QlikWorld lights up Vegas!

Introducing the latest enhancements to Qlik

QlikWorld is always a great place to hear the latest enhancements to their solutions. This year we heard about many updates, including:

• Qlik have refocused the raw data ingestion area with the launch of Connector Factory and plans to extend the already impressive list of over 250 connectors with a further 100 connectors. They have also committed to keeping the platform open regardless of the system or analytics end point.
• They are continuing to invest in visualisations with the introduction of enhanced styling of titles, plot areas and embedded images. This includes enhancements to the Qlik capability APIs, making it easier to embed analytics into the user’s website.
• The long awaited QlikView capabilities, such as horizontal filters and less grid restrictive overlapping objects, are soon to be available in Qlik Cloud.
• Insight Advisor is proving to be a powerful tool that is helping business users to select the most appropriate visualisation for their data, either by selecting a visualisation type or question using natural language processing. With a new enhancement called Key Drivers, users will be able to identify the factors that strongly correlate to a particular outcome through visuals in Insight Advisor.
• Reporting services now supports both PowerPoint and PDF file formats. In the delivery pipeline is a formattable XLS report generation based on Office 365 XLS and allows for the reuse of NPrinting XLS report template to ease migration of existing NPrinting solutions. Pixel perfect report generation and third-party extensions rendering will be supported.
• Qlik Application Automation continues to be the main method of orchestration and Qlik sees automation as a key driver of its product strategy. For instance, passing the insights from a visualisation directly into an AutoML data preparation stage will streamline the currently manual processes.
• And finally, there is to be further expansion of the Qlik Cloud countries of USA, Ireland, Singapore, and Australia, to include UK, Germany, and Japan.

MERCK improves reporting on global clinical trials with Qlik

MERCK is at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions that advance the prevention and treatment of diseases in people and animals. Since 2019 they have deployed more than 30 Qlik applications used by 8,000 users worldwide to support many uses cases, including managing clinical trials.

Randy Krauss, MERCK’s Executive Director, Metrics, Analytics and Performance presented alongside their Director, Jigna Patel, on the success they have achieved with Qlik. They are using it to support the operations involved in executing clinical trials for 88,000 patients across 21,000 active sites in 47 countries.

MERCK’s clinical sites want and need actionable insights into their performance on an ongoing basis, which they now have via Qlik with the on-demand reporting approach. Data is refreshed on a daily basis, but there are plans to move to near real-time solution. Alerts are used to inform users of actionable insights, as well as the on-demand reporting you would expect from a mature BI solution that is accessible across different devices.

Key metrics users have been asking for include:

• How well is our site progressing towards our goal?
• What milestones are coming up for a site?
• How am I performing against other sites?

‘Health Check’ reports provides an overview of site performance and the same reports is provided to all sites giving them real actionable insights.

The ‘Climber Report’ extension was mentioned as a ‘report builder’ and it is still great to hear that tools that Climber developed years ago are still adding value to customers today.

Data Literacy is key at MERCK, and this is delivered through general introduction, role based and object based education, including an annual assessment to see if data literacy is improving across the organisation.

Having spent many years working within the biotech and pharmaceutical industry myself, I have seen many successful implementations of Qlik to deliver real value in this space and MERCK’s presentation didn’t disappoint!