“Instead of helping school heads and other personnel to analyze information, I now have the chance to spend a large part of my day on strategic work.” Markus Wiehager, Controller, Nacka Municipality
Nacka Municipality saves millions with QlikView
Nacka is a municipality east of Stockholm, where approximately 78,000 people live. The municipality’s vision is based on Openness and Multitude. Nacka Municipality encourages development and renewal, effective use of resources and freedom of choice. Through delegating responsibilities, the municipality takes advantage of the skills and capabilities of its employees and listens attentively to its citizens.
Challenges
- High costs associated with purchasing standards noncompliance, which was difficult to police
- Controllers spending too much time on manual data collection and analysis
- Heavy burden on IT staff to generate ad-hoc reports from IFS ERP system
Solution
Nacka Municipality deployed QlikView to more than 250 employees across three functional areas. With QlikView pulling data from an IFS ERP system, Nacka Municipality analyzes employee purchasing, supplier pricing and budget execution – all with a focus on keeping costs low for the organization. With QlikView Server (64-bit) and Publisher, Nacka Municipality can effectively manage security and visibility requirements while handling massive amounts of data.
Benefits
- Cost savings afforded by QlikView paid for the project in 3 months
- Reduced time required to generate reports by up to 75 %
- Provided controllers with detailed, timely follow-up capability like never before
- Ease-of-use enabled non-technical end-users to use application after just 1 hour of training
QlikView complements the ERP system
A few years ago, Nacka Municipality decided to update its ERP system to something more modern. Upon selecting IFS as its ERP solution, Nacka Municipality quickly realized it required a solution to analyze the data within IFS. Based on its requirements, Nacka quickly came to the conclusion that QlikView was the only solution on the market that could meet its needs. QlikView enabled Nacka to make mainframe calculations in a Windows environment without complicated data storage.
Nacka Municipality moved forward with the project in purchasing 250 licenses in late 2004. QlikView would first be applied to analyzing data related to the educational system within the municipality.
Better control of the finances
Nacka Municipality had previously large problems with financial control which QlikView solves by performing detailed analysis of individual invoices in real-time. Now, users simply have to click on the information they require and it is shown down to the individual invoicing level. Nacka Municipality can now work effectively with balanced scorecards and continual budget assessments to ensure the municipality was operating within budget.
“With the new tool, it is easier to perform financial checks and assessments,especially in purchasing,” said Markus Schöld, Head of Business Development at Nacka Municipality. “Previously, we could not know if employees were keeping to contracts. The municipality has a contract database where we can see all the municipality’s contracted suppliers. Ordering from a contracted supplier is often 20 per cent cheaper and we can now see if we have ordered from the wrong supplier directly in QlikView,” concluded Markus Schöld.
User-friendliness – leads to efficiency
As QlikView is extremely user-friendly, all personnel are able to use the analysis tool only after taking an hour’s worth of training. Now, all departments in the municipality analyze their figures directly themselves thus making the annual accounting, budgeting and planning process that much more efficient and effective. Nacka Municipality will save millions every year through effective analysis. The investment in QlikView has already been repaid in less than three months.
