by Keith Smith, Senior Consultant
Witnessing the Transformation
One of QlikView’s greatest strengths is the ability to connect to multiple data sources of interest (ex: Oracle, Excel, *.csv, *.txt, etc.) and load all of this data into QlikView as part of one comprehensive data model. QlikView can truly become a “one-stop shopping destination” for all of your relevant business data.
The applications I developed encompassed manufacturer orders & shipments, channel inventory & sell-thru, industry performance & vendor market share (from external market research), and channel partner demographics. QlikView’s in-memory technology provided the perfect solution to load millions of rows of detailed, granular transactional data (no need to summarize in advance), perform complex calculations on this data on the fly, and then present it in a tabular or graphical format, easily understood by the business user. Additional filtering is performed with simple mouse clicks.
One sales executive shared my passion for fact-based decisions, and had come to understand the power of “one-second results”. No longer held back by inaccurate, pre-conceived notions of what was (or wasn’t) possible to analyze, he became a frequent visitor to my cubicle, hungry for new information and full of ideas of new “business discoveries” we needed to be making.
A company like ours thrived on maintaining healthy, mutually beneficial relationships with technology channel partners. When either party is motivated purely by self-interest, the other party suffers. We had concerns that one of our distributors was not “playing by the rules”, and we needed to address the issue. Analysis was needed in order to effectively evaluate each of the options we were considering. QlikView enabled me to quickly generate a report (from data that had already been loaded) that provided a detailed view into this distributor’s business. These insights were then used to make a decision on the best course of action to pursue. All of this took place in one day, not weeks or months that seems to be the more commonly (yet unfortunate) expected timeframe for in-depth studies of this nature.
NEXT: From My Cold, Clicking Hands
In case you missed it, read Corporate Culture Transformed – An Insider’s View (Part 2 of 4).
For more information on Bardess Group, visit our website or contact us now.
About the Author
Keith Smith, a Senior Consultant at Bardess, has been blending business data with cutting-edge processes and technology for the past 15 years. He looks forward to challenging projects that involve delivering the right information, to the right people, at the right time. He is especially interested in data visualization techniques that foster acceptance and comprehension of management performance dashboards.
