Posted by Paddy Moore on Tue, Feb 21, 2012 @ 03:03 PM
As we launch Q200 – Our new QlikView solution for Sage 200 Customers, we would like to share with you some of the great new QlikView 11 features we exploited to build Q200.
Using the new features in QlikView 11 reduced our time to market by 20% compared to QlikView 10, and allowed us to include some fantastic new Business Discovery capabilities for our Q200 customers. QlikView already rates #1 with Gartner for ‘Satisfaction with Development Tools’, so it is fair to assume QlikView 11 will maintain this rating!
A common scenario we come across is to provide KPI analysis charts, allowing the customer to select the KPI to display, and analyse KPI performance over time, and across a range of dimensions.
With QlikView 11 Conditional Expressions this is a snap. Tick the ‘Conditional box, on the Expression Tab, of a chart, add your condition and you are done. The final screen in the Q200 Sales Order app looks like this. Clean and tidy.. Prior to QlikView 11 we would have needed 14 charts or complex expressions to create these charts, now we have 2 charts and simpler expressions.
With Q200 we aimed to produce the most useful analysis for the widest number of Sage 200 customers. The new Alternate States features were a big help. We know that customers like to compare product lines and products to each other. For example, a grocery retailer may compare the sales volumes and profitability of one product line (e.g. Snack Foods) to another (e.g. Beverages). Using QlikView 11 Alternate States we allow Q200 customers to select any 2 groups of products and compare them directly. The customer is in the driving seat!
Understanding which products, customers, sales people and locations are driving Sales Performance is of central importance to our customers. There are often valuable insights to be discovered by cross-analysing and comparing Sales across multiple dimensions. Brushing and linking is a great way to provide this understanding. Alternate States in QlikView 11 delivered this insight via a concise set of charts.
Find out more about Q200 here.
See here for a full run down of the new features in QlikView 11, including the great new server collaboration features.
Posted by Noel Shannon on Tue, Feb 01, 2011 @ 03:58 AM
QlikTech, the world's fastest-growing business intelligence software company, today unveiled how its dynamic analysis of information is delivering top and bottom line results across the retail and wholesale industries. More than 1000 global retail and wholesale companies using QlikView include Alessi, Body Shop Italia, Eden Park, Fila Europe, Grotto (Gas Jeans), HR Group, Magasin, National Frozen Foods, Robinsons Group, Stonefly, Siba, The Cocoa Trees, Verdecora, VIP Parts, Tires, & Service, Visionlab, and WH Smith. Attendees of the National Retail Federation 99th Annual Convention & Expo this week can visit booth 250 to view a live demonstration depicting how QlikView is providing retailers and wholesalers with a strategic information advantage across the enterprise including areas such as sales, store operations, marketing, merchandising, inventory management, and the extended value chain of suppliers and vendors
"Prior to QlikView it was impossible for us to get at detailed operations, merchandising or supply chain data without laborious manual slicing and dicing from transaction systems into spreadsheets. Now we can juxtapose data from these systems - which we bring in at the item and transaction levels - any way we want and at any granularity," said Dan Grosz, Vice President of Information Systems at VIP Parts, Tires, & Service, a US-based automotive retail chain. "QlikView has been a real eye opening experience for the business and a great success for a relatively small IT shop with limited resources but very tight deadlines."
Retail and wholesale distribution is the second largest vertical market for QlikTech worldwide. QlikTech's retail and wholesale business has grown steadily year over year and in 2009 has continued to experience growth proportionate with that of the entire company. The down economy has actually played favorably to QlikTech's strengths and the company has experienced less resistance to invest by retailers and wholesalers based on its rapid time to value and ease of use.
In a recent survey sponsored by QlikTech, IDC found 98% of retail and wholesale users reported customer satisfaction(1) and marked business value after implementing QlikView, including:
- 56% Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to other solutions evaluated(2)
- 250% Return On Investment (ROI)(3)
- 42% deployed QlikView in 1 Month; 69% in 3 months
- 30% increase in employee productivity
- 22% increase in cash flow
- 20% decrease in operating costs
- 13% increase in revenue
Retailers and wholesalers know the secret to a successful implementation is in achieving high adoption from the user community. The fact that QlikView is so simple any user can build an application for the business decisions specific to his/her function without having deep technical or data modeling expertise makes a huge impact on both customer satisfaction and related training and service costs.
For example, retail buyers using QlikView can build applications to self-select any number of data elements pertaining to sales and product performance, pricing and promotions, inventory sell-through and open-to-buy. With QlikView the buyer can visualize the analyses in a series of bars, charts and graphs and proceed to identifying trends, patterns and anomalies in performance. This allows them to immediately ask any number of follow-up questions to get answers needed to improve product performance and preserve gross margin.
"In a year where many retailers and wholesalers fell to mergers and acquisitions or were closing their doors, we find the survivors have a sense of urgency for maximizing sales opportunities and driving agile and efficient operations," commented Rebecca Braverman, Global Sector Director for Consumer Products, Retail and Distribution at QlikTech. "By delivering proven ROI and reduced TCO, QlikView is a prudent business intelligence choice for both the business and technical teams at retail and wholesale companies."
