In order to get an upper-hand in this competitive business world, it has become quite important for companies to understand the concept of business intelligence. By choosing efficient BI software your company can achieve new heights in the market. You can search online to find excellent business intelligence software within your budget.

Today’s highly competitive environments require immediate responses from employees, suppliers and customers. A business professional constantly gets emails or calls that require immediate and urgent replies. To make an informed business decision, more time is needed regarding business analytics because a market can change fast and the information that must be analysed is in massive amount. This has resulted in making business intelligencemore of a necessity than a luxury.

When you are looking for BI software, you should consider the following points:

• What will the Business Intelligence software provide to an organisation or company? This surely looks like an obvious factor, but there are a number of people who do not know what they expect from their software to deliver them with. Most of the times people know what they don’t want, but have no idea about what they want from the software. Ensure that your organisation or company is clear about the things expected from the software. This would help you to not only save money, but your valuable time also.

• Always choose user friendly software: What you need to understand is that BI software is different from an ERP system or an accounting system which are mostly used by people on a regular basis. On the dashboard of the BI software you can look at the information or results, but the analytical area of the system is not used on a regular basis as you would for an accounting program. The system should be easy to understand and operate because people would simply stop using a complicated one.

• Mapping: Business intelligence software can be easily attached to multiple databases, after the vendor finds where the data exists. To save your time and money, it is advisable that you should find out if the vendor has the mapping of the system and knows the data location of your current ERP system or accounting. It would cost you less in implementation fees or consulting, if the vendor is more familiar with the architecture of your system.

• Who will be using the software? The management should be fully aware with the implementation of the BI software. If the senior employees are not using these tools, then the lower rank employees would also stop using it. By including one employee from each department of your company to use the software would ensure that the company gets the maximum benefits from the program.

• Go for the best available BI software: Wide ranges of software are available in the market with excellent dashboards and slick interfaces. What you need to understand here is that the software should match the specific needs of your company. These needs often vary greatly between different types of industries and companies. Choose the one that suits the requirements and provide the correct solution for your company.

• How much time is taken to implement software? Business Intelligence software is powerful, but sometimes can be quite difficult to implement and costly also. Therefore it is recommended to conduct a small personal research to find software that fulfils all your needs without being harsh on pockets.

Businesses are constantly facing different challenges every day, whether this be greater competition, lower profit margins, more demands from customers or declining sales.  For businesses to grow efficiently it’s important to understand what areas of the business are performing and those that aren’t.

Business analytics or using business intelligence  is about assisting organisations to integrate and consolidate data from all their operational processes and daily interactions.  Then delivering this information in a simple form, whether this is a dashboard, drill down analysis or report, to those that need it, when they need it, to better understand what’s happening and why it’s happening, to make more informed business decisions.  Here are some key strategies to apply when looking at business analytics:

• Daily analysis of demand to analyse shifts in customer buying behaviour: apply an additional level of scrutiny to analyse demand to identify those products with significant upward or downward trends. The forecast of these items could be adjusted to reflect shifts in product preference as consumers make trade-offs in price, package size quantities and value versus premium offerings.

• Optimise your product mix and emphasise value: Understanding product performance and tying this back to a profit impact is a critical component of a business intelligence system.  Marketing can then assess the right product mix to push based on the type of customer this attracts.  Consider a preference towards value-based product lines and position them to grab market share from competitors by appealing to the more cost-conscious buyers without devaluing products through well-timed pricing initiatives and bundled offerings.

• A fluid approach to inventory management: A fluid approach to inventory management is required when demand fluctuations occur, which is also a direct result of the type of business analytics system you use.  It’s not good enough for forecast or demand changes to take days or even weeks to be reflected in distribution, production, procurement and transportation plans. It’s important that managers can quickly see for themselves what’s going on and adapt to any demand changes as needed.  Stock movements should be analysed daily in light of orders, product mix, locations, margin and individual customers, aligning back to achievement of key targets.  It’s then easy to identify those products that are trending upwards as opposed to those to de-emphasise.  Those products identified as being slow to move can form the basis of a campaign with channel partners to alleviate excess levels of inventory.

