Kanthal, a leading producer of heating wire for consumer products and complete heating systems for industrial applications, was facing several challenges. The company wanted to increase control and improve accountability within the sales process. They also aimed to simplify and improve the efficiency of data gathering and report generation. Another challenge was to reduce their reliance on outside vendors for system manipulation. These challenges were hindering the company's growth and efficiency, and they needed a solution that could address these issues effectively.

Kayserigaz, a leading natural gas distribution company, was facing challenges in consolidating data stored in the SAP and Oracle databases. The company was struggling with managing inconsistencies and inaccurate data, and providing one version of the truth. They needed a single system that could provide end-users with visibility into more than one data source. The aim of their Business Intelligence (BI) project was to provide effective, information-driven dashboards that would increase the efficiency of the decision-making process.

KGM Kugelfabrik, a manufacturer of precision spheres, was facing several challenges in its operations. The company was dealing with long start-up times and laborious analysis processes. The evaluation and graphic preparation of data could only be done by converting the information to Excel spreadsheets. The company required different evaluations, including static evaluations that enable comparisons between two time periods. Furthermore, the company was dealing with diverse data sources, including Microsoft Dynamics, Access, and Excel.

Trade House Kopeyka, a leading national discount retailer in Russia, was facing difficulties in generating analytical reports due to the use of several disconnected real-time systems for accounting, SAP, Gestori and others. The generation of complex reports was extremely slow, leading to untimely business decisions. The company was unable to consolidate information quickly and effectively without a robust Business Intelligence (BI) tool. The data from multiple source systems often did not match, leading to inconsistencies. From a technical perspective, Kopeyka needed to reduce the data load on the real-time systems and free them from processing analytical queries and report generation.

Larson Manufacturing, the largest supplier of storm doors and windows in the US, was facing several challenges. The company was struggling to obtain timely access to accurate information. The limited time for analyzing and correlating data was another significant challenge. Furthermore, there was a lack of executive visibility into the company's operations and performance. These challenges were hindering the company's ability to make informed decisions and optimize its operations.

Madrid Salud, an independent not-for-profit organisation within Madrid City Council, was in need of a business intelligence tool that would help them create a balanced scorecard and monitor the progress of departmental work. The organisation was dealing with all local authority responsibilities relating to public health and substance abuse. The department had a professional team of 1,306 staff, all fully committed to making Madrid a healthier city. Its mission was health promotion and disease prevention through comprehensive treatment of people suffering from addictions. The mandate included encouraging wellbeing, food safety, improvements in environmental health, and sustainable integration of animals in the city. The department was also responsible for managing the council’s prevention of occupational hazards service and other autonomous bodies.

Magasin, a retail company based in Denmark, was facing a significant challenge in managing its enormous product flow, which included approximately 70,000 part numbers. The company needed to optimize this flow from procurement to stocks and manage the ongoing sale from minute to minute in the separate departments. The company was in search of a Business Intelligence (BI) solution that could provide an overview of the key figures in the company’s logistics department.

Maler-Einkauf Rhein-Ruhr, a buying association with 15 branches in the Rhine/Ruhr region, was facing challenges in evaluating its business data due to the large number of customers and listed articles. The company's reporting system consisted of endless lists of printed paper, which was laborious and time-consuming to navigate. The options for questions and analysis were very limited, preventing the management from dynamically and flexibly controlling their sales and purchasing processes. The primary challenge for MEG Rhein-Ruhr was to better cultivate their customer base specifically through a customer-oriented approach, which required highly efficient analysis of data from business processes to improve performance.

MarktSelect, a leading database-marketing specialist in the Dutch business-to-business market, was facing several challenges. They needed to provide their customers with 'readable' up-to-date management information. They also needed to measure the results and enhance the effectiveness of their marketing and sales efforts. Another challenge was to make links between data from very diverse databases. During a visit to a large Direct Marketing exhibition in San Francisco, they noticed that needs were changing worldwide. Analysis and segmentation were becoming hot topics. They needed a flexible Business Intelligence (BI) analysis tool that would enable their customers to raise the effectiveness of their marketing and sales departments.

