Salto Systems, a global manufacturing company specializing in electronic access control systems, was in need of a balanced scorecard in a single tool. The company wanted to deploy this tool across its sales, accounts, quality control, and aftersales returns business units. The company's managers were looking for a technology that could provide all the capabilities that used to require a complete package of products. The company began the deployment of the business intelligence (BI) application in September 2009 and completed it in April 2010.

Scania Denmark, a world leader in the sales and service of heavy trucks and buses, faced several challenges. The company needed to improve coordination between sales, finance, service, production, and shipping. The production team required visibility into product performance, usage, and service. The IT staff was under pressure from producing multiple reports on IBM System i (AS/400) information. Scania Denmark was using a number of different applications on different platforms, including generic reporting systems. It was crucial for Scania to quickly retrieve and compile all necessary information, and train its organization to use this information proactively.

Siemens Turbomachinery Equipment was facing challenges with their existing data analysis tool, Microsoft Excel, which was too static with limited performance and high administrative costs for data assessment. The assessments were only possible by calling in the IT department. The company wanted to improve the transparency of production, taking due account of the current manufacturing information available. They also aimed to achieve a significant reduction in the costs of producing key data and analyses. The firm’s various production processes accumulate between 200,000 and 500,000 sets of such data. Siemens Turbomachinery Equipment also wanted to make it possible for the various specialist units to call up and analyse key data without help from the IT department.

SinnerSchrader, one of the leading interactive agencies in Germany, was facing a challenge in controlling advertising across various communication channels due to its increasing complexity. The calculation of advertisement success indicators for extensive advertising campaigns was becoming more difficult in times of hybrid purchasing models and primary data sources. Furthermore, client-specific overviews needed to be quickly available for analysis and media consultancy.

Standard Life, a subsidiary of the Edinburgh-based Standard Life financial services group, was facing challenges in monitoring broker performance in near real time. The company was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with extracts from Microsoft SQL server data management software to prepare monitoring reports for distribution to management by email messaging. This process was laborious and time-consuming. Standard Life had two immediate priorities for any new business intelligence (BI) software. The first was for a persistency report showing which insurance policies have lapsed by broker for visibility by high ranking executives and actuaries. The second was to create a Management Information Pack with daily and monthly sales reports by broker for overview by senior management and sales managers.

Systemair, a leading ventilation company with operations mainly in Europe and North America, faced several challenges. The company needed to share valuable business data locked in its Movex ERP system with more than 25 subsidiaries throughout Europe. The goal was to simplify and speed up data analysis enterprise-wide for improved decision-making. Additionally, Systemair wanted tighter control over business processes and operations to ensure 24x7 product availability for customers. As the business complexity grew, the existing system of analyzing data with simple SQL queries and Excel became unworkable.

UWV, a governmental organization in the Netherlands, was facing the challenge of replacing all paper and static reporting with dynamic models for reporting and analysis, directly tuned to the information requirements of the users. The volume of paper reports within the HRM department was growing continuously, with each report being created manually with data from the personnel information management system. The departmental management team wanted to replace these reports, which were already dated the day they were distributed, with automated, 24/7, dynamic reports presented in an easy to use dashboard environment with slice and dice and drill down functionality.

Van Oirschot, a supplier of heating and installation materials for professional installers in Flanders, was facing the challenge of implementing a reporting and analysis tool that ensures consistent information provision and provides easier insight into Microsoft Navision data. The company operates five branches and a central distribution centre in Flanders. It creates added value by handling additional aspects for its customers, such as transport, stocking, provision of credit, collection and splitting, packaging and repackaging, services, guarantees, returns, information provision and training. However, it was crucial for the company to remain competitive and innovative in the face of increasing competition, chain integration and cost pressure. Moreover, their customers were expecting greater flexibility, longer opening hours and automated ordering processes.

Vellinge Municipality was facing a challenge of analyzing information residing in disparate source systems. They needed stronger controls in order to reduce overall operating costs. The solution required was one that could be used by employees lacking formal finance training and background. The municipality had a policy of keeping the income tax rates low, which meant that everyone in the organization needed to review all costs associated with every departmental decision. This involved approximately 10 controllers and 60 managers with budget responsibility sitting in different locations. Before implementing QlikView, they had to compare printouts from different systems manually to compile the information. In many cases, they even had to manage without the necessary information.

VIP Parts, Tires & Service, the largest privately owned US automotive aftermarket retail chain, was facing several challenges. The company wanted to replace its one-dimensional merchandising hierarchy reporting with multilevel merchandising and business unit views. They were also struggling with integrating disparate data from multiple systems. The company was seeking to increase the visibility of operational KPIs throughout the organization. The company's sophisticated business footprint spans retail, wholesale, fleet, and commercial divisions, making it crucial to have a comprehensive and integrated view of all operations.