NEW YORK, Jan. 11 /PRNewswire/ --
QlikPower is a specialist Partner for QlikView in the Retail & Distribution sector in the UK and Ireland
Posted by Noel Shannon on Wed, Jan 19, 2011 @ 03:08 AM
The National Retail Federation (NRF) trade show in New York last week was focused just on the retail industry. But because retail is all about consumers, and consumer trends heavily influence trends in business technology, the trends in mobile computing from NRF are especially significant for BI.
Across the vast show floor, vendors were pitching mobile solutions for inventory and asset visibility, stock room management, mobile marketing, and virtual transaction processing―even augmented reality. Companies like IBM and NCR were talking about mobile as a key element of converged, cross-channel retail solutions, to help retailers increase revenues by improving the shopping experience for customers.
Here are a few things that popped out at me from the (massive) show floor at NRF:
- Mobile is the future of business intelligence. QlikTech and other BI vendors were demoing mobile BI solutions, to put business information and analytics in the hands of decision makers when and where people need it.
- Tablets are proliferating. The Apple iPad will soon have lots of competition. Many tablet PCs were on display at NRF, including Cisco CIUS, Dell Duo, Fujitsu LIFEBOOK, and HP Slate.
- Mobile printers round out the picture. One of the downsides of mobile computing to date is lack of access to a printer from your device. This will change, evidenced by availability of mobile printers from companies like BIXOLON, Epson, and HP.
- Mobile payments are hot. Companies like Mobile Pay USA are offering solutions to enable consumers to make payments directly from their mobile devices. Check out these results from an IBM survey of 30,000 consumers. One of the key findings was that 50% of respondents said they were willing to use a personal mobile device to make payments, in order to avoid the checkout lane.
- Special-purpose mobile devices aren’t going away. Despite growing adoption of multipurpose mobile devices, the need still exists for ruggedized devices from companies like Bluebird Pidion and PSION TEKLOGIX, for example, and mobile payment terminals (point of sale systems) from companies like Denso, Ingenico, and Micros.
What do these trends in mobile for the retail industry have to do with you, cherished reader of The QlikView Blog? A lot! Imagine rich, easy-to-use analytics in the hands of a salesperson on the retail floor, guiding the salesperson through the up-sell and cross-sell process as they ring the customer up. And what better way to provide and deliver insight into inventory and asset status and real-time response to in-store marketing campaigns than with up-to-date analytics?
QlikPower is a leading provider of QlikView BI solutions in the UK and Ireland.
Posted
01/14/2011 09:12 by
Erica Driver
Posted by Noel Shannon on Thu, Aug 19, 2010 @ 04:58 AM
QlikTech today announced successful enterprise deployments of QlikView business intelligence software by VIP Parts, Tires & Service, the largest privately owned automotive aftermarket retail chain in New England. VIP’s business footprint spans wholesale, fleet and commercial divisions, as well as 56 retail stores. Using QlikView to integrate, analyze and search millions of transactions from operational and POS (Point of Sale) systems across locations, VIP moved from green-bar and spreadsheet reporting to real-time operational scorecards and holistic, multi-level views of business performance, improving management controls and response to business issues.
VIP recognized a need to embrace an enterprise-wide business intelligence system that could reach the furthest parts of its organization and bring data from multiple departments and sources together into a single solution. After an exhaustive search, VIP selected QlikView based on its ease of use, pre-integrated tools such as ETL (Extract, Transform and Load), and the ability to provide web-based access to data search, analysis and reporting throughout the company.
“Our CEO became one of the biggest fans of QlikView because it allowed him to drill down through corporate data right to the SKU level. District managers are thrilled to now have access to the same performance-based reports that they can share with store-level executives,” said Dan Grosz, the company’s VP of Information Systems.
VIP rolled out its first QlikView dashboards focusing on store operations in only a few weeks and achieved all its initial goals in just nine months, covering functional areas such as:
- Executive Analysis, increasing C-level visibility of operational KPIs by consolidating data from all parts of the company into a single QlikView
- Sales Analysis, leveraging POS data in new ways such as ranking sales by vehicle type down to SKU level
- Marketing Analysis, aligning merchandising and dealer services with customer purchasing patterns
- Operational Analysis, tracking store performance down to technician level
- Supply Chain Analysis, tracking inventory turns and Gross Margin Return on Investment (GMROI) down to SKU level (Prior to QlikView, calculating inventory turns was a slow, laborious process that limited calculations to only “buckets” of parts and tires. GMRO couldn’t even be calculated.)
- Payroll Analysis, consolidating payroll reporting and managing payroll performance from an enterprise view.
With QlikView, VIP drill down into detailed customer buying patterns and company performance across their wholesale and dealer businesses any way they want. Operational scorecards with data views matched to the specific needs of each end user provide the ability to set goals, quickly identify problems and track progress against them.
About VIP Parts, Tires & Service
VIP Parts, Tires & Service is New England’s largest privately held automotive parts and accessories chain. Based in Lewiston, Maine, VIP has 56 stores in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts and a business footprint spanning retail, wholesale, fleet and commercial divisions. Since 1958, VIP has been the place where New Englanders turn for everything they need to keep their vehicles running at peak performance. VIP is staffed with ASE Certified technicians and counter personnel seven days a week and is the only New England resource for high quality, name-brand original equipment parts, tires and repair services. The company backs its prices with a 200% price guarantee and offers lifetime warranties on parts and labor
QlikPower is an implementation partner for QlikView. If you would like to find out how QlikPower can help you fill out the form here.