• Understand your profit at a customer or sales rep/region level:  Most businesses understand their top line profit margins, but find it more difficult to measure this at a transactional level – whether this be by sales rep, store or region, customer or even at an invoice line level.  Some business analytics tools find it difficult to maintain fast query performance when analysing at these levels, especially when data volumes increase, so make sure you look for a tool that can handle this type of analysis.

• Ensure IT are empowering the business to make faster decisions not being a roadblock:There’s a definite shift away from IT centric reporting approaches across all sizes of organisations towards business user-led analysis solutions called Data Discovery business intelligence.  Data Discovery tools like QlikView make it easier for business users to understand what has happened, why it’s happening and what action is required to be taken.  They’re characterised by rapid prototyping, being simple to use and manage and can be delivered in a matter of weeks rather than months or years.  In the Finance analytic space, there has always been a strong need to move beyond manual, Excel based approaches to processes such as budgeting, forecasting and financial reporting.  However, the viable solutions for mid-size and enterprise organisations have for many been out of reach on a cost basis. Cloud based applications that Finance can own  and maintain in a simpler way are making a system based approach to these Finance processes affordable and therefore driving projects.

Proper implementation of these strategies can help your business to flourish. Effective use of Business intelligence software  supports each of these strategies and may give you an upper-hand in the market.

In today’s business world of high competition, efficient management of data is highly important. You can make decisions by quickly collecting and analysing data or information which helps your company to grow. The size of the business usually does not make any difference and even small ones can have remarkably large pool of information. Here, business intelligence software can proof to be an excellent tool for management. With help of these tools the progress of a business can be tracked by executives and managers of a company. It is vital to choose the right and best BI software no matter if it is the newest cloud marketing program or traditional software. This would ultimately help the company in achieving its goals.

How BI software helps you?

These types of software generally organise and then arrange the information or data in a format which can be easily understood by users. Company can get a summary of its performance as these programs can generate reports and spread sheets. The developers of such programs know quite well that businesses depend on special sets of data for making any decision. Business analyst needs to carry out a wide range of specific functions, these software perform and can meet all the requirements easily. Few functions of such software are as follows:

• Forecasting: It allows the managers and executives to make early predictions which are usually based on a particular set of information or data. Profitability of different decisions can be determined and alternative solutions of the outcome can also be predicted by them. This type of software is frequently used by high level managers and executives in decision-making process. A number of software has the ability to use the latest methods of forecasting.

• Client Intelligence: For analysing different consumer trends, it is considered to be a highly effective tool. The data or information generated is used by companies to figure out the needs of customers and then provide services depending on those requirements. It also influences various marketing decisions by a great level.

How to Choose High Quality Business Intelligence Software?

• First find out your business requirements which ultimately help you to find the best BI software. It is advisable that small business owners should opt for a program which can easily handle multiple functions at a time. Instead of going for different software for every work, you should buy an all-in-one tool which would cost less money.

• Specific function based program for different departments are often considered by large businesses. This helps the executives to concentrate on information that is important for their department. Even during hard economic times, business intelligence software  has helped companies to stay in the competition.

It is important to have excellent business analytics to understand the basics of new markets and to get establish. With untouched and new markets opening for various businesses, you have great opportunity to establish new business or to expand your current business. It is considered as a quite broad term and while understanding this term, you would find that a number different analytics come under this category such as customer, risk, marketing and operations analytics.

Business analytics provides solutions which help to make strategic decision by collecting large amount of data. You would find that it does have not simple but complex data like profits, losses, transactions, marketing return, customer feedback etc. Usually business analytical software is used to generate these types of data. This is not a new term, though it has become more accurate and structured with time. People often need a proper structure to evaluate the huge amount of information and data available.

Business analytics helps you to get a deeper and better insight of any business by breaking down complex data. Apart from providing valuable insights, it also cut unnecessary costs, identifies areas to improvement and offers quality service to customers. By analysing the expectation and needs of customers, it offers solutions for you to fulfil these areas.

You would find business analytics to be closely related to competitor analysis and customer analytics. By building strategies, it helps to provides upper hand to you over your competitors. Information is supposed to be treated as an asset by organizations which ultimately lead to applying prescriptive, predictive and descriptive analytics. Nowadays, it has become even more crucial because business organizations are worried more about survival rather than profits.

