What do you look for when you choose a car?

Well in a very similar way, these are some of the things you also look for when you are looking into purchasing a new BI software for your department to use.

Don’t Settle for a Sufficient SaaS Solution

You want a platform that efficiently uploads your data, without having to make pit stops again and again. You are looking for a cloud server that is reliable and secure, and that you can trust with your valuable data. You are also looking for a platform that creates visually appealing visualizations in a format that makes it easy to see the information you want to see.

Well with Qlik Sense SaaS solution, all of these are made available to you.

With Qlik’s wide variety of data transferring capabilities, never worry about not having the tools you need to get your data into your platform to be analyzed. Qlik Sense SaaS is also one of the most reliable cloud servers in the market, boasting a 99.9% uptime guarantee. The only .1% of the time that it is offline, Qlik makes a promise that you will be notified.

Get the Most Value for Your SaaS Solution

Qlik also provides one of the most visually appealing data visualization repertoire in the market. This combined with it’s complimentary services of NPrinting and Alerting, allows you to not only create powerful visualizations, but to report your findings and stay updated on the data that matters most.

And with the help of solution partners, like our team at CHAMPS Analytics, never feel alone or lost as we can support your department with our years of Qlik experience.

Qlik’s SaaS offering provides users with the tools needed to create data driven solutions.

Qlik Sense SaaS in 60 - Combo Chart Styling and Multiple Data Alert Conditions

Qlik Sense SaaS

Time is money, and being able to act quickly when there are issues within your department can save you and your company lots.

However, a common issue that comes with trying to act quickly is dashboard fatigue. Staring at dozens of visualizations across multiple sheets and apps can reduce the effectiveness of these visualizations. Qlik has recently released a solution that helps teams and departments solve these problems, saving them time, and saving their company money. This new offering is called Qlik Alerting.

Stay Up to Date by the Minute about Your Data

Qlik Alerting provides users the ability to create data driven parameters and targets the matter to you. When there is an outlier or anomaly in your data that passes the parameters you’ve set, you will get a notification to your smartphone, alerting you to attend to your dashboard. You can program these alerts to reach you through the app, over text, or over email. When using the app you are allowed to investigate the visualization in question directly through the app, saving you time from having to go back to your work computer.

Qlik Alerting is different from other alerting offerings you may have seen, as the targets you set for it to recognize are driven directly from the data. Other offerings allow you to create targets that respond to visualizations, which does not always provide the most accurate or timely insights.

Another bonus of Qlik Alerting is that it is completely free with the registration of Qlik Sense.

This means that you don’t have to pay additional fees to get an alerting offering that works for you and with your BI platform. Qlik Alerting saves you money upfront AND down the road with the results it provides.

Qlik Alerting

Every cloud computing service you use has data.

Your Spotify even has data from the podcasts you listen to on your way to work.

However, this data does not provide you value in its current state. You must be able convert and combine the data into a format that is accessible for you to create analytic opportunities. When your data is spread across multiple sources, you need a way to integrate these sources together in order to create the most value for your department.

Qlik Sense provides a service that can help you integrate your data for free. Qlik’s latest offering is called Blendr.io, a data integration tool that blends your data between hundreds of cloud data platforms. This allows you to integrate your data from multiple sources, and create data flows that save you and your team time and money.

With Qlik’s Blendr.io, seamlessly drag the data you wish to select, and drop it into the workflow. You can even create API’s and Webhooks in the workflows to create triggers that can pull data from wherever you need. You can also build in loops, saving you the time of having to tediously repeat workflows over again and again.

It was said earlier, but Qlik’s Blendr.io is free when you register for Qlik Sense today. This means you can kill two birds with one stone and eliminate the need to go searching for a tool to go with your BI tool that can meet your data integration needs.

https://videos.qlik.com/watch/AcdtoSqiSsyPNzLgCMTUnP

Qlik Blendr.io

Quick, your boss needs you to get him a report on this quarter's sales metrics. Only problem is, you don’t have a way to get him this report fast.

This is a problem we are seeing a lot these days, as not all BI providers have an in-house reporting platform that allows them to move their visualizations into reports. This is an important problem many are seeking to solve… because what’s the value in a visualization if you’re the only one able to see it.

Qlik set out to solve this problem for Qlik users by introducing Qlik NPrinting. Qlik Nprinting provides users the ability to build and distribute reports on all of the leading platforms, using their Qlik dashboards.

Qlik Nprinting provides users the ability to directly select the app, sheet, and visualization they want from their Qlik Sense server, and import directly into their presentation. Nprinting allows you import these visualizations into Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Office applications. The platform is also very user friendly, as it allows users to drag and drop the visualizations they wish to select.