Masoutis Supermarkets, the fastest growing supermarket chain in Greece, was facing challenges due to its rapid organic growth. The demand for ad hoc reports and analyses of various business parameters had increased exponentially. Business users ranging from buyers to store area managers, controllers, and C-level managers were pushing the capacity and capability of the existing IT infrastructure to its limits. The existing reporting tools were struggling to handle the flood of data from POS, ERP, CRM, WMS systems all lying on different databases from DB2 to MS SQL and Excel. 600 million records queries were common practice, which often resulted in a wait time of 1-3 hours for a report to run. Apart from increasing performance, Masoutis was also looking to improve the quality of decision making by providing users with valuable business insight, allowing them to freely navigate in the ocean of company data anywhere, anytime, securely.

Mediocredito, a leading Italian bank specializing in consulting, advanced finance, leasing and merchant banking to small and medium-sized enterprises, was in need of a system to provide targeted corporate analysis and consultation. The bank wanted to monitor financial risk and view and interpret such data in a simple, easy-to-manipulate manner. The bank embarked on an ambitious project, X-Match, to identify a system that would provide targeted consulting of strategic corporate data and analyze and monitor financial risks. The project took approximately two years to create the model, with the greatest effort placed on analyzing and structuring the underlying database.

Meilleurtaux, a leading mortgage loan financing broker in France, was facing challenges in managing its rapid growth and gaining insights into client profiles, loan files, and scoring to identify the right business to undertake. The company was working with more than 80 reports, created in Excel, each requiring access to 2 million records stored in an Oracle database. This overloaded the database and indicated that new investments in servers would have to be made. In addition, the creation and maintenance of these reports required the work of 10 IT department employees, who were spending a great deal of their time building up the reports and were also confronted with major issues of inconsistency. The implementation of a more adequate and scalable platform solution was becoming crucial.

Merck Sharp & Dohme B.V. (MSD), the Dutch subsidiary of the US corporation Merck & Co., was using JD Edwards World, a worldwide financial system with limited scope for analysis and reporting. The parent company uses the data from this system to make consolidations and draw up the annual financial statements. It applies a complex set of rules which determine what costs are allocated to what items in the balance sheet and the profit and loss account. MSD Netherlands has to account for any differences in balance sheet items by conducting a detailed analysis. The challenge was to find a solution that would allow them to analyze the data from their financial system quickly and easily, and also take account of their specific set of rules.

META, a data consultancy created by Kinetic, aimed to build highly visual applications to sell data consultancy services and bring together disparate data sets for customers to gain competitive advantage. The company wanted to convert customers’ own data into actionable business insight. The challenge was to build innovative and highly visual applications to sell data consultancy services to third parties with a fast time to market. META needed a solution that bridged the gap between traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions and standalone office productivity applications. Previously, this was achieved at Kinetic using spreadsheet software, IBM Cognos, and manual processes. META needed a flexible, scalable, and agile BI solution to simplify multiple data sets and do the heavy lifting of aggregating data from multiple sources.

The 1. Obermurtaler Brauereigenossenschaft, a leading brewery in Austria, was facing several challenges. The company had no accompanying cost accounting, no mobile access to current data for staff working offsite, and no ad-hoc analyses were possible. The company was keen to have a simultaneous costings program designed as well. This was to provide the executive management team more quickly with the information it needed for decision making on, for instance, compiling the product range, manufacturing, sales or marketing. The new solution needed to answer queries on sales, such as, for example, sales of total and individual products as well as by region. Another requirement concerned the mobility of the business intelligence (BI) application to give off-site staff the opportunity of working with daily data updates.

