QlikView | Customer Success Story | Austin Fire Department Austin Fire Department Solution Overview Austin Fire Department (AFD) uses QlikView to improve Municipal fire department serving the City of Austin, Texas operations, performance, Industry Government and service Function Executive, operations, finance, HR Geography United States AFD used to manage by anecdote, intuition, and assumption. With QlikView, our decisions are based on data-supported Challenges facts. We can test an assumption before we act on it and • Lack of visibility into operations and performance data measure a decision after it’s made. • Unable to effectively extract, integrate, “ and analyze enterprise data from seven Elizabeth Gray, distinct databases Business Systems Analyst Supervisor, Austin Fire Department • Improve reporting efficiency to improve operations, staff morale, and to ease staff stress Austin Fire Department (AFD) has a but” pulled it out with tweezers,” said Solution proud history of serving the more than Elizabeth Gray, AFD’s Business Systems AFD deployed QlikView to 16 users 750,000 residents of Austin, TX. The Analyst Supervisor. in 12 weeks. With QlikView, AFD now department, which responds to approxi- analyzes 911 calls, response times, mately 75,000 calls annually, holds as its QlikView: Better business apparatus deployment and usage, mission to protect lives and property. intelligence for better service personnel absences and leave, budgets The department began the search for and finances, firefighter staffing, cadet recruitment and hiring, and work orders. a Business Intelligence (BI) solution. It Using QlikView (64-bit), AFD immediately turned to QlikView after reading about leveraged the data stored in different the software in DM Review. “We ap- databases to achieve the department’s proached QlikView with a good deal of first-ever real time view of operational skepticism,” said Gray. Today it provides performance. AFD with the direct ability to easily Benefits query and analyze over 10 GB of data. • Saved 300 hours, representing an She remarks, “We can absolutely verify equivalent cost of $131,000 that it works as advertised.” • Enabled fact-based decision making and improved business processes Simple, fast, affordable • Eliminated staff frustration and stress QlikView’s next generation in-memory Data Source Systems Responding to tough association technology made it a simple, Application: Banner Payroll, AIMS economic times fast, and affordable solution. Because financial, FDM RMS Fire Recently, difficult economic times forced QlikView doesn’t require a data ware- Incident Management, AFD AFD to identify ways to increase ef- house, OLAP cubes, or other components in-house legacy systems ficiency and effectiveness of operations of traditional BI systems, AFD deployed Database: Firebird, MS SQL, Access, in order to streamline spending and their pilot in 12 weeks. Using space on Excel improve services. an existing server eliminated the need for Hardware: Dell R805 2RU Server with expensive hardware. Users require little 2.3 GHz Dual Quad-Core CPU, 32 GB memory, 1 TB The department collected high-level to no training and are able to answer storage annual performance measures, but daily “hmmm, what if…” queries without hav- operational data was spread across mul- ing to rebuild reports. tiple divisions in different data sources. AFD lacked a useful tool for extracting Improving operations or integrating it efficiently. “We shoveled one division at a time data into our systems with a bulldozer AFD has more than 20 QlikView QlikView | Customer Success Story | Austin Fire Department applications. Chief officers use it to track represents an equivalent staffing cost of 911 calls and responses by jurisdiction, $131,000. And without the need for an station, battalion, number of runs, and army of technical staff, the total cost of hour of day, day of week, and year. With QlikView ownership is much lower than QlikView, they have direct and immedi- typical BI systems. 12 weeks to develop ate insight into call volume and types, 5 applications; estimated response times, workload, and call distri- For many users the benefit of now be- 20-30 hours for each bution. QlikView also provides decision ing able to perform critical analysis is additional application. support for the allocation of fire trucks to “priceless.” QlikView replaced the non- existing and new stations. value added time spent chasing numbers with value-added time spent analyzing For years, AFD could not easily present data and improving decisions. And the financial information for effective analy- analysis is worth more because the data sis and cost tracking. QlikView helps is trustworthy. finance managers manage strategically by enabling comparison of forecasted to Austin taxpayers have also benefit- actual budgets, accounting forensics, cost ted from AFD’s new decision-making Return of service analysis, and much more. abilities. A neighboring jurisdiction had claimed AFD owed it money because its Saved 300 hours of staff time, AFD’s HR managers use QlikView to an- units responded to calls within AFD’s alyze personnel leave and daily absences, territory. Using QlikView, AFD com- a cost savings of $131,000 payroll trends, staff demographics, and piled data on the frequency and types years of service for talent management of response runs into both jurisdictions. and succession planning. They are able The result demonstrated that both areas to simulate “what if” scenarios related provided approximately the same level Investment to specialty payments. Instantly, they of service to each other and avoided an can track the impact on negotiated labor added expense for Austin’s taxpayers. contracts of raising or lowering specialty pays related to education, firefighter QlikView also helped AFD make a was no backlash from the neighborhood certification, bilingual ability, or other politically charged decision about locat- that “lost” an engine or from the ladder metrics. ing fire engines and ladders. Firefight- company that had originally asked for ers assigned to one area of town asked additional help. Cost savings are high; for additional equipment because they true benefits “priceless” “sensed” a high number of calls were Future plans After 15 months, AFD has counted cost delaying response. After initial analysis, AFD plans a Phase II rollout that will savings across divisions and seen distinct AFD saw that a different part of town extend licenses to all section heads and improvements in business decisions. received more calls and had a greater operations managers. And it will deploy a AFD estimates having saved $43,000 in need for apparatus. Using QlikView- dashboard, showing status on key perfor- off-site training costs for initial users. generated data, AFD determined that mance measures, to all 1,200 members of Additionally, managers involved in the moving an engine to this area balanced the department. Eventually, the depart- pilot estimate that before QlikView they the workloads of responding engines ment hopes to use QlikView to pull and spent approximately 300 hours annually and had the net impact of decreasing the analyze enterprise data held outside the coaxing data out of reporting systems number of long response times. Because department. Finally, it plans to integrate and preparing it for analysis, which the decision was based on facts, there QlikView with its enterprise GIS system. AFD had very different ways of doing business across divisions. QlikView allows us to standardize definitions, “ find norms and trends, and address issues pro-actively. Elizabeth Gray, Business Systems Analyst Supervisor, Austin Fire Department © 2009 QlikTech International AB. All rights reserved. QlikTech, QlikView, Qlik, Q, Simplifying Analysis for Everyone, Power of Simplicity, New Rules, The Uncontrollable Smile and ” other QlikTech products and services as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of QlikTech International AB. All other company names, products and services used herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The information published herein is subject to change without notice. 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