Reporting vs. Analysis and QlikView

This post is moved to Reporting vs. Analysis and QlikView post in Business Intelligence and Beyond blog.

Reporting versus Analytics
Photo : Adobe Digital Marketing Blog

QlikView and Salesforce Seminar in Singapore on 25th April 2014

Business Intelligence technologies are a must-have in every business to make informed decisions and keep up-to speed with the ever-evolving markets. QlikView’s disruptive technology makes it a key player and leader in the industry; with its flexibility and powerful analytics environment, building QlikView apps can be mastered by both, business users as well as developers.

QlikView is a great platform to develop business analytics application to provide Salesforce users with key-pipeline related data at their fingertips. A QlikView Salesforce Analytics application allows you to easily load and analyze all your CRM information directly from your salesforce.com account. With QlikView for Salesforce, information can be explored intuitively and visually – with drill-down detail in just a few clicks.

If you are in Singapore and a Salesforce user, do not miss this seminar on QlikView and Salesforce by Knowledge Management Solutions (KMS). KMS will perform a demo presentation which will cover the following topics:

- Drive higher levels of sales efficiency and effectiveness
- Measure pipeline trends across the entire sales cycle
- Analyze customers and prospects across multiple dimensions and data sources
- Plan and track more effective marketing campaigns and linked sales activities
- Increase demand generation, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities

Sample QlikView Salesforce Analytics Dashboard

Date: 25th April 2014     |      Time: 10 am to 1 pm
You can register here. Or email carlota@kms-world.com with your name, designation, company, official email, phone# for registration. 

QlikView Workshop: Build your first Business Intelligence Application in 1 day

Business Intelligence technologies are a must-have in every business to make informed decisions and keep up-to speed with the ever-evolving markets. QlikView’s disruptive technology makes it a key player and leader in the industry; with its flexibility and powerful analytics environment, building QlikView apps can be mastered by both, business users as well as developers.

You are invited to join Knowledge Management Solutions Pte Ltd for a 1 day QlikView hands-on Training Session in Singapore. The hands-on approach allows you to build a QlikView application that integrates real data from several different sources and presents it in dashboards, analyses and reports.

QlikView Business Intelligence dashboards allow organizations to measure and track the performance of key processes.  QlikView’s click driven, visually interactive interface gives users instant access to top level metrics and record level detail, revealing unanticipated business insights.  Through QlikView disruptive, in-memory associative approach, business users have experiences unprecedented success and satisfaction.

You can register here. Or email carlota@kms-world.com with your name, designation, company, official email, phone# for registration.

Date:  
7th of February, 2014

Time:  
9 am to 6 pm (registration starts at 8:30 am)

Venue:  
55 Market Street #03-01Singapore 048941

Agenda:
1. Introduction to QlikView Business Intelligence
2. Create your Business Intelligence Application with QlikView
Tea Break
3. Data extraction from different sources
4. Data modeling
Lunch break
5. Design of graphs and charts
6. Build your advanced dashboard (Analytics and Reporting)

Notes: This is a paid training event at SGD300 (original price is SGD1,250).

Best QlikView Book in the market: QlikView 11 for Developers

QlikView's distruptive technology makes it a key player and a leader in business intelligence industry. With its flexible and powerful analytics environment, agile development process and relatively easy-to-learn architecture, it is a must business application for every company who would like to make informed business decisions and analysis-guided strategies.

If you want to develop QlikView dashboards for your company, the best way is to engage with an experienced QlikView solution provider that will do the development for you. But if you wish and prefer to spend the time, you can also learn it. The best way again is to get a good QlikView training but you can also buy a QlikView book and learn it. And if you would like a QlikView book advise, we would definitely suggest "QlikView 11 for Developers". Written by Miguel Garcia and Barry Harmsen, we use this book alongside Qlik's standard QlikView training material to train our own consultants. I think we have 5 - 7 copies in our company which is a QlikView partner in Singapore.

We strongly recommend "QlikView 11 for Developers" because it uses a hands-on approach and is well written. Miguel Garcia is a Business Intelligence Consultant and QlikView Solutions Architect and is quite experienced in QlikView implementations. The book shows this.

QlikView 11 for Developers takes a real life data and builds a QlikView application about Airline Operations (not your standard and boring sales performance dataset). The application evolves from chapter to chapter, along with your skills, going from a simple proof-of-concept to creating a data model, adding a custom style, building a dashboard, and handling and manipulating the source via script.

