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!

Inside Info features at 2009 Qld Supply Chain & Logistics Conference

Posted on by Sonia Johnson

Everyone tracks their performance in the supply chain to a greater or lesser degree using Business Intelligence (BI) software or some basic form of reporting.  The emphasis however needs to be on the ease, integration and frequency with which this can be done. 

Phil Langdale, Services Director for Australia’s QlikView Master Reseller, Inside Info, will explore these issues at this year’s Queensland Supply Chain and Logistics Conference on 27 August at the Sofitel Hotel in Brisbane.    In particular, Phil will share why and how organisations like Amcor, Manassen Foods and Fujitsu General have moved to a business intelligence delivery strategy using QlikView business analysis software that simplifies the business itnelligence user experience, empowering users to think, navigate, see a result, explore and act all in real time to understand better supply chain performance, service levels, productivity, inventory and costs.

 Over 350 supply chain professionals are expected to attend the event.  The conference is a joint effort by the Queensland Divisions of the Supply Chain and Logistics Association of Australia (SCLAA), the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply – Australia (CIPSA), the Australasian Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS), the Australian Institute of Packaging (AIP), the South East Queensland Procurement Network, Queensland University of Technology School of Marketing and supported by the Australian Logistics Council.

How to set sheet object properties using Themes in QlikView

Posted on by Juan Martin

Among the tasks related to preparing a QlikView document for a production environment, there is one that tends to be underestimated: fixing the position and size of sheet objects. If the user interface is large enough (lots of sheets packed with objects, some of them hidden), manually changing the object properties one at a time can be a daunting task!

More often than not, it is irrelevant or misleading to allow the end user to move/resize objects such as list boxes, multiboxes, inputboxes, current selections and text objects. There is an option to automate fixing the objects: in QlikView Server Management Console / General we find a checkbox “Disallow moving and sizing objects” which is a switch that turns off this setting for all documents.

But then there is the case of charts and tables: for these, the situation might be different because sometimes it is desirable to allow users to maximize, move or enlarge these objects to avoid scrolling or just to have a better visualization due to differences in screen resolution.

While trying to find a way to sort this out I was encouraged to use themes to acomplish tasks like these. Although themes are usually used for other purposes I decided to play a little bit with the feature to see what I could find. It turned out to be a great way of automatically setting almost any property across a QlikView document. The wizard is intuitive and very powerful, but we need to understand how it works to be able to control which specific properties are changed when applying the theme.

Themes are files (extension qvt) that contain information about document/sheet/object properties. They are usually used to replicate a predefined look and feel on new QlikView documents but we can also benefit from them in other ways.

Themes are handled from the Layout tab, which is included in the document properties, sheet properties and object properties dialogs. There are two buttons: “Theme Maker” and “Apply Theme”. The first is a wizard to create your own themes or modify an existing one and the second is a wizard to apply an already existing theme. Machines with an installed QlikView developer have a default folder for themes (C:\Program Files\QlikView\Themes) which are ready to be used.

The Theme Maker wizard works based on the objects within the active document. The first step is to specify whether we want to create a new theme or change an existing one. In the second step we select the source to extract properties from, this could be the document itself, a sheet or a sheet object. If we select an object as the source, we can also specify the property groups that we want to work with in the theme: object type specific, caption & border and print settings. I suggest selecting them all to fully understand what will and what will not be included.

The third step consists of three windows (one for each property group) containing a list of available properties to include in the theme. Every checkbox we tick will include the property value of the source object in the theme. Unchecked boxes will mean the theme is “neutral” on that property, in other words, when we apply the theme to other objects those properties values will not be changed. One thing to consider: when we include a property into a theme its value can be modified later (i.e. by overriding with another source object) but we cannot make the theme “neutral” on that property anymore.

This is already saving me lots of time, I hope you find it useful too. It would be great to hear about similar experiences, so any comments or suggestions on other good uses of themes is welcomed.

Australian Businesses Prioritise Business Intelligence Software To Grow

Posted on by Sonia Johnson

Business intelligence experts and users will prioritise business intelligence software in 2009/2010 to deliver greater operational visibility and uncover business opportunities (74%), suggesting BI within medium-large enterprises is perceived as a revenue-generator ahead of saving time and money.

QlikTech and Inside Info, the Australian provider of QlikView business intelligence software, conducted the survey at the first annual QlikView Australian user conference, Qonnections, in Sydney this month. More than 100 specialist business intelligence users attended including customers, partners and other BI specialists.

Overwhelmingly, business intelligence software is used right across the enterprise, with senior management the primary users of BI and reporting (93 per cent) and sales and finance teams joint second.

The day-long Qonnections event featured speakers from Inside Info’s rapidly growing customer base (250+ in Australia) including Talent 2, Amcor and Manassen Foods, and partner, PwC. The majority of those attended to keep abreast of business intelligence product developments, share ideas and learn from others (65 per cent). Specifically, 29 per cent wanted to learn about QlikView 9’s advanced visualisations with 17 per cent interested in global search capabilities of data.

“We purposely chose to not run the typical IT industry, vendor-dominated user group forum for the QlikView community.  The calibre of speakers from well-known domestic and global brands at our first Qonnections user conference demonstrates the value that attendees see in QlikView, business intelligence itself and in learning from peers,“ said Stuart Barnard, Managing Director at Inside Info. “We’re tremendously grateful to everyone who attended and made the conference such a success.“

Inside Info launched QlikView’s new release, version 9, to its community at the event, showcasing new enhancements in the areas of enterprise manageability, live real-time push data into memory for faster querying, mobile user (iPhone, Blackberry and Java mobile) and cloud deployments, integrated reporting, advanced visualisations and usability improvements including global search to bring operational data to life.

Also a first for the business intelligence industry, QlikView’s Personal Edition is available as a fully-functional, free downloadable QlikView developer tool for personal use from www.insideinfo.com.au.

Making Business Analysis Work Like Your Brain

Posted on by Sonia Johnson

TIME magazine, features QlikTech’s CEO, Lars Bjork, talking about how QlikView makes business analysis work like you think, transforming the company into “one of the hotter business-intelligence-software companies around,” according to the magazine.  QlikView lets users search intuitively across databases and quickly displays information in charts and graphs designed for it.  No other in-memory business intelligence tool can achieve this with QlikView’s fast query performance and rapid application development, typically within 3 to 4 weeks. 

According to TIME, QlikTech has reversed the process of long, drawn-out and expensive business intelligence deployments. QlikView software lets users decide what data they want to collect, rather than sort through an information hierarchy. Want to know what sales were on Christmas Day? Who sold the most? In NSW? Where the temperature was above 30°? According to Bjork, “No computer would organise data this way, because most software was developed from hardware, meaning that it’s a slave to linear application. However, your brain doesn’t function like that. The idea is that by replicating some of the ways your brain works, the QlikView software can help users find what they need more quickly. The time to value is extremely fast,” says Bjork. “It’s what people focus on.”

Read the entire TIME mag article

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1912425-1,00.html