Riocard Mais, the biggest ticketing system in Brazil and Latin America, was facing challenges with the increasing volume and complexity of data due to the increased functionalities and technical requirements of their system. Each year, the system records two billion operations and 60 million financial transactions. The company needed a tool that could provide consistency in information and agility in accessing and analyzing data. Consultations had to be done on the mainframe, which generated conflicts between normal credit sales and business area reports. The IT department was limited to running in small time slots and a request would take on average 48 hours to fulfill.

Microland, a provider of ITSM services, was looking for a way to differentiate itself in the crowded ITSM market. The company wanted to provide its customers with transparency into their ITSM landscapes and deliver a platform that was powerful but easy to use. Many of Microland's customers reported that despite having all the reporting tools they could think of, they still lacked visibility into their ITSM analytics. They were running projects for six months but still had no useful KPIs and did not know what was happening with their ITSM.

kidsunlimited, a UK-based childcare provider, was facing challenges in managing its rapidly expanding network of over sixty nurseries. The company was struggling with its legacy financial and management reporting systems, which were unable to correlate information across different data sources. This led to the creation of multiple, individual reports and manual collation, a time-consuming process that often resulted in a lack of visibility at a local level. The company was in need of a solution that could improve communications and reporting, enabling it to have a centralised view of its operations across all its dispersed sites.

EuroMaint, a leading maintenance solution provider for vehicles in the Swedish rail industry, was facing challenges in reviewing its workflow and synchronizing resources across 20 different applications for equipment support delivery. The company was heavily dependent on IT specialists for custom report development, which was not only costly but also resulted in long turnaround times. They needed an easy-to-use and intuitive analysis solution that could provide an integrated view into operations, bringing together financial, staffing, and operational data.

ACI Consult, a member of the Automobile Club d’Italia (ACI) group, was originally founded to handle ACI operations in the area of transport engineering. Since 2003, the company has been responsible for designing, developing and creating innovative traffic-control services, regional and environmental services, urban furnishings and lowimpact technologies. Among its more innovative initiatives, ACI Consult has been involved in ACITRAFF, a project intended to provide a great many regional bodies with targeted traffic reports in order to analyze traffic patterns and plan infrastructure projects. ACITRAFF monitors traffic flows and uses sensors positioned along the main roadways in order to gather data on the number of vehicles, their speed, their size and traffic congestion, so as to provide accurate, up-to-date traffic information. The ACITRAFF architecture is comprised of peripherals, including active and passive optical sensors, that communicate with one or more dataprocessing centers using a variety of communication networks (phone, cable, radio, GSM, GPRS, etc.). The system gathers data on an ongoing basis and sends it to a central database, which is then used for studies and subsequent traffic planning.

Adige Commercialcarta, a Verona-based company manufacturing bags and paper for food products and packaging materials, was facing challenges due to its growth and diversification of activities. The company needed to expand its corporate software to support both the production division and the sales network. After implementing an ERP management and production-planning system, the company needed a tool that would allow it to quickly and simply extract and analyze sales and production data. The company was looking for a solution that was manageable, easy to implement, and could provide in-depth sales analyses, which would also be very useful for its regional agents.

Aditya Birla Minacs, a business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions provider, faced increased competition in the outsourcing market. The company needed to deliver on its promise of ‘timely reporting of results at virtually every stage of the customer relationship lifecycle’ for their clients. This required empowering their frontline team with tools that would enable them to make quicker, faster, and informed decisions. The company had deployed multiple systems across regions for its key operations, each with its own reporting mechanism. Consequently, cross-functional analysis was non-existent. The executive team found the process cumbersome, and weren’t sure of the reliability and accuracy of these reports.

ADO Gardinenwerke, a leading manufacturer of drape material and decorative fabric in Germany, was facing challenges with its existing business intelligence tool integrated in the ERP system. The tool was unable to handle the high volume of data that needed to be analyzed for ADO’s sophisticated reporting system. Questions such as sales trends for specific customers, big sellers in various countries or regions, seasonal deviations in sales, and overall sales trend for individual models could not be answered efficiently. The tool required a massive amount of in-house and outside development to create reports and answer new questions. Additionally, data consistency was not always guaranteed and there was insufficient capacity to process mass data, leading to extremely long response times. The system was also inflexible and slow, failing to provide the necessary benchmarks and reports at the level of quality required for optimum data analysis.

Advantage Pharmacy Group, a successful business in the crowded and competitive market, has always believed in the importance of centralized infrastructure and services. The group manages systems like loyalty and marketing services, group ordering and warehousing, and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to manage financial services. However, they were missing a business discovery solution to ease the task of accessing, reporting, and analyzing data across all systems. They considered Microsoft SQL Reporting Services but found it limited and costly. They needed a solution that would unify the data for analysis, provide services to their franchisees, and bring together many disparate data sources in a single meaningful report.

Agora Publishing Services, a holding company of various international publishers, was facing a challenge of performance visibility and improved guidance into their seven autonomous businesses. It was critical for the executive team and business managers that the new system not encroach on their current business practices. The company had shifted its business from 95% direct mail acquisition to 60% from email and web, and needed a solution that could effectively manage and analyze this transition.