QlikView 11 for Developers

Singapore hospital uses analytics to cut hospital readmissions

Khoo Teck Puat Hospital (KTPH), a 550-bed hospital in Singapore, is using analytics to cut unnecessary readmissions which wastes hospital bed capacity and creates unnecessary cost:

"To further reduce unnecessary readmissions, KTPH recently identified a group of 800 patients with two hospital admissions in a six-month period. Using an analytics technology, doctors were able to target specific patients who were most likely to be readmitted for a third time in the following month.

“This allowed our nurses to prioritise their home visits for more vulnerable patients,” said Mr Lau. He added that the pilot project achieved results of over 90 per cent accuracy. There are currently 800 patients in KTPH’s AIP programme, which does not require additional payment by patients. Mr Lau said that, with timely intervention, the hospital can potentially free up to 58 beds in a six-month period."
Source : KTPH project cuts hospital readmissions

KTPH’s Ageing-in-Place (AIP) programme is an initiative which identifies and offers assistance to patients with a history of frequent readmissions.

Khoo Teck Puat Hospital (Chinese: 邱德拔医院; Malay: Hospital Khoo Teck Puat) is a 550-bed hospital located at Yishun in Singapore. The hospital was officially opened on 15 November 2010, but began seeing outpatients and day surgery patients on 28 March 2010. It is named after late Singapore banker and hotel owner Tan Sri Khoo Teck Puat.

Business Intelligence vs. Business Analytics

Business Analytics (BA) and Business Intelligence (BI) are usually used used interchangeably but there are some key differences between these two and Business Analytics is not Business Intelligence!

Business analytics makes extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive modeling, and fact-based management to drive decision making. Analytics may be used as input for human decisions or may drive fully automated decisions. On the other hand Business intelligence is more about querying, reporting, OLAP, and "alerts".

In this sense, most business intelligence / business analytics tools in the market offers a mix of BA and BI. Some are more BA tool than BI tool and some are more BI tool than BA tool.

Below image shows the Business Analytics levels. There are 2 main level: Reactive decision making and Proactive decision making. And Business Analytics is a term which should be used for proactive  decision making, which is predicting the future. So from bottom up the tools you have (in the order of increasing competitive advantage and degree of intelligence):

Business Intelligence vs. Business Analytics

 Standard Reporting - What happened?
Ad Hoc Reports - How many, how often, where?
Query Drilldown - Where exactly is the problem?
Alerts - What actions are needed?
Statistical Analysis - What is happening?
Forecasting - What will happen next?
Predictive Analysis - What is the best that can happen?
Optimization - Lets' act on it.

KMS QlikView Service Packs in Singapore

QlikView is one of the most popular business intelligence solutions in the market. It is also highly popular here in Singapore where a QlikTech (the company developing the QlikView application) has a regional office and some 11 partners serving the customers.

Knowledge Management Solutions (KMS) is the largest partner of QlikView in Singapore. The company was in fact once QlikView South East Asia from 2004 (when they have brought QlikView in Singapore and became the 3rd office of QlikTech outside Europe after South Africa and Israel) to 2010 (when QlikTech came to Singapore and took the name back). KMS is still the largest QlikView partner in the region with offices in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Hong Kong.

KMS now offers irresistible service packages for QlikView to existing QlikView customers. Called Elite Service Pack and Lite Service Pack, the company opens its expertise on QlikView and business intelligence (one of the most in the world) as QlikView Server Monitoring, QlikView Enhancements, QlikView Training Services, Access To Knowledge Management Solutions Online Learning Management, QlikView Health Check, Special Offers & Rates plus Designated Account Management Team.

The Service Packs are very good solutions for companies with QlikView who need someone to develop more applications and do extra stuff related to QlikView. Instead of hiring someone with QlikView experience, which is difficult to find and expensive, they can for example buy Elite Service Pack which is priced at 5,000 SGD per month or 50,000 per year. The package comes with 50 man-days QlikView Enhancement feature which includes changes to existing QlikView applications, new QlikView application development, QlikView scripting, QliKView version migration, applying patches, etc.

For more information download QlikView Service Packs (PDF) brochure.

QlikView Service Packages in Singapore

Description of Features
QlikView Server Monitoring
Assist in-house IT Infra on QlikView
- Solving issues on QlikView Reload Jobs
- Solving QV application access issues by users
- Periodic Reports
- Alert any impact of OS related service/security patch upgrades on QlikView

QlikView Enhancements
- Changes to Existing Applications
- New Application Development
- QlikView Scripting
- QliKView Version Migration, Applying Patches, etc.

