The gauntlet was thrown down in a LinkedIn discussion to find 101 Uses for QlikView.  It quickly became the most active discussion on the group by a substantial margin.  The target was reached and exceeded in no time.  This is an excellent indicator of both the breadth of QlikView’s applications and the enthusiasm of it users to sing its praises.

For myself one of the things I love about my job is that every week I am on site at different companies in completely different markets meeting the challenges they have through better visibility of their data.Here are just some examples of my own 101 uses for QlikView.

General Ledger
This is one of the most universal applications I have implemented. Building a data definition to sit over a chart of accounts to produce an interactive view of the GL.  Line items can be rolled up and drilled into as required.

FMCG
High volume of sales means a high volume of data. QlikView can help make sense of these data.  A good example was plotting tonnage of raw material against it’s cost (in multi currency) and the value of sales of the manufactured product.

Insurance
QlikView seems to have found a sweet spot in insurance.  The answers to the large number of questions asked by insurers when you are taking out a policy become the dimensions. There are then many different metrics such a Loss Ratio, GWP, NWP, Earned Premium, etc..  These can then be displayed in many different ways. There is also the display of claim amounts in the underwriters favourite; the Development Triangle.

New Media
Along with new ways of presenting companies marketing messages there are new ways of collecting data on peoples activity and behaviour on-line.  QlikView can track both the cost and the efficacy of SEO, PPC and other online promotion efforts.

Offline Media
Other forms of media spend can now be more fully analysed by comparing against the new media data.  Did that TV spot airing lead to extra clicks on the company web site or an increase in mentions on Twitter, for example?

Sales Force Management
Often used in QlikView training and demos; finding out which salesperson shifted the most units is an obvious use of QlikView. That can be taken on beyond historical reporting to setting targets and defining territories (with help from Google Maps integration).  Salesperson activity can be viewed alongside that all important impact on the bottom line.

Education
A sector that is all about results (in more than one sense) needs to be able to measure these results.  QlikView allows this.  It can tap into multiple systems such as registration and timetabling applications and the various government return files.  From here measures such as attainment, attendance, class size and application conversions can be calculated and mapped against each other in a single dashboard.

Logistics
An industry which is heavily tied to service level agreements (SLA’s) needs to be able to view exactly how they are measuring up to these agreements.  Where there are any cases of late collections or deliveries the reasons for these need to be quickly investigated an addressed. QlikView allows hauliers to be able to view this information and act on it.

ERP
A successful ERP implementation taps into every aspect of a business.  This means the data behind it is a fantastic single repository for dashboarding.  From sales ledger to EPOS and staff timesheets to general ledger it is all there with consistent unique keys for each data item.  I have been involved in a number of implementations over Microsoft NAV Dynamics that have capitalized on this.

There’s not enough time to list all my other examples here – but suffice to say that I have not yet found a situation where QlikView has not been able to rise to the task in hand and deliver over and above what it was originally expected to do.

No wonder I enjoy what I do so much!