By using a business analytical software people can use results in the best way by analysing information and gathering essential data. People are able to make highly focused and accurate decisions to help their business to succeed. They can make most out of their analysed and collected data. This type of software conducts effective data mining, enabling the collected information to be accurately put into different business models. It can be used in multiple tasks like various drafting strategies which can optimize and utilize marketing data.

Business analytics is quite crucial component helping to improve operational performance as organisations are supposed to deal with huge amount of data. Even small businesses with the help of analytics models can disparate data or use information to its full potential. Future trends of a business are predicted as these models generate trends and patterns using historical data.

For new and growing organisations, it is important to understand the expectations of the consumer. Analytics goes well beyond gathering data; its main job is to provide assistance to business organizations to make key decisions. You would figure out that business analytics is far more than using software tools, collecting data, creating reports and dashboards.

In today’s time majority of companies are getting attracted to use business analytics to make better decisions for its businesses. It is important to take analytics as an investment, rather than as an expense. 

When a business gets correct data or information on right time, it is termed as business intelligence. Dependence on information and data creates a need of software which enables the user to gather, sorting and finalizing all data for use in business. This type of software plays an important role in managing information related to services, products, clients etc. It helps to analyse clients spending and behaviour patterns, preferences, market conditions and capabilities of a company, changing trends in market share.

By organizing and arranging, business intelligence tools convert data in an easy to understand format. Companies are able to get a view of its performances as these programs can produce reports and spreadsheets. There are multiple benefits of using Qlikview business intelligence software such as:

• The software prevents conducting business of a company on basis of guesswork, adding a high level of surety and certainty.

• It provides immediate response to metric and queries report. Qlikview generates information quickly in comparison to other types of softwares. This results in saving a lot of time of company employees.

• It is not an easy task to keep a track of every material loss, for businesses with huge inventory and stocks. Here, Qlikview not only prevents material loss but also keeps track of whole inventory.

• You would understand the approach and needs of clients better with detailed statistics and reports. All information related to customers can be used effectively in future.

• Qlikview offers excellent trends, forecast and industry projections which results in improving conversions and enquiries.

• It makes a huge difference to a business in terms of turnover, profits and performance of employees. It saves time, money and effort which can be utilized in other areas of a company.

Every company should consider Qlikview business intelligence software as it offers high return on investment (ROI). This software provides numerous advantages on which you can capitalise and it is advisable to discuss how to implement it at workplace. It is commonly used in form of executive dashboards and scorecards which enables the management to check important measurements and performance indicators within seconds. On the other hand, traditional reports have to be drawn up each time for various assessments, consuming the valuable time.

Qlikview is considered a strategic tool which helps management of a company to view information and data from different perspectives, even the smallest details. Ensure that you must know how to use it properly and effectively. By doing so, it can be utilised in the best possible way and helping you to get more from the software.

Business intelligence software is often termed as backbone of a company by a number of experts. Qlikview can also be used in product reviews, sales forecasts, employee training etc. It conducts various tasks immediately, enabling the employees to concentrate on other work. This ultimately leads to development and growth of a company. High flexibility is offered by its visual design elements as it brings numerous viewpoints into one. These excellent features make Qlikview business intelligence software a preferred choice for faster implementation of future plans and overall growth of a company.

In this post I want to share with you a good practice in handling the various expressions that exist in a QlikView business intelligence  document. The most used expressions are the ones used in charts, where they hold measures such as Sum (Sales), Sum (Price*Quantity), etcetera. These are the ones more likely to be reused by other objects and in different sheets. There are many other expressions including Chart Attributes, Color Expressions and Show Conditions, you can see them all by going to the menu Settings/Expression Overview.

The use of expressions can be intensive in QlikView, especially when having a sophisticated user interface. There is a growing need to handle these expressions in a more efficient way, and this can be accomplished by the use of variables.

<span style="font-size: small;"> Reasons for holding expressions in variables:

• To achieve reuse: the formula for a measure such as Sales usually remains the same across a QlikView document, so it doesn’t make sense to write it on every chart. 

• To enforce consistency in the formulas: by avoiding the risk of having different formulas that calculate the same measure. 

• To provide an single point to apply changes: if and when a formula needs to be changed, you only need to change one variable and all the charts and other objects that refer to that variable will follow. 

• To allow the end user to make changes through an input box, when needed. This could be the case of targets for KPIs or general parameters.