Nacka Municipality, a government entity located east of Stockholm, Sweden, was facing several challenges. The municipality was grappling with high costs associated with purchasing standards noncompliance, which was difficult to police. Controllers were spending too much time on manual data collection and analysis. The IT staff was also burdened with the task of generating ad-hoc reports from the IFS ERP system. The municipality needed a solution that could help them analyze the data within their ERP system and provide detailed, timely follow-up capability.

The North West NHS Collaborative Procurement Hub (NWCPH) was faced with the challenge of achieving a standard approach to collate and consolidate data from multiple financial and purchasing systems and turn it into useful management information. The Hub needed to automatically pull together, format and present financial data from many applications throughout its 38 separate Trust sponsor bodies managing more than €1.5 billion in annual spend. Previously, all financial data was handled manually. The process was undertaken annually for the primary reports for the North West Collaboration Hub, and on an ad-hoc basis by the Hub’s category managers when they needed any specific information. At best, this all took several weeks, and by the time all the data was in, it was usually out of date.

Noble Group, a global supply chain management company, was facing challenges with its business reporting and data mining processes. The company was using a multitude of traditional reporting tools, SQL extracts, and Excel spreadsheets to source, manipulate, and present business data. However, these tools did not provide a holistic view of the business. Data was highly fragmented with similar and same data type held across multiple systems, resulting in uncoordinated, repetitive, slow, and costly business reporting and data mining. The reports generated were not graphical, interactive, mobile, and collaborative. The only ‘business intelligence’ (BI) came from pivot tables using Microsoft Excel. The company was looking for a specialist BI software that is globally scalable, browser-based delivery model, and one that is reputable and in the leaders section of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for BI.

Het Noorderpoort, the largest regional training center in North Netherlands, was facing a shift towards transparency and accountability in the broader educational sector. The organization needed to change its way of providing information in terms of control, accountability, and analysis. The existing management information systems were not sufficient to meet the new demands. The organization needed a BI solution that could provide detailed insights into both results and processes. The solution needed to be user-friendly and offer business discovery capabilities. It was also important for the solution to be accessible to all of its 1,500 employees, offering them tools to independently analyze data to the minutest detail.

Nolte-Möbel, one of the largest manufacturers of cabinets and bedroom furniture in Germany, faced the challenge of coordinating company processes for just-in-time production. The company needed to achieve greater transparency for all employees and quickly and easily implement modified parameters. They had mountains of statistics compiled in endless paper lists, but usually, only one page of each list was actually important. To stem this flood of information and provide greater transparency for users, a suitable analytical tool was sought. One of the main requirements was to be able to quickly and easily implement modified parameters since customers (furniture stores) frequently change their affiliation throughout the year. A traditional OLAP solution would require the continuous creation of new cubes, which not only takes time, but important data can also be lost.

Nutricia Netherlands, a part of the international food company Danone, develops, manufactures, and sells special diets for infants, young children, elderly people, and people with special dietary needs. The company faced a significant challenge in processing large quantities of data into meaningful reports for Quality Assurance and production using Excel spreadsheet software. It took a great deal of time and effort to extract relevant information from several data sources including SAP and other applications. Nutricia sought a business intelligence (BI) solution for faster insight into data, improved quality and efficiency of production, and easier access to safety report summaries.

Optimera, a leading distributor of building materials in Sweden, was facing challenges in generating rich insights into various factors that impact sales performance and profitability. The company needed to share up-to-date data reports with management to improve decision-making performance. They also aimed to increase their market share and competitiveness by gaining increased control over sales. The company was looking for better ways to follow up sales figures. In order to understand the market, they needed a flexible tool that easily showed trends and margins for product types, periods, and customer categories.

Orthomedics, a leading importer and distributor of medical products in South Africa, was facing challenges with its existing ERP system. The system was successful in storing information but lacked high-performance data analysis tools. This resulted in managers spending more time sorting out IT issues rather than analyzing the data. Other problems included the time taken to retrieve the information and distribute reports. With a national footprint, the timely distribution of accurate information was critical. The company had reached a point where it needed to generate over 150 sales analysis reports to cover various requirements.

