Qlik - one to rule them all!

Hello! Thanks for coming back for another of my articles, don't forget to check the previous tests of Waalaxy and Copy.ai

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I remember what the Monday edition of the most popular polish gazette(at the time) "Gazeta Wyborcza" looked like from 15 years ago.

In fact, it was as thick as a Bible, and that size was due to the number of job advertisements printed weekly in the newspaper. Advertisements for which, if we were interested in something, we had to have a physically printed CV. After circling the offers you like you needed to sent the resume by mail(not email??). The process was time and resource consuming. Write a resume, print a resume, buy a newspaper, view a newspaper, rewrite data, send resume letters to the post office, etc., etc.

Some time later, most employers began to allow sending a CV by e-mail (later mainly announcing recruitment in the press), but the process was still complicated.

Then something new appeared on the market. Pracuj.pl - a job portal, founded by several colleagues from the student association AIESEC. In just a few years, they revolutionized the job search process. They were not the first - but they did it the best and today they are a monopolist, which I even applied a small pebble to during my 2-year work for the popular portal.

What was the key word of this success?

Simplicity.

Why am I writing about this?

Because we're all looking to improve our life processes. Whether it would be looking for a job, ordering a taxi, food or searching for information - everything is simplified.

However, I have the impression that this process don't affect data analysis. In most cases it's hard to say it's simple or easy.

I mean, we have a lot of great tools, new ones keep appearing - and yet over 90% of companies still rely on Excel.

And despite its many advantages, Excel

1. is not a database,
2. it's not a data warehouse,
3. or an analytical tool per se.
4. It will work up to a certain scale. Later it will only be a bottleneck.

Having Excel, we are only able to confirm historical events, react post factum, describe the past. This slide from Gartner describes it accurately:

Today, information about "what happened" is definitely not enough. Global trends are now prescriptive analytics, creating statistical models and literally giving prescriptions, recipes on how to achieve the desired events.

If not Excel then what?

Of course, there are many proposals. I work with Qlik, one of the leaders of Gartner's magic quadrant.

What is Qlik?

It's not only a data visualization tool. It's:

1. ETL process - Extraction, Transformation, Loading data in the tool.
2. Database - directly in the tool.
3. Data Warehouse - a place where we collect and process raw data from any source.
4. Easily create and distribute analyzes.
5. AI and ML mechanisms, suggesting the best analyzes based on our data.

Help in sales and marketing.

Often, we only see part of the truth in sales and marketing activities. Only some of our clients, processes, activities. We have to switch between different systems like CRM, ERP, Excel, warehouse system, accounting and controlling systems and we see only a fragment of the data each time.

By using tools that connect your various activities, you can

1. Muach easier dmin and evaluate you processes.
2. Examine profitability.
3. Plan and execute plans, budget, etc.
4. Build marketing campaigns based on data and be able to realistically measure their effectiveness and profitability
5. Identificate and get rid of low-margin / low-income activities
6. Predict things price trends and customer behaviour.
7. Increase the share of high-margin customers / transactions
8. Notice irregularities by combining data from different systems

What are the downsides?

Licenses or implementation cost more than Office 365.
It's good if at least one person in the company has database knowledge.
        

However, often just one analysis saves even a few days a month.

One of my clients wasted 8 working days a month on the allocation of media costs (i.e. assigning and dividing media costs into several dozen Cost Centers in the company).

Another, thanks to the combination of sales, production and warehouse data, discovered that he was losing almost 700 000 euro per year on an improperly constructed commission system.

Another one reduced the number of reports from 1000 excels per month (which no one read in full) to a dozen dashboards showing the situation in detail and in cross-section.

Examples:

• Consumer Good Sales
• S&OP (Sales and Operations planning)
• Customer Experience Analysis

Thank you for your time spent with me today :) If you would like to know more about Qlik, check it on a free trial, or just talk you can message me here: [email protected]

Have a nice Monday and see you in 2 weeks!