Variables can be created manually by going to the menu Settings / Variable Overview or by using the SET/LET statements in the script. They have a name and a value, which can hold any sort of strings or numbers, and they can be used as a reference from every sheet object. The Input Box is the object designed to show variables in the user interface.

If you want to start experimenting with moving your expressions to variables try the following:

• >Go to the Expressions tab on one of your charts and copy one of the formulas, for instance Sum(Sales Value)

• Go to the menu Settings / Variable Overview and click on the “Add” button to create a variable. Give it a name such as v Formula Sales (it is a best practice to have all variable names starting with a v to help differenciate them from Fields).

• Select your variable from the variable list an paste the formula from the chart in the “Definition” text box.  If the formula starts with an = sign, remove it. Finally click on “OK” to save the changes.

• Go back to the Expressions tab of your chart properties and replace the formula with the following: $(vFormulaSales)

The $ sign expansion indicates the string contained in the variable is a formula that needs to be calculated.

The final step is to replace the cloned formulas in all the other objects so they all refer to the same formula contained in the new variable.  Every new object that needs to show Sum (Sales) should also refer to the variable.

You may already have quite a few QlikView business analysis documents where you didn’t apply this practice, but it’s never too late to get started.  In the long term it’s really worth it.

Business Intelligence Software

Developers love QlikView business intelligence software after they start using it, able to use features that they already know in different ways where they gain new wisdom to use their creativity. Here’s some pointers on some of QlikView’s simple and advanced capabilities that stand out.

Drag and drop to open a QlikView application:

Drag and drop a QlikView application (qvw) file into the QlikView Developer client to have it opened.

The power of grey and selections:

With QlikView, users can literally see relationships in the data. They can see not only which data is associated with their selections, they can just as easily see which data is not associated. This generates new insights and unexpected discoveries.

With a right click, they can reverse their analysis by selecting the non-associated data (select excluded).

By using the “show alternatives” option on list boxes, the user can get further insight on the data values that are related to the selection state besides the green value.  When a selection is made on a list box, the selected value is highlighted in green and all of the other values are highlighted in grey. If the user would like to get insight on the data values that are still relevant with the selection state in addition to the green value, they can check the “show alternatives” option and can get insight on all of the relevant values in addition to the selected value.    

The user can move between selected values in a list box by using the down arrow on the keyboard. As the selection changes with the down arrow pressed, the charts recalculate on the fly and the user sees changes in the data. 

List box with expression:

The user can create new data selection points by creating a list box with an expression. For example, the expression can define the sum of sales at the customer level. The user can then make selections on these new data points to do further analysis.

Calculated dimensions:

The dimension values on charts do not need to exist in the data model; new data points can be created and used as dimension values on charts. For example, in a chart showing the inventory quantities by the number of weeks, the number of weeks is a calculation that is used as dimension values. 

Bookmark:

In QlikView, the current state of selections can be saved as bookmarks for later use. To create the bookmark, it does not store the actual data values; it stores the criteria that are used while the selections are made (the filters the user applied). If the selection criterion is an expression, let’s say “top 15 customers,” it will store the expression and when the data refresh happens, the updated top 15 customers will be displayed when the bookmark is selected.  

Document chaining:

With document chaining, it is possible to open one QlikView application from another QlikView application and carry the selection states from the first to the second application.

Power of in-memory data transformation:

QlikView bi software provides a lot of functionality to transform data in memory. It is possible to create new tables, and new fields in memory. Please see the script syntax part of the QlikView reference manual document.

Data exploration:

On the table viewer, when hovering with the cursor above the fields, users can get information about the data density and subset ratio to understand any data integrity issues. The number of selected values vs. all of the values is displayed on the right bottom part of its screen.

Binary load:

With binary load, it is possible to load the in-memory data model from one QlikView application to another one. Binary loads are very fast. It is possible to do further in-memory data transformation on the data after the binary load.

Search:

QlikView allows search not only by actual data values but also by new data calculations. For example, the user can type “=rank(sum(Sales)) <=5” on a product list box. This would select the top 5 products based on sales. The same type of search can be done on a search box. In that case, it not only will display the top five products but also all of the associated data (e.g., sales people, regions, price, etc . . . anything related to these five top products). Pretty powerful! </p>

These are just some of the “unlisted” benefits of QlikView.