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Nanyang Technological University (NTU) was facing challenges in tracking data over the “student lifecycle” from the application and admissions phase to post-graduation performance. The existing static data analysis made ad hoc, real-time reporting difficult. The university was required to provide reports to the Board of Trustees and Ministry of Education. The process of pulling all this information together was tedious, time-consuming and involved a lot of manual effort. The IT department struggled with improving the delivery of the information, but developing reports using NTU’s existing application systems was not easy and took a large amount of effort. The administrative staff needed to use Excel spreadsheets on this outdated data extensively to meet their reporting requirements. These issues often hindered users from acquiring sufficient data to perform trend analysis for decision making.

National Frozen Foods Corporation, a leading private label packer of vegetables, faced challenges with poor visibility into production data. The company found it difficult to analyze data across disparate IT systems for ERP, warehouse management, HR, and other systems. There was no way to package company data to executives and other employees. The company recently upgraded its legacy ERP, Warehouse Management, and other systems to better accommodate the selection, quality, varieties of crops, seasonality, growing methods, and inventory management needs of customers. While those systems provided better access to the information management and operations professionals needed, the source was limited to exported data in Microsoft Excel. This proved difficult and time-consuming, particularly for those users with non-technical backgrounds.

Nationwide Commercial, a division of Nationwide Building Society, faced the increasing challenge of analysing millions of rows of “big data” about its loans portfolio. The division wanted a holistic view of key strategic data and metrics from a number of sources, including its ProMS property risk management system. The aim was to maximise investment returns and portfolio performance, while reducing operational risk and improving ease of compliance. By improving the quality and speed with which it can answer queries or produce on-demand reports, Nationwide Commercial can assess the characteristics and relationships of its commercial loan book more effectively.

Newham University Hospital NHS Trust (NUHT) was facing challenges in managing information in a responsive manner. The process of collecting and analyzing data for monthly board papers, setting out KPIs and performance, was lengthy and inefficient. The Trust needed a system that could facilitate instant decision-making in an environment where even the smallest changes can have a huge impact on patients’ lives. For instance, if there was a sudden rise in demand for a certain medical procedure affecting operating room availability, the decision-makers couldn’t wait until an end of month report to analyze what could be done about it.

Nipro Europe NV, a part of the global Nipro Corporation, develops, produces, and sells medical and pharmaceutical aids across Europe, Africa, Russia, and parts of the Middle East. The company also oversees four production facilities in the United States and seven in Europe. To enhance its operational efficiency, Nipro Europe switched to SAP ERP in 2010. However, the company faced challenges in providing insights into data from four different SAP systems and giving employees the tools to report and analyze data. Answering ad hoc queries and consolidating data from the various systems remained an issue. SAP also offers possibilities for this, but these are more strategic in nature and often lead to complex and time-consuming projects.

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.

The North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust serves a diverse and, in places, highly dependent population of approximately 250,000 people. In a challenging time for budgets in the NHS it is vital that resources are used as effectively as possible, whilst continuing to improve the patient experience and the care offered. To help meet that challenge, the Trust initiated an improvement programme. After an initial review, agreement on the need to introduce new measuring tools was reached towards the end of 2009 – with a desire to find a business intelligence tool that made it possible to easily analyse and understand the performance of different parts of the trust.

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.

Ochsner Health System, a leading healthcare organization, was facing challenges in shifting from a reactive mode to proactive decision-making. They wanted to gain a complete understanding of the performance metrics of their clinical operations. The organization was struggling to monitor surgical room utilization and turnaround times to maximize capacity. They also wanted to identify long turnaround times between cases in the operating room to streamline the process. Another challenge was to measure surgical room utilization and its impact on revenue generation as 70% of revenue was driven from surgeries. They also needed to assess the number of procedures and costs by case for manual surgery versus potential for robotic surgery.

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.

PC Electric, a manufacturer of industrial plugs, sockets, and small distributors, was seeking a flexible business intelligence (BI) solution that could adapt to the dynamically changing conditions of day-to-day business. The company wanted to be able to incorporate internal and external data sources without having to rely on IT experts. They also wanted a solution that could be expanded to meet future reporting and business analysis needs. Furthermore, they did not want to get involved in a complex BI project requiring a month of preparation. Instead, they sought an easily understandable and easy-to-use tool that could be quickly installed and quickly offer palpable results.

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.

PerfectServe, a provider of physician contact and patient care communication services, was facing challenges in managing the IT needs of its fast-growing organization. The company was growing at a rate of 50% each year since 2000. They needed a solution that would empower their clients to develop customized data reports without relying on PerfectServe's IT staff. Additionally, they wanted to increase the depth and functionality of their data reports. PerfectServe delivers standard reporting on contact events to its hospital clients typically on a monthly basis. The addition of a “self-serve” business intelligence reporting tool would be a major enhancement for clients as well as a benefit to its own operational productivity.

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.