The Akron Beacon Journal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper serving several counties in Ohio, was facing challenges in gaining visibility into the performance of its advertising sales teams. The newspaper wanted to identify opportunities for revenue growth in advertising among a mix of customers, ad types, products, placements, etc. The challenge was to analyze financials and advertising revenue across ad type, placement, product, sales team, and sales rep, all focused on driving ad revenue growth.

Alabama Farmers Cooperative, Inc. (AFC) is a regional federated supply and marketing agricultural cooperative that provides value to its members. The organization, with annual sales of more than $300 million and more than 2,300 employees, has grown through a series of joint ventures and acquisitions. However, AFC was greatly challenged to determine product margins and profitability accurately. Data was stored in various systems, and reporting was a cumbersome, manual process. Because of this difficulty, profitability analysis could only be done on a monthly basis, and confined to a small subset of the more than 3,000 product lines AFC carries. Seasonal variability is a mainstay of its business, so “managing uncertainty” is a way of life with a tremendous impact on profitability.

Albany Times Union, a leading daily newspaper in New York's Capital Region, was facing challenges in gaining visibility into the performance of its advertising sales teams. The company was struggling to identify opportunities for revenue growth in advertising among a mix of customers, ad types, products, placements, etc. The lack of detailed insights into these areas was hindering the company's ability to effectively manage its business and make informed and timely decisions.

AlfaStrakhovanie Group, the largest insurance company in Russia, needed to boost the efficiency of its analytical processes to support its dynamic growth and widen the competition gap in the insurance market. The company was using accounting systems and Microsoft Excel to create their analytical reports, which was time-consuming and required manual execution for certain operations. The group’s leadership decided that by the end of 2010, all the business’ reporting capabilities would be centralized into one single system. Regional business units required a centralized supply of real-time information and this could be provided by the right BI tool. Furthermore, a BI tool was expected to improve the corporate process for report generation.

ALK-Abelló, a global leader in the development and production of allergy diagnosis drugs and vaccines, was facing a crucial phase of getting their flagship product GRAZAX® approved by the European medical regulatory agencies. The European Mutual Recognition Procedure for new medical products is subject to very strict deadlines and is compulsory prior to any product release on the market. ALK-Abelló used the data management system Oracle Clinical, but with the strict and short deadlines to deliver answers ahead, a doubt rose whether in terms of resources it would work and whether it would be possible to create the needed overview in time. As 4-5 employees in the company had the competences to create overview and to retrieve data from the database, it could easily turn out being a catastrophic bottleneck.

Anji-TNT Automotive Logistics Co. Ltd., a joint venture between the Shanghai Automotive Industry Sales Corporation (SAISC) and CEVA Logistics (TNT Logistics), was in need of a Business Intelligence (BI) solution to manage the inventory of raw materials, parts, equipment, and finished products efficiently and effectively. The company had previously adopted a competitor's solution, which proved to be complicated to deploy and difficult for end users to navigate. After comparing different vendors' solutions in terms of cost and performance, Anji-TNT selected QlikView.

TNT's Corporate Audit Services Department was facing a challenge with their monthly reporting process. The department, which is responsible for internal audits worldwide, had three senior managers compiling reports for the head of the department each month. This process was time-consuming and lacked a consistent structure and uniformity, as each manager had their own method of compiling the reports. This complicated the data-merging process and the compilation of one departmental report. Additionally, all the data was manually inputted, which took a lot of time. The department was looking for a solution that would simplify the consolidation of the decentralized data, accelerate the auditing of data reliability, and present their custom-defined KPIs in a flexible and transparent manner.

Aon Asia’s management needed a clearer picture of the company’s revenue streams, starting with the ability to segment revenue by industry and product. The existing situation made it difficult to gain a true view of the company’s income across different offices in the region or to allocate the correct fees and commissions among their regional directors and country segment heads. Before using QlikView, it was all manual reporting – from regional director to country segment head to country finance. Each step in the chain required someone to manually compile the data and check for errors – a time consuming process involving a lot of following up with different parts of the business. It also lead to the possibility of different versions of data coming from more than one source. The search began for a packaged solution that could automate the process and analyze the financial streams.

Aon Groep Nederland bv, a provider of risk management, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, was facing challenges in fulfilling its Aon Client Promise, which is fully focused on creating added value and impact. The company was spending various man-hours on manually handling information requests using Microsoft Excel and predefined wordbooks in Oracle. The reports generated were sometimes lacking in uniformity. The company needed a flexible, interactive and associative BI solution that could be quickly implemented. The solution was also required to cater for the requirements of the current business landscape.

Arbinet-thexchange, Inc., a leading provider of voice and IP solutions for buying and selling telecommunications capacity, was facing a challenge of limited insight into their daily financial and operational performance. They were primarily relying on spreadsheets to calculate revenue month-to-date for decision making and for revenue forecasting. The company could not pinpoint how minutes were used, pricing of various voice services at current transaction levels, where revenue was made and lost, how traders were performing, or market trends. The requirements to gather data, download to spreadsheets and execute macros were manually intensive. While providing more insight into Arbinet’s true performance, the time required for information analysis still delayed response times to business trends.