One of the best advantages  of Qlik NPrinting is that it comes free. This is not the “free-trial” or the limited capabilities for free offering. It is completely free with all of it’s capabilities for Qlik Sense users. 

One of the greatest advantages is that you don’t have to be a Qlik user to see these reports. Qlik enables it’s user to import their visualizations into platforms that everyone can have access to like Microsoft Powerpoint. This is not always offered by other BI providers, which require you to be a user in order to see the reports others have created. This creates value in organization wide continuity by allowing all parties to be on the same page.

Qlik NPrinting

Monday.com is one of the most recognizable names in the field of employee and client management software.

Founded in 2012, it provides customers with a visually appealing and tactically efficient platform that allows them to better manage teams, projects, and customers.

Increase the Value Brought to Your Organization

At CHAMPS Analytics we have seen first hand the value that Monday.com has brought to our customers. It has allowed them to become better organized and more effective managers.

What we have realized though, is that by combining Qlik and monday.com, our customers have seen a noticeable increase in the value that monday.com provides. Qlik is an industry leader in BI software, helping teams across the world channel their data into actionable insights.

Get Real Results When Combining Monday.com and Qlik

Intrinsic Therapeutics is a medical device company that specializes in providing implant solutions to prevent recurring issues for discectomy patients. They have recently used monday.com for their customer management needs in relation to the hospitals and surgeons that they had sold to and trained.

When Intrinsic reached out to us at CHAMPS Analytics, they were looking to take the next step in taking the data provided by Monday.com, and using it to create insights that would allow them to track their progress with their customers.

With the use of Qlik, we were able to come in and help Intrinsic build a dashboard of sheets that allowed them to track their KPIs related to the surgeries provided using their device, the surgeon conversion rate, and the effectiveness of their training cohorts. We were able to use Qlik’s powerful visualizations to allow Intrinsic to easily dive deeper into the data provided from monday.com.

“Qlik has been able to allow us to manage various data sets (from independent software’s like Monday.com, Quickbooks and SurgiCloud) and bring them together easily in one tool for analytics. The CHAMPS Analytics team has been excellent in building the connections, and further more developing graphs and models that wouldn’t be possible in Excel or would have taken us weeks to produce and result in a subpar product.” - Ralph Beentjes

Intrinsic is a great example of how Qlik can allow your company to use the data from monday.com, and create data driven results that brings value to your company.

Qlik and Monday.com

5 Strategies For Improving Your Analytics

There’s no doubt that Excel has been one of the tools of choice for analysis and reporting. Users love the control they have, the rapid and easy creation of models and graphics, and the ability to be both independent and self-reliant. With Excel, you’re in the driver’s seat. But just like driving a sports car when what you need is an SUV, using Excel for analysis means that you’re over-served in some ways and in others, much underserved. Out-of-date data (and no easy way to update), error-prone analytics, multiple versions of the same file circulating among colleagues, 
 too much manual involvement—these are just a few of the frustrations commonly associated with Excel. And what 
 of the time wasted developing your analysis instead of spending time actually analyzing?

Despite these issues, many departments—and entire businesses—run on Excel, swearing by it one minute 
 and swearing at it the next. There are better ways, from simple improvements you can make yourself to large 
 scale, enterprise-oriented changes. This paper focuses primarily on improvements you can make to improve 
 how you conduct your analytics without sacrificing the advantages of Excel.

You can improve the quality of all of your analytics if you stop doing so many reports and presentations and just focus on the ones you and your colleagues need to make decisions. Inventory the various analytic reports you and your team maintain and then uncover which ones matter and how often they require updating. You’ll have a much better idea of the metrics that matter and the value that’s being provided to the team. As a bonus, not only will you reduce your team’s workload and focus on the most important tasks but you’ll probably also eliminate a lot of previously unidentified duplicated efforts.

We’re all so busy doing the same thing over and over that sometimes we forget to stop and ask, “Is there a slightly better way?” And, unless you’re a super power user, when it comes to Excel, there probably is.

Use the online help! Excel has some great examples. But don’t just read them. Do them. Create a spreadsheet with the same data Microsoft shows in its help and replicate the help files. Doing will help you more than reading.

Look for help. For the vast majority of data problems you have, there is probably someone with the exact same problem who has described the answer somewhere on the Internet. Search for “pivot tables”, “Excel add ins”, etc. You’ll be amazed at how much there is out there. 

