South Africa ’s Medical Research Council (MRC) has used next-generation business intelligence tool QlikView to improve the management of its annual Government grant and its 220 contract research projects (annual budget about R500m) . Divisional Manager for Contracts and Budgets, Philip du Plessis, says QlikView has helped the MRC save time and resources as well as enabling better decision making.

“Contract research for organisations including the US National Institutes of Health, the Center for Disease Control and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation accounts for about half our budget,” says Du Plessis. “We need to give fairly frequent and detailed updates to our funders as well as in-house users, and it can be very complex especially when dealing with projects that have multi-year budgets. QlikView has made the reporting to funders and internal clients easier.”

Du Plessis says QlikView gives users at the MRC instant access to information, updated daily from the organisation’s HR and payroll system as well as its core financial system (JD Edwards). “Previously we managed all our contract budgets in spreadsheets not linked to the finance system. The finance system is not set-up to handle our government grant as well as our contract research grants. Now we have an easy way to analyse data according to any variable we want to track, across any of our 45 units and their 220 contract research projects.”

Unlike older business intelligence software the MRC had used previously, du Plessis says QlikView is quick to implement, easy to use and easy to build on. “We had a working model for 15 users up within a week and we’ve since increased our user base to 100,” he says. “It’s so intuitive that anybody can be trained to use the system in a day or less, and because it’s so easy to implement we can develop our own new data models whenever we need them. Combined with the low support requirements, that has made QlikView’s total cost of ownership very low.”

“Our researcher administrators love QlikView because it gives them up to date information they can trust, and much better control over and insight into their budgets,” adds Du Plessis. “For our managers, it has saved days of time when it comes to compiling quarterly reports. 

“Because QlikView makes information so visible, it has also improved the integrity of our data,” says Du Plessis. “For example, it quickly exposed a couple of minor problems in our accounting structure which otherwise might have gone undetected for much longer.”  

Ends

About QlikView South Africa

QlikView South Africa is the local representative and distributor for QlikView, the world’s fastest-growing Business Intelligence software (IDC) and South Africa’s preferred Business Intelligence tool (ITWeb Survey 2008). 

QlikView simplifies analysis for everyone and works the way your mind works – making associations by connecting data from many sources in a few clicks. This patented in-memory association technology brings fast results and better decision making to a wide range of customers and industries. QlikView is intuitive to learn, simple to modify and can be deployed in less than a week. 

QlikView is the flagship product of QlikTech who has more than 7,400 customers in 83 countries and more than 500 partners worldwide. QlikTech was founded in Lund, Sweden and is headquartered in Radnor, PA (USA) with direct operations throughout Europe. QlikTech offers a fully functional, free trial of QlikView and a 30-day money-back guarantee. For more information, please visit www.qlikview.com

Editorial details

QlikView South Africa
Davide Hanan

Tel:       021 680 9506

Cell:      082 788 5791

Email:   davideh@qlikview.co.za  

DUO Marketing + Communications
Maria Oosthuizen

Tel:      021 683 8223

Cell:     084 506 7649

Email:   maria@duomarketing.co.za