QlikView Training Services
ELITE
Conducted once every 2 months, 6 times/yr
1 trainee per session
1 training class type per session
LITE
Conducted once per quarter, 4 times/yr

5 trainees per session

Free Power-User Training
QV Server
QV Power User Training
QV Data Modeling Training

Access to KMS’ Online Learning Management
- Online courses and learning with LMS QV introductions, online courses, feature updates
- QV license maintenance must be

QlikView Health Check
- Perform review of QlikView applications used
- Emphasis to optimize QlikView functionality to enhance
reporting & analysisneeds of users
- KMS’ QlikView Application Expert to visit onsite
- Provides for 2 half-day sessions per year

Special Offers & Rates
Get special discount on KMS’ Add-on Tools ie.
- Click2Manage
- Click2Mail
Special discount on professional service manday rate. Valid for QlikView system under valid licence maintenance.

Designated Account Management Team
KMS will assign a designated team for QV Server Monitoring
Service and other value-added services.
- Account Manager
- Project Manager
- Technical System Consultant
Reports and Updates:
- Customer Update meetings in each quarter
- Status of monitoring activities
- Status of support activities
- Single-point-of-access/contact

What is business intelligence?

What is business intelligence? When you ask this question to the World Wide Web to get a definition of business intelligence, you end up having a lot of answers from a business intelligence sales man perspective. These answers are good starting points but many lack information on what does business intelligence really mean for you?

In their great book named Adaptive Business Intelligence, Zbigniew Michalewicz, Martin Schmidt, Matthew Michalewicz, Constantin Chiriac, gives a very good definition of business intelligence and benefit perspective.

Business Intelligence systems are “software systems and services which extracts knowledge from raw data” writes say. “A business intelligence system is responsible for collecting and digesting data, and presenting knowledge in a friendly way (thus enhancing the end-user’s ability to make good decisions)”.
Writers argue that the business managers realized data raw data and information provided by traditional enterprise information systems are not very useful if the organization has necessary tools and processes to analyse them. Business Intelligence tools fill the gap between information and knowledge. Their goal is to access and retrieve data from various sources, convert raw data to information and then knowledge and provide an easy to use graphical user interface to display these knowledge.

At this point it may be confusing for you if you do not have the clear understanding of the difference between data, information and knowledge.  Data is “raw” numbers, symbols, etc. collected daily. Data is prepared into information, which is “organized data,” pre-processed, cleaned, arranged into structures, and stripped of redundancy. Knowledge on the other hand is “integrated information,” which includes facts and relationships that have been perceived, discovered, or learned.

One of the most important reasons for you to collect data, process them into information and store this information is to use it to answer questions and make decisions. And a good decision in the modern fast pace of corporate world has to satisfy two conditions to be effective: the decision needs to be right and decision needs to be on time. A timely but wrong decision does not worth so much and in many cases right but late decisions are also worthless. To have right and timely decision, you need good decision making skills and experience but also right and timely knowledge. But usually what managers have is not the knowledge, they have information and they need to spend time to convert it to knowledge before the information becomes useful for decision making. Business Intelligence system fills that gap.

So business intelligence is not an excel on steroids with better charting, reporting, slicing and dicing tool. Benefits of business intelligence goes far beyond that. A business intelligence system has an important role in the corporate MIS ecosystem: it converts information to right knowledge to enable right decisions!


By the way, the book, Adaptive Business Intelligence, actually goes beyond Business Intelligence into realm of Artificial Intelligence where the software system not only converts information into knowledge but also converts knowledge into decisions by means of Artificial Intelligence:

“Today, most business managers realize that a gap exists between having the right knowledge and making the right decision. Because this gap affects management’s ability to answer fundamental business questions (such as “What should be done to increase profits? Reduce costs? Or increase market share?”), the future of business intelligence lies in systems that can provide answers and recommendations, rather than mounds of knowledge in the form of reports. The future of business

Intelligence lies in systems that can make decisions!  … While business intelligence is often defined as “a broad category of application programs and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data,” the term Adaptive Business Intelligence can be defined as “the discipline of using prediction and optimization techniques to build self-learning ‘decisioning’ systems” (as the above diagram shows). Adaptive Business Intelligence systems include elements of data mining, predictive modeling, forecasting, optimization, and adaptability, and are used by business managers to make better decisions.”
Source : Adaptive Business Intelligence - Chapter 1

