Johannesburg, 15 Feb 2006
Neil Harvey & Associates (NHA), one of South Africa`s leading developers and suppliers of managed healthcare software for the healthcare funding industry, has partnered with QlikView South Africa to provide instant data mining to its customer base.
QlikView`s business intelligence and data analytics software has empowered NHA`s clients to easily access and analyse the millions of claims they process every month.
NHA has over 30 years` experience in healthcare administration systems and services 12 medical aid administrators with more than 500 000 member families. NHA`s flagship product, Medware, raises, collects and reconciles premiums and records, and also assesses and pays claims. Further, it maintains a database of client details and a history of transactions.
This translates into a huge amount of rich data and an ongoing hunt for suitable tools to manage and analyse the data.
"We offer a complete IT outsourcing service to our clients and when it comes to data analysis, we needed to address two key issues: first, even though our volumes are very large - we deal with hundreds of millions of rows of data - we wanted to be able to access data at a granular level, and second, we needed to empower our clients to do the information-mining themselves, without getting tangled up in IT issues," says Neil Harvey, managing director of NHA.
After a long search, looking at various BI options, NHA was introduced to QlikView and decided then that this was the software which would address its key requirements.
"We`ve tried several BI tools in the past but found them one-dimensional. Moreover, our developers had to produce cubes to give a snapshot of members` data and the time taken to build these was enormous. In addition, it was difficult to add new information and clients weren`t drawn to explore the data themselves. This means that my programmers spent a lot of time producing reports for our clients."
"QlikView has the ability to handle large volumes - and a wider range of fields - of raw data, presenting it in a succinct manner without hiding the data or impacting on the background view. It`s multi-dimensional and extendable within a single model and works off our application database, negating the need for a traditional data warehouse. It`s designed for use in the real world," explains Harvey.
QlikView was developed with the end-user in mind, rather than for the IT department. It provides users with guided analysis and lets them decide what they want to focus on. Unlike traditional BI tools, QlikView does not make use of OLAP and is able to analyse massive amounts of data at unprecedented speed by loading data directly into memory. By taking full advantage of 64-bit technology`s memory capacity, QlikView can provide summary level metrics and record level detail on the same architecture. "This successful implementation of QlikView illustrates once again how QlikView can address the shortfalls of traditional OLAP," says Davide Hanan, managing director of QlikView South Africa.
"Since implementing QlikView we`ve seen a faster deployment of user requests. Maintenance of the information is easier and fewer resources are required to manage the data. This means that my programmers are now freed up to innovate and create, rather than produce hundreds of reports. Almost all of our clients are using QlikView, which is a natural extension to our Medware and Careware products. This means we can concentrate on being the IT department for our clients and live up to our slogan - `Forget IT - Just Do Business`," concludes Harvey.
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