WD-40, a global consumer products organization, was facing challenges in analyzing reported data and gaining insights into customer behavior. The company was relying on hard copy weekly reports to provide crucial business detail, which was putting increasing pressure on the IT department to produce more meaningful sales information in a user-friendly, real-time application. The traditional reports created by the company’s previous ERP system were both costly to produce and lacked important detail. A data analysis tool was needed to support WD-40’s growing business and to ease the pressure on IT resources. The company also needed applications that would support, speed up and simplify financial reporting to its parent in the US, a logistics application for better order-to-delivery efficiency and pan-European sales analysis for proactive management.

WECO Pyrotechnische Fabrik, a leading fireworks producer in Europe, faced challenges in managing its multi-stage in-house production system and purchasing merchandise from abroad. The company required accurate logistics planning to ensure all branch outlets received their stocks in time for New Year’s Eve sales. The same level of accuracy was needed for planning production and import schedules. For a long time, data analysis was done using Microsoft Dynamics NAV business management software coupled with individually programmed reports. However, this procedure proved to be time-consuming and error-prone. The data was first exported from the inventory management system into various different Excel worksheets and then collated. This process led to errors and could only assess and optimise processes in retrospect.

York Minster, a world-renowned cathedral, is a large organization with around 150 employees and 500 volunteer workers. The operational costs of the Minster are incredibly high, amounting to £9 per minute, 24 hours a day. As a registered charity, it depends on donations and visitors fees to survive. This means that the Minster has had to become increasingly aware of its income streams in order to improve margins and keep reinvesting in its many community and regeneration projects. The IT department is relatively small, with two employees including IT Manager David Wilkinson. Wilkinson also acts as Assistant to the Chief Accountant, and it is this dual role that brought him to QlikView. “When we started charging for entry into the Minster, we needed to be able to analyse visitor trends and tills data. We also wanted to identify where we were improving, especially how much income was coming through from GiftAid and the sale of guide books,” says Wilkinson.

Zurich Insurance, a leading insurance-based financial services provider in the Nordic region, faced several challenges. They needed to better assess risks and business potential of insurance solutions, link together insurance systems while making them more adaptable and easier to use, and perform fast and flexible analyses on different customers, types of damages, countries, and products. The company's underwriters, who assess the risks and business potential of all insurance solutions, needed a tool that makes it easy to link different local databases together and perform fast and flexible analysis regarding different customers, types of damage, countries and products.

Health Market Science (HMS) is a leading manufacturer of healthcare provider data in the United States. The company's flagship product, the HMS Provider Master File, includes detailed reference information for over 4.5 million individual practitioners and 1.0 million healthcare organizations. However, the company faced challenges in continuously tracking, integrating, analyzing, cleansing, and packaging millions of records of data from thousands of sources. The company's business analysts depended on as many as three programmers to write SQL code for a new, complex analysis. This process was time-consuming and sometimes led to different answers to a query depending on who was writing the code. HMS needed a solution that would enable business analysts to analyze data without support from programmers and meet requirements without the cost, complexity, and time required by traditional OLAP cube solutions.

Dorman Products, a leading supplier of automotive and heavy-duty replacement parts, was facing challenges in project and support testing cycles due to the large orders they were processing. The Quality Assurance (QA) team was responsible for ensuring optimal support for new products, enhancements, and bug fixes. However, they were struggling with addressing order-related issues in a timely manner. Each order could have several thousands of order lines, making it difficult and time-consuming to recreate and debug issues. The process to replicate and debug production problems was highly manual and involved many steps. The team recognized the need for a solution to streamline this multi-step process.

When Ian Kane, Senior Data Warehouse Architect, joined Wombat Security Technologies, his job was to build a data warehouse from scratch. With the Wombat Security Technologies already on the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) in MySQL, moving the data to a Postgres database Amazon RDS was a natural choice given that they were already on the Amazon Cloud. Most of the ETL coding would be usable on a standard Postgres RDBMS. Because they regenerate their data warehouse every 15 minutes doing ETL, they needed a solution that could do log-based change data capture (CDC) to migrate their data continuously.

MTech Systems, a company operating in the live protein industry, was facing a growing demand from its customers for faster access to more robust reporting and the ability to interact with data in a visual format. The company was also looking to broaden its target audience within its current segments. Furthermore, the industry was experiencing an explosion of new data as equipment, house controllers, gauges, and more were coming online. This presented a challenge for MTech Systems' customers to benefit from and better manage this influx of data.

StoreNext, a leading research and analysis firm in the consumer goods market in Israel, was looking to improve its value proposition. The company wanted to launch a next-generation self-service Business Intelligence (BI) solution that would allow its clients to analyze millions of transactions to better understand market trends. Additionally, StoreNext's clients had been requesting mobile capabilities, which the company was keen to provide. Another challenge was the company's reliance on external consultants for the development of the solution, which they wanted to reduce.

