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Pharmaceutical companies are under increasing pressure to stand out from the crowd in an industry facing pricing pressures, promotional saturation, regulatory scrutiny, reduced product differentiation and increased customer and channel complexity. The healthcare market faces the dual paradox of being awash in data but often lacking in insight. Some of these companies are finding the means to pull ahead of the pack through leveraging analytics in broader and dramatically more effective ways. They are creating the organisational capability to develop and execute against differentiated insights. AsteRx was dealing with large data volumes, comprising millions of scripts from a national sample of hundreds of physicians to be analysed in a myriad of ways that would take weeks to manipulate for a single result. Customers were provided with raw research data, usually in Access or CSV format, making it difficult from which to draw insight. Furthermore, data contained lots of hierarchies, continually changing data frequency with varying levels of data aggregation. Multiple data sources also needed to be integrated with different formats, languages and data structures.

Gwent Police, a force in South Wales, United Kingdom, was facing several challenges. The existing performance management system was incapable of providing information for internal stakeholders. The force needed a system that could provide crime mapping and support intelligence-led policing. The previous system was paper-based and took a whole day to compile monthly staff performance reports. Information was dispersed under different applications in the force’s Command and Control system. The force was also keen to identify the availability of appropriately trained staff and highlight where there were shortages.

Allina Health, a not-for-profit healthcare system, is dedicated to the prevention and treatment of illness and enhancing the health of individuals, families, and communities throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin. The organization has a comprehensive electronic medical record (EMR) system, Epic, which plays a key role in its success. However, Allina Health is also part of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) Innovation’s Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (ACO) model, which requires a strong information infrastructure to manage and visualize the enormous amount of data that will eventually be reported to the government. The goal of this infrastructure is to bring all medical and patient information together, enabling Allina to evaluate its performance, identify areas for improvement, and discover ways for clinicians and care teams to deliver better care to patients.

Design Within Reach (DWR), a multichannel modern furnishings retailer, was struggling with its data management. The company’s sales and inventory data was often analyzed using Excel, and occasionally with custom built reports using SAP’s Crystal Reports. This led to inconsistencies in data analysis as different people used different processes to create reports. The IT team was also burdened with doing one-off pulls from the company’s databases. DWR needed a solution that was flexible enough to be used by all Area Managers, regardless of location, and easy enough that they could find answers on their own, despite their levels of technical ability.

PHOENIX, a premier residential mortgage industry advisor, faced the challenge of collecting and analyzing extensive quantities of data for its over 250 customers. The information required for efficient, effective, and compliant mortgage production and servicing came from multiple sources due to the variety of systems employed by these firms. For instance, a Mortgage Servicing Rights (MSR) owner might use multiple third-party subservicers to manage its MSR portfolio, complicating the process of viewing performance data. It was increasingly difficult to sift through and focus on salient information on a consistent and timely basis to enable informed, smart decisions and to monitor outcomes. A lot of specialized effort was spent gathering the data, understanding what happened with a particular loan, realizing what it means, and then planning a course of action.

MAPCO Express, Inc., a leading convenience store operator in the Southeast United States, was struggling with inaccurate reporting due to the use of Excel as its only reporting tool. The company had significant amounts of valuable data but lacked the ability to extract meaningful information from it. For instance, it was unable to track customer loyalty trends per store. The timeliness of the data was another issue, with reports taking weeks to aggregate, which hindered efficient business decision-making. MAPCO needed a single source of truth and the ability to see the underlying trends and patterns that led to discrepancies.

The American University of Beirut (AUB), a leading academic institution in Lebanon, faced significant challenges in managing 'big data' and extracting valuable insights. The university was using Oracle's business intelligence solution, which they found difficult to deploy and was only being used for reports rather than for dashboards and business discovery analysis. The university was also seeking to create a roadmap for the use of QlikView throughout the campus. The university and its medical center, AUBMC, were working with a variety of applications and database systems, including IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, FoxPro, Oracle Financials, and specialist systems for hospital clinical needs. They also used three enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems—Oracle ERP, Banner ERP, and IBM—as well as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) for AUBMC.

J.B. Hunt, a Fortune 500 company and one of the largest transportation logistics companies in North America, was in the midst of a company-wide digital transformation journey. A key part of this journey was the implementation of a Microsoft Azure Databricks data lake to modernize the data warehouse for increased efficiencies and data access across the organization. However, as the engineering and technology team started its rollout, they noticed increasing pressure on the operational data stores that served as the backbone for J.B. Hunt 360, their cutting-edge digital freight matching platform. After evaluating the data pipelines, the team pinpointed the need to accelerate the flow of data into the lake to ensure that J.B. Hunt 360 users maintained a quality experience with no performance lag.

King.com, a leading global online gaming company, was faced with the challenge of managing and making sense of the massive volumes of gaming data generated by their platform. The company needed a way to make this data accessible to the business for informed decision making. They also aimed to deliver rapid business insights and empower their business users with self-service capabilities. The challenge was not only to handle the data but also to derive meaningful insights that could inform various aspects of the business, from executive decisions to marketing strategies and product development.

Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) faced a significant challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the closure of schools, the district had to ensure that all students had access to online learning resources. However, a small percentage of families and staff did not have internet access at home. LCPS had procured 1,500 hotspots from various vendors, but the challenge was to distribute these devices equitably. The district needed to identify not just the students, but also the households that required internet access. A triage approach was established to prioritize the distribution based on the disadvantaged status of households, households with multiple students, and households with students in higher grade levels.

