Qlik: leading with data to drive business performance

How much better would your organisation be if you could see all its vital data in real time, instantly? How much better again if the system giving you this oversight helped you address challenges and spot opportunities?

A seminar taking place in Dublin next month is designed to do just that, helping businesses to harness their data in new ways to drive business improvement.

Hosted by Capventis, the digital solutions company with a focus on data analytics, the Qlik Global Analytics Tour takes place in the Iveagh Gardens Hotel, Dublin on June 12^th.

The half-day seminar will focus on the transformative power of Qlik, the only end-to-end data management and analytics platform available, that is built to transform an entire business.

The sectors may be varied,  but all  have one thing in common, namely business users wanting to gain insights, rapidly

“The seminar will look at developments in analytics, including functionality as well as the challenges organisations face, to enable them to improve the way they use data,” says John O’Shea, commercial director, Capventis.

Speakers will include customers presenting use cases, as well as representatives from Qlik and Capventis. A hands-on workshop will enable participants to build an application and create  dashboards.

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Capventis works with more than 120 organisations in Ireland and the UK, including AIB, the Health Service Executive, PaddyPower Betfair, med-tech firms Boston Scientific and Zimmer, as well as international safety wear manufacturer Portwest.

The sectors may be varied,  but all  have one thing in common, namely business users wanting to gain insights, rapidly, from large volumes of data generated across multiple systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM), explains O'Shea.

"Many organisations, large and small, resort to extracting data regularly and manually manipulating it in spreadsheets to generate reports. These are repetitive, time consuming and subject to error. Business analysts frequently spend 80 per cent of their time preparing data, leaving very little time for analysis," he says.

A global business

Qlik, established in Sweden in 1994, but now headquartered in the USA, has over 50,000 customers globally, and is focused on the task of bringing data from business systems to analytics platforms for analysis on all user devices (desktop, tablet, mobile and voice-activated)

Examples of Capventis customers utilising Qlik include approximately 30  Irish hospitals that use it to monitor and improve patient care at every stage of their treatment, from admissions to release. Dashboards accessible at a nurse's station can highlight real-time occupancy, discharge-ready patients and monitor staffing needs.

In manufacturing, Capventis has provided Qlik to med-tech clients to deliver real-time views of progress through the factory, including supply chain management, waste reduction,  quality and safety. Such oversight unearths opportunities for savings that existing standalone systems simply don’t facilitate, says O'Shea.

Financial services companies are also major Qlik users, he explains, as they are faced with the challenge of gaining insights into millions of transactions spread across multiple systems. "Financial consolidation, regulatory reporting and fraud prevention are the most frequently used aspects of Qlik. Fast access to data provides both high-level overviews, as well as the ability to interrogate data down to the individual transaction layer."

Data literacy

An emerging realisation for business is that in addition to the challenge of acquiring the correct technology, becoming data-driven also requires data literacy across the organisation. Recent studies have suggested that only 24 per cent of business decision makers are estimated to be data literate enough to be able to interrogate data, to ‘argue’ with it and to understand what the issues are, to spot anomalies and address them, he explains.

“While very many technologies enable people to gain insights, their offering is predicated on high levels of data literacy across the staff. Unless the organisation has people who understand the data, that opportunity is lost.”

Users can now converse with the data. That's quite an evolution

According to O'Shea, Qlik recognises this need and has invested significantly in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to simplify the analysis.  "Using its Cognitive Engine, Qlik  looks for connections between the data imported and makes recommendations to the users. Not only can it spot anomalies, it will recommend the best way to display its findings visually and, over time, uses ML to deepen its understanding of the business. It can even allow the user to interrogate the data verbally, by use of voice control technologies such as Amazon Alexa," he says.

"Users can now converse with the data. That’s quite an evolution. Ten years ago, organisations had a business intelligence team sitting in a room, to which business users put in a request and waited two weeks for a response. In the last few years we have seen the advent of dashboards which made it easier to see what was going on.  Only now are we seeing the true democratisation of data, putting all the power of the data in the hands of those who can make the best business decisions."

Capventis: delivering value

Capventis’s role is to ensure its customers obtain value from the installed Qlik Analytics Platform. Using its IM²PROVE methodology, Capventis establishes priorities and quickly moves to initial application development to confirm alignment and deliver value, before iterating and expanding scope.

An important element of Qlik implementations is that the ‘time to value’ involved is short. Qlik can start contributing within a month, O'Shea explains, providing organisations with insights that could not have seen before.

360-degree view

In 2017 there were 300 daily data-driven interactions per person. This is expected to increase to 4,785 by 2025, he says. "Having the ability to parse vast volumes of data in seconds will be crucial to organisational success, as it will provide the ability to tailor offers and services on an individual basis, based on unparalleled levels of insights into behaviours and interests. By seeking out multiple areas of micro improvement, based on unique insights, it provides the data-driven organisation as a whole with a competitive edge.  It creates a 360-degree view of not just customers, but any entity in a business." However, the analytics platform must then perform at scale. At Qlik’s recent annual conference, Qonnections, a live demonstration saw it crunch 80 billion rows of sales data to answer one question: “how many of my clients didn’t get a discount?” It took just 10 seconds to arrive at the answer.

The Qlik Global Analytics Tour in Dublin and Belfast will demonstrate the power of Qlik to rapidly provide real insights from high volumes of data from multiple systems. In parallel, it will highlight how its use of AI and ML democratises analytics by assisting users to understand the data and visualise it.

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