Piraeus Bank Group, the fourth-largest Greek lender, was facing challenges in accessing 'big data' for marketing campaigns, monitoring liquidity in near real time, and reorganizing its branch network based on better insight. The bank had invested in a new data warehouse based on IBM Banking Data Warehouse to improve organizational effectiveness and profitability. However, they needed a solution that was easy to use across the organization and could handle the exploration of terabytes of big data with one application. The bank also wanted to transform itself by closing the skills gap between IT experts and business users through self-service analysis.

Power NI, a leading independent all-island energy utility in Ireland, was reliant on 'legacy' customer management systems. They found that they were not making the best use of the information they had or able to access all the information they needed. They wanted better reporting and analysis, what QlikTech would describe as Business Discovery. The company was looking for a solution that could provide analysis reporting on sales and debt management for business customers and could be shared with customers through 'Energy on Line' to allow them to understand their energy consumption.

Go Ape, a rapidly growing outdoor adventure company, was struggling to manage and identify with their business as they expanded. They had too many different data sources, too many spreadsheets, and too much information in too many places. Everything was fragmented, and every report pack took too long to pull together. The company needed a simple yet effective reporting solution to allow them to reconnect with their business and allow them to manage in real-time. They also faced challenges in managing their recruitment process, which involved hiring up to 500 people in the space of 3 weeks each year. They needed a solution that would allow their managers to access, retrieve and process applications, as well as conduct interviews.

Godrej Consumer Products Limited (GCPL), a major player in the Indian FMCG market, was facing challenges with its reporting process. The company was dealing with duplication in reporting and delayed response times across departments. This was affecting the decision-making process as the reports were not available in real-time. GCPL was using SAP ERP as its foundation which was supported by the SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse solution for Business Intelligence, analytics, and reporting. However, the company was looking for a self-service, user-friendly BI solution that could provide improved analytical capabilities at all levels across the organization by allowing users to segment data across geographies, products, and sales hierarchies.

Good Health, a manufacturer and distributor of natural health products, was facing several challenges. The company was receiving multiple report requests from internal employees and external partner companies. There was a high volume of ad hoc communications among company employees, and there was no efficient way to track the manufacturing and distribution of products. Furthermore, the company had little insight into which product lines weren’t selling. The company's ERP system, while housing the necessary data for business operations, was increasingly difficult and time-consuming for reporting. The rise in requests for different reports from staff members was becoming burdensome as each report had to be manually prepared.

Greencore Northampton, part of the Greencore Group, was facing challenges in analyzing electronic point of sale (EPOS) data. The company was using Microsoft Excel reports to monitor sales performance, which involved complex pivot tables and took hours of work to produce. As a result, they were often slow to react if a particular product wasn’t selling well in a particular store. They had no real-time information on which were the best-selling lines, so stores in some areas ran out of stock and in others they had to throw away food. The aim was to reduce waste and improve the availability of sandwiches and wraps at M&S stores in the UK.

Groupe Rossel, a multimedia publishing house, was facing challenges in providing uniform reporting and analysis capabilities for the diversified business lines and companies within the group. The group's operational management teams required data to optimize their business lines, including distribution, sales, subscriptions, and marketing. However, the company did not have a strategy in place to support these data and reporting requests. For instance, figures on sales and subscriptions required two full-time IT employees spending three days a week to generate the report, while two full-time business line employees spent five days a week gathering the required data.

Grupo Munreco, a leader in the Spanish watch manufacturing sector, needed a business intelligence (BI) solution that would provide the group with fast access to all company information, as well as a tool to help managers carry out analyses from different perspectives. They wanted a solution that was flexible, fast, user-friendly, and provided self-service BI. The company wanted to optimize its order fulfillment service, monitor each and every one of the orders and repairs processes, and integrate them within an automated warehouse system.

Gemeente Haarlem, a city council in the Netherlands, was under pressure to reduce costs and improve performance management while also introducing new service delivery models to boost efficiency. The council had adopted a business lead approach to performance management and was working towards developing a shared services strategy for ICT, and other areas, such as finance and HR, between its different departments. ICT formerly operated semi autonomously using disparate data sources and had accumulated more than 100 million records. A principal driver for the change programme was to embed a performance management culture throughout the organisation and transform the delivery of public services. Cost effective, easy to use, business intelligence (BI) technology emerged as a vital tool for achieving success with the change agenda in the long term.

Halton Group, an international company specializing in indoor climate products, was facing challenges in managing its worldwide growth. The company's existing enterprise software systems were unable to deliver the types of reports and analysis needed to proactively manage day-to-day business operations. The business warehouse module connected to one of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems was complex to operate and provided a limited number of reports. Halton needed a solution that promoted self-sufficiency and did not require programming or any extensive set-up to create and run reports. The company also needed a product that could integrate with its multiple enterprise software applications to centralize and standardize its reporting processes and improve supply chain efficiency and customer service.