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.

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.

ADP Netherlands BV, a part of international market leader ADP Inc., provides a wide range of HR, payroll, tax, and benefits administration solutions to approximately 1.2 million employees in over 6,000 companies every month. The company was facing a challenge in providing its customers with relevant and easily accessible information about Human Resources. The static reports generated by ADP using Cognos Imprompto and Clarion Report Writer were not meeting the dynamic reporting and analysis needs of their clients. The HR departments of their client companies were becoming more accountable and needed to provide information directly to the board of directors. This required the HR departments to have their business processes clearly mapped out. Furthermore, line managers needed feedback and overviews of various HR aspects such as employees with a high number of sick days.

Aggregate Industries, a leading supplier and manufacturer of heavy building materials in the UK, was facing the challenge of a competitive market and the need to improve business performance and reduce costs. The company realized that major improvements to their existing Cognos business intelligence (BI) solution would benefit the entire organization. They needed faster access to 'big data' about operational efficiency and business performance. The company was also looking to change the culture of the company to see data as an asset and wanted to provide users with a single version of the truth.

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.

Amcor Limited, a world leader in innovative packaging, was undergoing a significant global operational and strategic review. The company aimed to transition to deliver sustainable shareholder value with a strategy of being more customer and market-focused. This was to be achieved through superior customer service & value, in a manufacturing environment where differentiation is typically focused on driving down costs. As part of this strategic initiative to ‘get fit’, Amcor globally initiated the ‘Value Plus’ project as a means to build sales and marketing excellence. The two main objectives were firstly understanding and improving returns by identifying & capturing commercial opportunities; and secondly to upgrade the sales and marketing capabilities across the company.

The Public Ports Authority of Andalusia (APPA) needed a business intelligence (BI) tool that would allow it to process and analyse all the management data generated over the past 10 years of its operations. The authority wanted to install the BI tool in several departments including finance, human resources, planning, systems and telecommunications, operating and contracting and statistics. The company needed a BI solution that could be installed and brought into production in record time. The period that elapsed between installing QlikView in the company’s server and production of the first documents was just 30 days.

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.

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.

Danderyd Hospital in Stockholm was seeking ways to improve the quality of their bowel surgery work. They had been manually working with the ERAS protocol since 2000, which initially performed well, but due to difficulty in seeing any change in the work, they soon fell back into old routines. The hospital needed a system that could help them maintain high compliance with the ERAS protocol and easily generate reports to show what areas of the care system are working well and where improvement is needed.

Danone-Unimilk, a division of Danone Worldwide, was facing challenges in preparing reports on production efficiency. The company had developed an internal corporate standard of reports for controlling equipment use efficiency. However, the process of data input in MS Excel was time-consuming and the timeframe of reports preparation for production lines efficiency analysis was not satisfactory. The company needed a tool for preparing internal standard reports to the parent enterprise and for analyzing the information to uncover the efficiency of the measures for equipment performance improvement. The new system had to meet several requirements including compliance with the corporate standard of reports, no data contamination, possibility of data analysis with hourly refinement of production lines use efficiency, support of associative data model, automatic data updating on schedule, support of web-access and mobile devices, and 24/7 system availability.

De Hypotheekshop, a leading Dutch mortgage advice provider, needed to adapt to the changing financial market environment, which was marked by a recession and new compliance regulations. The company wanted to operate based on up-to-date information rather than gut feeling. They needed a Business Intelligence tool that could be deployed in different ways: standalone, mobile, in the cloud or on-premise. The tool needed to link to multiple data sources, combining the internal data of De Hypotheekshop with third-party data sources from their growing network of franchisees. This would provide users across the network with insights that would have an impact on the business. Additionally, the company faced the demand for transparency and compliance enforced by the Autoriteit Financiële Markten (the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets).

Deloitte, a global professional services firm, was facing a challenge with its reporting environment. The firm's reporting involved various aspects such as staffing levels and requirements, results by practice, industry and region, time entry and billing, headcount utilization, targets and more. Different roles within the staffing organization required different reports. All these reports were developed in Excel, which proved unsustainable due to the large size of the files and the lack of in-depth, intuitive views and drill-down options. Deloitte needed a solution that could provide data insight and open new paths to growth and improvements of their bottom line.

DeLuca Homes, a leading homebuilder in America, was facing several challenges. The company needed to proactively manage complex construction schedules while reducing administrative costs. They also needed to efficiently manage the company’s data needs without overburdening IT. Furthermore, they wanted to streamline supplier relationships based on analysis of real buying trends and buyer preferences. The company was growing and diversifying, and their geographical sphere of development had grown from throughout the mid-Atlantic region of the US, to southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Florida. They had also opened a new regional division in Orlando, Florida, which now accounts for 50 percent of DeLuca Homes’ sales. The company is vertically integrated with in-house capabilities for land acquisition/development, architecture, construction, manufacturing, mortgage, and title. Controlling every facet of the business provides DeLuca Homes with complete control over the end result – to deliver the finest homes in the finest communities.

Deroma, a leading global manufacturer of industrial terra cotta products, was facing challenges in tracking production across the nine companies that make up the Deroma Group. The company needed a solution that could streamline management data and use it constructively in an easy-to-use format. The company's products are distributed by six marketing subsidiaries in Europe, the United States, and China and can be found in all major DIY chains and over 8,000 Garden Centers around the world. With over 2,000 employees and €100 million in revenue, the company needed a robust solution to manage its complex operations.