Learn the “analysis essentials.” Tasks and features like “lookup” functions, pivot-tables, the date functions, find/replace, subtotals, named ranges and keyboard shortcuts can help speed your analysis.

Evaluate yourself and your team for the right technical fit. For example, you may be able to use the “ODBC” driver (Open Database Connectivity standard) to connect to data warehouses and centralized databases. This can be effective but the requirements are steep: 1) you must have access; 2) you must know what you’re looking at and 3) you need to be connecting to or pulling fewer than 1 million rows (for Excel 2010). So don’t expect your analysts to turn into Excel macro experts or database programmers. If you need that kind of help, look to add those skills via part-time contractors or developers.

The data challenge today isn’t that people don’t have the information. It’s the way they get at it, cleanse it and ensure its integrity. Because everyone does these tasks differently, there are often multiple “versions of the truth.” Excel only makes this worse. When you add in the logical errors made in spreadsheets, we’re talking about a lot of potential incorrect or misleading information. In fact, there are industry estimates that 90% of spreadsheets contain data or logical errors. Quality checking and clear communication are crucial.

Obviously, no one’s perfect so never assume you cleansed your data, wrote your formula or sorted your data right every time. Do a lot of quality checking along the way. You have to provide accurate data, and you must go out of your way to explain where you got it, how it was calculated and why it might differ from the reports they’ve been seeing.

Be careful and descriptive about naming, including column names, file names and version numbers. Good, clear documentation would be ideal. More attentiveness to naming and documentation is not going to stop the problems but it may reduce them.

Don’t overestimate what other people know about using Excel. For example, Excel does have some file management and change tracking capabilities. Do you know what percent of people know how to use and comply with them? It’s not many. You can decide you want to be the one to educate the world or you can decide to do things in very clear, simple ways so that you get back the input you need.

Work your internal resources for better data

Now is as good a time as any to start talking to your colleagues about your data needs and what you’re doing with Excel. By showing and sharing about your current analytics, you’ll get good ideas and start setting the stage for more sophisticated and systematic approaches.

The data challenge today isn’t that people don’t have the information. It’s the way they get at it, cleanse it and ensure its integrity. Because everyone does these tasks differently, there are often multiple “versions of the truth.”

Make time to start talks with the leaders of your IT department. Although many IT executives are busy with security and governance issues, they too would rather provide you a more useful, secure approach than running the many report requests which they know will end up in hundreds of Excel files spread across the company. (A major concern for some IT groups is the control and potential elimination of these so-called “spreadmarts” (a TDWI-coined term describing the proliferation of Excel files within an organization). While it would be naïve to say that your team and your IT department can easily align goals and resources, you can start to talk about ways to improve operations. 

Some organizations already have complex and underutilized business intelligence platforms available. Much of the work associated with these BI systems may be reusable. (The assumption is that your BI systems are not delivering a high degree of usefulness; otherwise, you’d already be using them and not Excel).

Have a plan for upgrading your analytic efforts to tools more appropriate for the job. Be realistic about Excel’s limitations.

There’s an old saying: when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This applies to analytics and Excel. Business users often don’t have other, more appropriate tools and we frequently can’t get the attention we need from IT. So we end up spending far too much time and effort trying to make Excel work when it just isn’t the right application.

So look around. There are tools out there. Ideally, your analytics would rely on software that is as easy to use as Excel but that connects directly to your source data. As an example, Tableau Software (full disclosure— Tableau is the sponsor of this paper) makes applications for fast analytics and visualization that connect to existing Excel spreadsheets, data warehouses and other data sources. The software combines data exploration and graphic visualization in an easy-to-use, highly intuitive application.

The goal is to help people ask rapid questions of their data and get immediate, real-time answers. Customers have described it as “Excel on steroids.” Bill Attridge of HTM Corporation said “People using Excel PivotTables for analysis take note. If you use Tableau once, you’ll never use an Excel PivotTable again. Tableau is great for analysis and even makes the work fun.”

Some users will never stop swearing by and simultaneously swearing at Excel. Analytic habits don’t change overnight. It’s natural to want to use Excel as a flexible, low-cost method for analytics but we must recognize its limitations. If you genuinely seek to reduce the number of analytic reports, learn some new Excel tricks, pay obsessive attention to quality, collaborate with your IT department and seek out more robust new solutions, you will build a stronger, more flexible analytic environment that will serve your needs well into the future.

Qlik Sense SaaS

Qlik Alerting

Qlik Blendr.io

Qlik NPrinting

Qlik and Monday.com

Struggling with Excel to Analyze Data?