Art In Motion, a leading international fine art publisher and wholesaler framer of innovative wall decor, was facing challenges due to its rapid growth. The company installed JD Edwards One World ERP system in 2002 to automate and streamline its business processes. However, the resulting data was overwhelming and the company needed better access to and distribution of data. With varied product lines and four distinct channels of distribution, Art In Motion required easy access to real-time, front-line analysis of sales, inventory, and distribution. The company began its business intelligence initiative and evaluated several solutions before selecting QlikView.

Rewards arvato services, a subsidiary of arvato AG, is a leading supplier worldwide of consultation, sourcing, and logistics for awards and customer loyalty programs. The company serves 30 national and international companies, supplying consumers in 62 countries with around 1,500 different articles. To offer optimum service and operate economically, arvato must continuously evaluate customer, product, and supplier data from some three million data records. Previously, standard reports were prepared within the retail system, with data from two systems and a SQL sales application exported, then imported into table calculation lists, and compiled. However, as the number of customers increased, it became increasingly difficult to compile the information. The old system would run into limits due to the high load from the various analytical requirements.

Autodesk, a world leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software, faced the challenge of consolidating over 25 years of customer and product data from multiple sources. The company wanted to remove IT from the process of creating dashboards while still allowing for some control and governance of data. With other BI tools, it took too long for users to get the answers they needed to make informed business decisions. The company needed a solution that could provide speed and intuitive ease of use for a broad roll out to every organization and business process across the company.

Avnet Technology Solutions, a global technology sales and marketing organisation, was struggling with the aggregation of transactional data from their ERP system. They needed greater insight into customer, sales, channel, inventory, supplier and delivery performance data. The IT department was overwhelmed with numerous sales report requests each week, which were time-consuming and resulted in duplication of effort. The company needed a management and sales focus on profitability and accountability of the numbers to operate dynamically.

Bainbridge International, a manufacturer and distributor of specialty products to marine, construction and recreational markets, was looking for ways to gain a competitive advantage over other companies in its industry. The company had previously utilized IT specialists Blue Rock Systems to stabilize and support its 50-user Microsoft DynamicsNAV (Navision) ERP installation. The success of that engagement led Bainbridge to approach Blue Rock Systems again about other ways to enhance its operations. Specifically, Bainbridge required a sales tool that would help the company track and increase customer spend and profit. They needed a 'finger on the pulse' solution that could provide valuable insights into customer behavior and product appeal.

BBS Food B.V., a producer of frozen and chilled convenience chicken and pork meat products, was facing challenges in tracking and tracing its entire business process. The market demanded transparent information on their entire production process, from purchasing to marinating and from cooking to packaging. Customers required insights into the origin of the raw materials used, the core temperature to which each piece of meat has been cooked, and the amount of time the production process has taken. This information was crucial for food safety and was also used for labelling products. BBS was legally required to provide information on the origin, acceptance tests, and shelf life at any given moment. The company was using Microsoft Excel and Word for data collection and reporting, which was a time-consuming and inefficient process.

The Brussels Capital Region, one of three regions in Belgium, was tasked with developing a joint budget for the eight cabinets of the Brussels Regional government and the thirteen semi-public institutes in the area. Previously, all institutes developed their own budgets. This consolidation created the need to find a solution that could simultaneously process a series of extra information flows coming from very diverse data sources. This was particularly challenging as the Cabinet was suffering a shortage of staff at the time. The Cabinet needed a solution that could fit all of the (financial) data from the various data sources, including Excel, Oracle and Access, quickly and easily into one screen.

Berlin Recycling, a subsidiary of BSR Berliner Stadtreinigungsbetriebe, was facing several challenges in its operations. The parent company's SAP system was not providing the necessary reports for corporate management. The company needed a solution that could automate the preparation of its own analyses and reports. With the vast amount of data that the company was dealing with, it was crucial to have a system that could process and analyze this data efficiently. Furthermore, the company was looking for a way to manage and optimize its processes intelligently.

Bianchi - Cycleurope was in need of a tool that could generate reports integrating the entire group to ensure consistency in data and presentation across groups. The company wanted to provide management with a tool capable of improving the decision-making process. They were also looking to resolve criticalities in certain corporate sectors such as sales, procurement, and warehousing.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, a non-profit organization, was facing challenges in managing its database of children and volunteers involved in the program. The organization's impact on children's lives is directly related to how effectively it pairs 'Littles' and 'Bigs'. Each match is carefully selected based on a number of factors, including age, interests, and geography, among others. However, with the growing number of children and mentors involved in the program, it was essential for the organization to manage its database efficiently and successfully. Furthermore, as a non-profit organization, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America relies heavily on private and government funding from various donors from all over the country. Therefore, it was crucial for the organization to prove to its donors through hard numbers and data that its method of delivering one-to-one mentoring is both effective and achieving statistically-proven outcomes.