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.

Mitsubishi Electric Cooling and Heating Solutions (MEUS) faced a significant challenge in reporting due to the scattered source data across multiple systems and sub-systems. These systems included SAP, SalesLogix, the company’s website CMS, and a homegrown training management system. The process of compiling a basic sales report took 20 to 40 hours a month, involving the exportation of SAP reports to Excel and manual consolidation of fragmented data from various other systems. This not only resulted in lost time but also a lack of visibility into sales, training, and customer service opportunities. MEUS needed a solution that could consolidate data from all its enterprise software and homegrown systems and run powerful reports in a fraction of the time currently required for reporting.

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.

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.

Ko Olina Transportation, a VIP transportation service provider in Oahu, faced significant challenges due to the high tourist population and limited road infrastructure. Traffic congestion and delays were frequent, causing logistical issues. Additionally, the remote location of Hawaii often resulted in limited and unreliable cell phone connectivity. The company needed to maintain constant communication with its drivers and ensure proactive maintenance and upkeep of its vehicles to provide seamless transportation services to its clients.

Northwest Tank was already using a GPS system to deliver better customer service and drive more efficiency in the field. Remy Cano, the President of Northwest Tank was looking for a solution that could provide accurate information directly off the engine computer especially with regard to idling, actual fuel used and driver behavior. His research revealed that traditional black-box systems were not easily able to provide this level of detail without an expensive upgrade that involved taking vehicles out of service and waiting around for installers to show up. Remy expanded his search to look for an affordable solution that could be installed quickly, was easy to move around between vehicles and was comprehensive in functionality.

Whirlpool Mexico customer service operations needed to better meet its commitments to customers and ensure that the Home Technician team was performing services on time. The customer needed a solution that would better capture what was happening in the field and technician time spent on each service call.

Staybright Electric, a family-owned electrical service and commercial lighting company, maintains a fleet of over 240 vehicles across the country. The company needed to keep track of all its vehicles seamlessly through GPS solutions to ensure productivity and customer satisfaction. However, their original GPS solution was expensive and forced them into long, extended contracts with high termination fees. The company also faced several instances where vehicles were stolen, and were hard to track down. It soon became clear that the old solution no longer met the needs of the fleet. What they needed was not only a better, cost-efficient solution for its growing fleet, but also a partner that would help it stay true to its mission of superior quality and service.