PEI, a leading sales, marketing and distribution company for medical and surgical products in Ireland, was heavily dependent on third-party consultants to create reports from various information management systems. This was not only costly and time-consuming but also inflexible and a barrier to in-depth investigation of data. The company needed a system that would enable crisp, accurate, timely data analyses and reporting, which was critical to the health of the company. They also wanted to empower all employees with the ability to use the new system to access and share information to better service customers.

Pelephone Communications, a leading 3G mobile service provider in Israel, was facing challenges in improving network resilience and analyzing data services delivery. The company was operating in a highly competitive and unregulated market, where customers had high expectations of network speed and reliability. To meet these expectations and ensure high-quality user experience, Pelephone decided to enhance its network speed and reliability. However, the company's existing business intelligence software, SAP BusinessObjects, was no longer suitable as it was IT-centric and had performance issues. It could take up to 30 minutes for a single query, which was unacceptable for the network operations center. Therefore, the team of 75 engineers started looking for alternatives.

Pergo, a leading manufacturer of high-quality laminate flooring, was facing challenges in managing customer relationships and reacting to changes in demand. The company needed a solution that would provide its sales representatives with an immediate overview of retailer performance. This would enable them to better manage customer relationships and gain visibility to more effectively react to changes in demand. The company also wanted to ensure product availability in stores by better managing logistics data and proactively identifying potential out-of-stock situations through more accurate inventory analysis.

Peterborough City Council was facing a multitude of challenges in generating budget information. The council relied on a multitude of reports generated from Oracle and other financial reporting software to produce budget comparison reports (BCR) and key performance indicator (KPI) information. This often involved extensive manual manipulation of data in Excel to derive required outputs. Managers were also frustrated by the inability to report and analyse data in a single format. In addition, the council experienced delays in accessing BCR information and it was increasingly cumbersome to drill down into the data to provide individual budget holders information relevant to their roles. A critical weakness was that BCR information was only available at month end making it difficult to analyse and provide forecasts of any variations in actual as against projected expenditure. Finally, at a time of national constraint in public sector spending it was a major challenge to extract and manipulate procurement data to identify potential efficiency savings and create adequate mechanisms for accruals.

Philips Healthcare's Business Innovation Unit Interventional X-Ray (BIU iXR) was in need of a dynamic solution for information provision on the progress, cost, risk, and quality of R&D projects and processes. They required a solution that offered personalized views and drill-downs, was easy to implement and manage, and could automate the data collection process as much as possible. Prior to the implementation of QlikView, they were using a reporting solution that lacked analytics capabilities and was no longer supported by the supplier. This resulted in quality issues and inefficiencies, with more than two full-time employees working all day on collecting and visualizing data predominantly from Excel using mostly manual processes.

Pikolinos Intercontinental, a leader in the Spanish footwear manufacturing industry, needed a business intelligence (BI) tool to help managers make decisions based on information shown in scorecards which, in turn, brought together information from different systems. The company quickly opted for QlikView because it met all its requirements. Amongst the criteria that prompted the company to choose QlikView, Ortiz points to “its fast implementation time compared with other BI tools and its ease of use, delivered through intuitive, visual display of data.”

Pilot, a major player in the global writing instruments sector, faced challenges in managing its complex sales processes. The company had a multi-support product offer and complex, international distribution networks. It was essential for the company to have a complete knowledge of all sales methods and dynamic analysis of sales and profitability by product and by customer. In early 2007, Pilot acquired an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to integrate all its sales data. However, the system soon showed its limitations: no dynamic graphical retrieval and a lack of connections between data, implementation of new data sources, or new analysis axes. These weaknesses proved costly for Pilot, which is still a small medium-sized enterprise with limited resources and budgets.