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

Bianco uses QlikView for Lawson M3 to uncover sales opportunities & improve IT productivity

Posted on by Stuart Barnard

Bianco Construction Supplies, a mid-market manufacturer and distributor for the Australian building and construction industry, has chosen QlikView business intelligence software working with Inside Info  for sales and logistics analysis of Lawson M3 data, to increase management responsiveness to trends, customer demands and generate new sales opportunities.

Based in South Australia, Bianco Group has sizeable operations, employing over 350 people and is a leading supplier of structural steel, reinforcing, portable building hire, construction equipment, tools and services to the building, construction, civil, Government and mining industries.   Bianco makes at least 800 customer deliveries every week around Australia.

Bianco had a limited view of sales and customer data, and disseminating and sharing this information across the business in a timely manner was a challenge.  Its IT department needed to reduce the time and manpower required to respond to adhoc report requests while accelerating the availability of up to the minute sales, delivery and customer information.

After reviewing traditional ‘cube’-based business intelligence approaches, Bianco chose QlikView as its business intelligence platform to build a firm base for quick decision-making.  The speed and ease of deployment, depth of multidimensional information analysis and the proven Lawson M3 application templates were decisive factors in Bianco’s choice of Inside Info and QlikView.

“It took one day for Inside Info to deliver our working QlikView sales performance application.  We took a few weeks to become familiar, made some changes and had finished our first BI deployment by the 30th day.  We were blown away.” said Peter Crescitelli, IT Project Manager, Bianco.

Using QlikView, Bianco now automates analysis of sales, margin, dispatch and customer trends and impacts across its business at the click of a button.  QlikView has improved IT staff productivity saving at least two hours out of each day in not serving ad hoc report requests, while senior management have more detailed visibility of operations.

“Since implementing QlikView into the Bianco sales department, our management team can now promptly drill down sales figures within minutes, without the need to rely on our IT department for reports.  Having drill down by customer, selling divisions , product , margin and many other options has taken monitoring sales figures and identifying opportunities to the next level,” said Alex Canova, National Sales Manager at Bianco.

“QlikView has driven a significant step change for Bianco in the way we work and think.  We have more detailed, flexible and faster data analysis than we ever thought possible from our Lawson ERP system.  We’ve increased our responsiveness to trends and customer demands and improved our ability to generate sales opportunities that quite possibly would not have existed before,” explains Peter Crescitelli, IT Project Manager at Bianco.  “Senior management are now analysing ‘living’ information themselves with QlikView, rather than relying on monthly automated hard copy reports.  Each user has a personalised analysis dashboard, with the real-time data they need to better run their sales divisions and operations.  By doing this, we turned what was a two-day delivery for ad hoc reports, into interactive on-demand access and instant insight for our business, while saving our IT team at least 500 hours a year in manual report development.”

QlikView has delivered Bianco extremely fast, flexibility to respond to changing business conditions.  Bianco’s sales managers now have ‘3D’ visibility of where business is lacking, where it’s striving, buying habits and product sales history to see where to improve to generate new sales opportunities.  Operational teams use QlikView daily to easily spot any inefficiency in the supply chain over its 800+ weekly deliveries.  Having this information personalised and easily at hand is what QlikView is all about.

Inside Info Announces Launch of QlikView 9 in Australia

Posted on by Sonia Johnson

Inside Info has launched QlikView 9 for Australian businesses seeking an affordable business intelligence solution that is fast to roll out, suits 1-1000+ users and can be instantly interrogated by anyone easily via multiple interfaces, complete with user-assisted global search and enhanced graphics to bring operational data to life.

Available now ‘on premise’, ‘via the cloud’, or ‘via a mobile’, QlikView 9 continues its trend of giving anytime, anywhere business answers to organisations needing immediate decisions from often complex multiple data sources.

Highlights of QlikView 9 include:

  • Enterprise Manageability— supports large deployments, data sets and PDF reporting
  • Real time information – live real-time push data into memory and refresh
  • Cloud Availability— through Amazon’s reliable Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service
  • QlikView Mobile— launch of Java Mobile, Blackberry and iPhone clients
  • Usability and Simplicity— enhanced visualisation and search capabilities
  • QlikView Personal/Developer Edition— free downloadable developer tool for personal use

“QlikView has already set the wheels in motion for a major transition in the BI space with its simplicity, usability and time to value. Uptake of QlikView by mid-large enterprises to date is a testament to that globally and locally,” said Stuart Barnard, Managing Director at Inside Info. “QlikView 9 makes it even easier for customers to deploy QlikView on a grand scale while also making it simpler for small and medium businesses to get value from BI.  More and more organisations understand the value of switching to QlikView because of its dramatically higher project success rate.”

Extending Enterprise Capabilities

QlikView 9 offers more support for larger deployments than ever through significant new manageability, performance and scalability, real-time data and reporting enhancements, including: highly-visual control panels of all servers and modules, automatic load balancing for better memory utilisation and faster queries, field frequency calculation optimisation to better handle large queries, AJAX and Java Thin-Client collaboration support, live real-time push data into memory and refresh, and PDF report generation and distribution.

Deployable in the cloud

QlikView 9 can be deployed in just 15 minutes in the cloud using Amazon’s EC2 Web service to speed up time-to-value, scale on-the-fly, and give lower upfront cost structures. This gives the option to businesses of being platform neutral with no infrastructure cost.

Powerful, interactive mobile access

QlikView 9 is the first BI tool designed specifically for all major mobile interfaces including the Apple iPhone, BlackBerry and Symbian-based smartphones. QlikView for iPhone fully leverages the Multi-Touch interface and location-based GPS features to enhance QlikView 9’s interactive capabilities. QlikView 9 is also available on the majority of other mobile platforms through the new QlikView Java Mobile client for devices running Java Virtual Machine.

Advanced visualisation & search

QlikView 9 brings business answers to life with new, state-of-the-art visualisations, including detailed charting features such as spark lines, whiskers, trellis charts, and live chart backgrounds.

QlikView 9 also incorporates the BI industry’s most comprehensive global search functionality. It enables users to search every QlikView field simultaneously, from anywhere in the application, with just one click. As user types in their search words, QlikView instantly highlights available matches for immediate access. Users can search hundreds of fields at once to ensure every element of their QlikView database is investigated for matches.

QlikView 9 Enables Anyone to Create Custom Apps

A first for the BI industry, QlikView Personal Edition, is a fully-functional, free downloadable QlikView developer tool for personal use.  It now means creating personalised applications is easy for those with no previous training or technical expertise, and is no longer the exclusive domain of power users.  Users can design applications for any environment, from the largest to the smallest QlikView deployments.

Availability

QlikView 9, including QlikView Personal Edition, is now available to all customers as a download through www.insideinfo.com.au