CEGID Group, a provider of management software for organizations in multiple industries, was looking to enhance its software-as-a-service offering. The company wanted to provide its clients with a seamless experience that would allow them to easily collaborate and explore data through customized dashboards. However, the company faced challenges in achieving this goal without requiring special training for its clients.

Financial Services organization Meilleurtaux identified an urgent need to deploy commercial and marketing applications for their franchise agencies. The agencies required access to in-depth analysis to make informed decisions that would drive the business. The challenge was to find a solution that could provide the necessary data and analytics to the agencies in a user-friendly and accessible manner.

Puget Sound Energy, a Washington State-based company, supplies electrical and natural gas services to approximately four million Americans daily. The majority of the business operations are run on SAP, making it crucial to limit outages when implementing SAP changes. To ensure smooth transitions, data must be accurately placed in the right systems at the right time to prototype, test, and implement new SAP implementations. The company has 12 SAP instances and is constantly adding new products, making the process of updates and data synchronization a significant challenge.

Multipack LJM is a company that provides packaging services for a diverse range of products including food, pharma and FMCG, with major brands such as Nestle, Kellogg’s and Coca-Cola as their clients. The company faces the challenge of responding to changes in demand in real-time. This involves adjusting and optimizing production to meet the evolving needs of their clients. The challenge is further compounded by the need to manage the procurement of raw materials in line with the changing requirements of their clients.

The Science Centre Singapore was facing challenges in forecasting and marketing due to the lack of a centralized data system. The data was stuck in Excel spreadsheets, making cross-company access cumbersome. The organization was striving towards being a data-driven organization as part of its digital transformation journey. The goal was to leverage various platforms to create targeted digital experiences and promote user adoption of data analytics among the staff. The organization was dealing with complex data due to different attractions, workshops, and ticketing platforms. The old setup had individual officers responsible for their own data, leading to siloed insights and cumbersome data access.

Energy Safe Victoria (ESV) is responsible for the safe generation, supply, and use of electricity, gas, and pipelines across the state, serving approximately seven million people living in Victoria. One of its priority areas is ensuring safety audits and inspections are thorough to meet its responsibility as a technical and safety regulator. However, ESV faced two key challenges: accurate data collection and the availability of resources for analysis to ensure compliance with expected safety standards. Teams often had to deal with a high volume of data across work sites in remote locations. Additionally, the efficient generation and quality of data analysis required to meet ESV’s safety audit goals were also a challenge. During an audit, field teams collected data manually, often on paper and across several devices and machines. These tasks were time-consuming, clunky, and onerous, and could lead to possible errors. Inaccuracies could then delay risk assessments and outcomes which affect the monitoring of trends, anomalies, and identifying systemic behavior and issues.

The Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom (AJF), a Sydney-based public not-for-profit company, was looking to expand its advocacy into the Asia–Pacific (APAC) region in mid-2020. The organization realized that it needed to fully understand the press freedom landscape in the APAC region. Existing data was presented in different ways and AJF identified a gap in the market for a visual overview of the data. The organization wanted to develop a project that provided a visual overview of the data in the region it was trying to better understand. AJF's advocacy focuses on building trust and relationships, and the organization wanted to develop a tool that emulates that. The purpose of AJF’s work in the region is to support others to act independently to protect their own press freedom and transparency. This has positive civic and possibly even economic implications for those countries.

The University of Bath recognized the importance of data visualization skills for their MSc in Business Analytics students. They wanted the students to gain practical experience in an industry-leading tool. The challenge was to provide the students with real-life data and a platform where they could apply their theoretical knowledge and develop their data visualization skills.

Al-Ikhsan Sports, the leading sports retailer in Malaysia, was in need of a robust business intelligence platform to aid in intelligent decision-making and support future growth. With a network of 135 stores across Malaysia and a burgeoning ecommerce platform, the company sought deeper insights into the performance of individual store locations and the best-selling products at each store.

Grip, a London-based company, developed an AI-based event matchmaking platform to solve the problem of inefficient networking at events. The platform uses a self-learning matchmaking engine that uses natural language processing, advanced algorithms, and deep neural networks to learn about the professional goals and interests of visitors, exhibitors, and sponsors. To remain competitive, Grip needed to integrate with other systems such as event registration and CRMs like HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, and Salesforce. However, building these integrations was a time-consuming process that required the expertise of developers.

The IT sector in India has thrived during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a surge in demand for data scientists. However, there is a shortage of students skilled in analytics. ICT Academy, created by the Government of India, aims to bridge the industry-academia skill gap and create a new generation of industry-ready talent. The academy partners with technology companies to train teachers and graduating students in new technologies. One of its key collaborations is with Qlik, which offers the Qlik Academic Program focusing on up-skilling educators and students in data analytics.