will be launching the Chinese version of QlikView into the region.

Strategic agreement has also been reached with Kingdee Software, a leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) software Company headquartered in Shenzhen, who posseses the largest number of users in China.   Kingdee selected QlikView to be integrated into the business intelligence module of its K/3 ERP standard edition system, to provide its customers with the most powerful business information analysis tools. As the number one supplier of ERP to small to medium enterprises for the past four years (according to IDC) Kingdee’s 600,000 customers and 1,100 partners create a powerful network. A number of Kingdee customers purchased QlikView immediately after the announcement of its availability.

“We are thrilled to unveil major initiatives in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan that we believe will quickly make QlikView an important force in Greater China. With the traditional players lacking QlikView’s associative capabilities and rapid time to value, we expect to win business from companies that have been ill-served by their current solutions and are fed up with failed and expensive attempts to implement BI,” said Lars Bjork, CEO of QlikTech. “QlikView now offers companies of all sizes in Greater China a whole new class of BI software so they can get to the answers they need quickly, and have the flexibility to make the strategic changes that will sustain their business for competitive advantage. The era of antiquated, hard-to-use BI software is coming to an end.”

QlikTech has over 40 customers in Greater China in many sectors, including food and beverage, financial services, logistics, government and public sector, manufacturing, media, pharmaceutical, real estate, retail and trading. Current customers include CTR, Homemart, Little Sheep, Sidel, Bank of China and Zhonghai Fund Management Co. Ltd.

Copy and Paste Object Expressions in QlikView and Save Hours!

Posted on by Richard Byard

A neat little feature of QlikView business intelligence software that we happened across one day is the ability to copy and paste expressions within and between objects. It sounds so simple but in complex applications where you are reusing the same expressions many times, or using slight variations of the same one, it can save a huge amount of time.

 

Simply right click on an expression in QlikView under the expressions tab of the object properties window, select copy, right click in the space beneath the last expression and select paste… This can be done within the same object or the expression can be pasted into a different object.

 

I know it doesn’t sound like the labour saving tip you were possibly expecting BUT the expression will copy all of the number, presentation, visual cues and other formatting which will save a huge amount of re-clicking and effort.

 

As an example:

You have a complex set analysis expression for sales quantity and want to create one for order quantity. The only difference will be the field name so why not copy the whole expression and simply change the fieldname. You know the formula works and now you don’t even have to think about the formatting as it’s all done for you…

 

The smallest things make the biggest differences!