It may sound futuristic but these systems exist and are successfully used by several companies. For example one such application type, Advanced Planning and Scheduling, is in the market for nearly 2 decades and used by many enterprises to drive their decision making processes.  For example, 3 writers of this book, Zbigniew Michalewicz, Matthew Michalewicz and Constantin Chiriac runs a company named SolveIT Software in Australian company which provides supply & demand optimisation based on Advanced planning & scheduling, Supply chain network optimisation, Demand planning & forecasting and Predictive modelling.

Business Analytics Professional Short Courses

According to a recent survey conducted by IBM among 3,000 Chief Information Officers (CIO) around the globe, Business Analytics and Cloud Computing will be in the top 5 technology priorities for middle to large sized companies for the next 5 years. Business Analytics, with Singapore Government's focus on productivity increase and marketing afford of Business Intelligence and Business Analytics software solutions provider SAS, is a buzzword in Singapore recently. There is no week passing without a new development in the business analytics area.

Business Analytics can be defined as a practice of gaining business insight by exploring corporate data with the help of statistical tools. Business Analytics tools has a great potential to increase productivity in offices where high skilled, high paid employees spend a significant portion of their time to manually massage data using spreadsheets.

Below is from The Performance Ideas Blog:

"Business Analytics has a huge potential to help us increase productivity. And I would argue that there is plenty of ‘low-hanging’ fruit. Think about a story that happened to me a short while ago: A CFO decided to implement a dashboard of about 50-60 KPIs (let’s not start arguing about that part…). His team was excited and started building a 65 page Powerpoint master template. The CFO was delighted. Guess what – three people spent almost two weeks per month on preparing this dashboard. Lot’s of time was wasted on extracting data from different source systems. Lot’s of time was wasted on creating Excel lookups, queries and charts. To sum it up: A big waste of time. The low hanging-fruit came in the form of a traditional BI platform. We hooked up the source systems, created the reports once, linked different charts to Powerpoint and voila: the monthly reporting book. It took one person about a day per month to check & refresh the data (there was still some manual labor involved). Consider the difference: three people for 10 days vs 1 person for 1 day. 30 man days vs 1 man day. Not bad?"
Source: The great productivity leap?

Knowledge Management Solutions (KMS), the largest and the oldest QlikView expert partner in Singapore, is having detailed QlikView Courses where you can learn to use QlikView Business Discovery Platform to gain insight from massive and/or business data for making informed decision.

KMS offers different types of training courses in Singapore. Other than standard 5-days fully detailed QlikView Developer Courses , KMS also offers 2-days long QlikView Power User training courses as well as a 1-day introductory Build Your Own Business Intelligence Application in a Day.

You can mail them here : levent@kms-world.com

QlikView Pricing and Cost

Business Intelligence cost can vary from scope to scope. More, it can vary for the same company and the same scope due to the approach, special prices, etc. Unfortunately most vendors do not publish their business intelligence software licensing and pricing publicly. You need to engage with them to get prices and you have almost noway to know exact pricing. These vendors usually sign a non-disclosure agreement with their existing customers so you cannot even get an answer for the cost and pricing by detailed investigation.

QlikView, one of the most innovative business intelligence solutions in the market, is one of the few business intelligence solution provider whose licensing and pricing options and prices are publicly available. QlikTech (the developer of QlikView) is not only transparent on the pricing and licensing but also provides many options for its customers to have optimum license mix.

This is great news if you are looking forward for a business intelligence solutions and QlikView is on the card but this flexibility is also a source of confusion for newcomers to QlikView world. QlikView Sales Managers usually do not make the life easier as most of the answers about QlikView pricing from them will be "it depends".

Knowledge Management Solutions, largest QlikView consulting expert in Singapore and South East Asia, has a short Qlikview-Licensing-And-Pricing paper explaining different license options and their features (and limitations) in the context of QlikView pricing and cost.

QlikView is one of the few business intelligence software in the market
with licensing and price options are publicly available.

Finding the best initial installation and defining the best roadmap may save you substantial amount of money if done by an experienced QlikView consulting company. So we suggest you take a look at this paper.

You can download this QlikView (PDF) paper here: KMS-Qlikview-Licensing-And-Pricing.pdf.