A Real Life Case-Study

In the previous chapter, we got familiar with certain industry domains. We had a look at insurance, pharmaceuticals, and retail domains. The chapter took us through the business processes and the terminologies used by business users, and we looked at the KPIs used by these domains.

This is the final chapter of the book; we will look at a real life scenario and try to implement the learnings from the preceding chapters. The chapter will look at a manufacturing company and its business scenario. We will look at the expectations of the business users and the KPIs which matter to them.

The chapter will then proceed to go through the actual process of how to implement the requirements, including data modelling, development, and visualizations. We will also look at validation, UAT, and go-live.

The chapter will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to Adventure...

Introduction to Adventure Works

Let us now see how we can put our learning in the previous chapters to use. For this, we need to look at a real life scenario. Let us look at a fictitious organization called Adventure Works Cycles, henceforth referred to to as AWC.

AWC has chosen Qlik Sense as their enterprise analytical platform. It is looking to implement Qlik Sense across its various departments. The different functions which want to take benefit from Qlik Sense are:

• Sales
• Finance
• Manufacturing
• Human resources

They want to implement Qlik Sense in phases and want to roll it out initially to the sales function and thereafter to the other functions.

AWC has awarded the implementation work to Jim, a Qlik Sense Consultant.

With this background, let us understand how Jim goes about the job of implementing Qlik Sense. Jim will be putting to use the concepts he learnt in the book...

Preparation

At the start of the book, we studied the advantages of preparing for a project and trying to harness information whic

Studying AWC Website

Websites of companies have good amount of information, helping us understand their objectives, missions, goals, products, and services. Jim visited the website of AWC, and after studying the website, he made the following observations.

AWC is a large multi-national company, headquartered in United States of America. The company manufactures and sells metal and composite bicycles. The company has sales operations in multiple regions, as seen in the following figure:

Sales region for Adventure Works Cycles

As seen in the previous figure, AWC has presence in the following countries...

Gathering Business Requirements

Jim now needs to get the actual business requirements, which will help him develop the Qlik Sense application. Since Brian heads the sales and also happens to be the champion, Jim needs to meet Brian and get all the business requirements from him. For the meeting, Brian gets along his colleagues heading sales of North America, Europe, and Apac.

Based on the earlier findings, Jim knows that lot of business users are traditional and haven't been exposed to the BI system. Jim proposes showing a quick demo to the business users. The demo can help them know the capabilities of Qlik Sense and make them aware of what are the different possibilities with Qlik Sense. A demo application relating to their industry will help Jim to get requirements in a crisp manner. Jim shows the demo app from Qlik website (https://demos.qlik.com/qliksense/ConsumerGoodsSales...

Defining approach and solution architecture

For Jim to define the solution and the data architecture, he needs access to the database system. He approaches Jean Trenary for getting access to the data warehouse and gets the access.

Once Jim gets the access to the system, he starts exploring every table related to sales available in the warehouse. This helps him to understand the nature of the data stored in the table and how it is linked to other tables in the warehouse.

He lists the dimensions and fact tables in the data warehouse which he would need to cater to all the sales related requirements.

Dimension tables are as follows:

Table Name	Description
DimCustomer	This table stores all customer related data. The customer data is captured only for the online channel. It stores the demographic information, like FirstName, MiddleName, LastName, Birthdate, and Gender. ...

Execution of project

Now that Jim has frozen the data architecture and best fit data model, he can start the development work. He decides to start with the extraction process. (For this example, we will fetch the data from data warehouse available in Microsoft Access database.)

Extraction

First thing that Jim needs to do is to create a connection to the database. Microsoft Access database can be accessible to Qlik Sense via an ODBC driver, so he will have to create an ODBC connection to connect to the Access database.

Let us see the steps used by Jim to create an ODBC connection to the data source:

1. Open the ODBC data source wizard.

You need to go to Control Panel | Administrative Tools | ODBC Data Source (32 Bit).

Once you...

Post Go-Live Steps

Now that Jim has completed the delivery of the application, he should look at post Go-live steps to increase adoption. The different areas that Jim needs to focus on are as follows:

• Creation of user manual
• Creation of application specific video (this can be similar to the video seen athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X5sjExhoug)
• Creation of frequently asked questions
• Close look at Qlik Sense monitoring apps to check adoption and performance
• Conducting of a refresher end user training
• Ensuring that proper backup strategy has been implemented

Summary

As we come to the end of the book, we hope the readers have enjoyed the journey and could make the most of the concepts that would help them to wear the hat of the consultant.

As consultants, the readers will face varied situations and use cases, and may get chance to work in multiple domains. This chapter looked at a situation where a consultant is exposed to a manufacturing company having both Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) models.

The chapter helps the consultants to understand the business challenges and how analytics can help the business users derive better insights and enable taking business decisions. The technical aspects involved in developing dashboards were looked at as well.

Once you are ready with the Qlik Sense application, it's important to plan the roll-out and look at best practices to build user confidence and increase...