Introducing KPI Pulse

Just over a year ago, I experienced a couple of light-bulb moments...

• Not everyone is, nor do they want to be, a data analyst – it might sound obvious, but the way that everyone accesses and consumes data can vary dramatically, even if they perform similar roles. I found that some people would like to view data in table form, like a big spreadsheet; these are generally financial, accountant types. Sales and entrepreneurial types liked big numbers and graphs.

• More work is being done away from our desks; at coffee shops or at client meetings. Therefore, having easy access to important metrics and data isn’t always possible.

• Many operational staff regularly like an emailed report, only to open it up and search for an issue or a value that needs their attention.

I thought, how can I take QlikView (or Qlik Sense, Excel and more, for that matter) and make it easily available to anyone, so that they can consume the information the way they want to?

The idea of KPI Pulse was created!

The concept was to have a locally installed publishing application which would automate the reloading of data into QlikView and then allow the designer to create a series of snapshots (they could be images like a graph, a complete dashboard, a data file or even a PDF report). These snapshots would then be available within a mobile app, a website, via email, a desktop app or even within Excel.

KPI Pulse was born!

We can now take QlikView metrics, personalise them for each user and push them up to your own secure cloud server. From there, these metrics are available on our mobile app, email, online Head Up Display, desktop app, Slack and Excel. We can schedule the distribution of key metrics any way you like and get everyone on the same page – aligned with your business performance goals.

Executives and managers can instantly see their own metrics on their phone, without needing to log in. If they then need to share that metric, they easily can with Slack, email or a text message.

You don’t need any extra QlikView licenses, allowing you to easily push metrics to all staff who require them, and even provide metrics within a website to your customers, clients or other stakeholders.

KPI Pulse is easy!

Right from the start, my goal for KPI Pulse was to make it easy to distribute the great work that a QlikView Designer has done, getting relevant metrics to the right people, easily.

One of the great things about QlikView (and Qlik Sense) is that it’s like the Swiss Army Knife; it’s the one package that you need to learn, allowing you to do so much. When looking at other BI solutions, there’s always a stack of tools that you need to learn and use.

Now, with this one easy to use application, the reach and effectiveness of QlikView has become even more powerful.

Watch our quick video!

Contact us today to find out more about KPI Pulse, and what it can do for your organisation.

Or visit our website at www.kpipulse.com

Recent Scams Targeting ASIC Customers

It has come to our attention that scammers pretending to be from ASIC have been contacting registry customers asking them to pay fees and give personal information to renew their business or company name.

These emails most often have a link that provides an invoice with fake payment details or infects your computer with malware if you click the link.

Warning signs the email is not from ASIC

An email is probably a scam and is not from ASIC if it asks you:

• to make a payment over the phone
• to make a payment to receive a refund
• for your credit card or bank details directly by email or phone

Here is an example of a scam email from 5 December

If the email you received contains the above information, it is not from ASIC. 

How do I protect myself from email scams?

To help protect yourself:

• keep your anti-virus software up to date
• be wary of emails that don't address you by name or misspell your details and have unknown attachments
• don't click any links on a suspicious email

It is also highly advised to check your registration renewal date; ASIC will only issue a renewal notice 30 days before your renewal date. Be sure to search your business name on the ASIC register - if it's outside of your usual renewal time frame it's most likely a scam.

How do I notify ASIC of a potential scam?

If you would like to notify ASIC of a potential scam email, you can forward the entire email to ReportASICEmailFraud@asic.gov.au

To ensure your systems are well protected, get it touch with the Advance team today. We're always looking out for you!

Minimising a Ransomware Attack

What is Ransomware?

Ransomware is a piece of software that has been installed or downloaded to a computer, that once activated it will block access to that computer system until a sum of money has been paid. Typically, the sum of money demanded is not a large amount compared to the cost of time and effort it might take to restore or otherwise resurrect the files.

For example, your work computer containing important documents has been held ‘hostage’ and you are required to pay USD$500 to regain access to your files – when calculating the time and effort required to restore the computer back to the original state, even with good backups, you are likely to exceed that figure.

Two well-known ransomware threats that have received considerable press coverage recently for their widespread nature are the WannaCry and Petya attacks. These aren’t the only Ransomware threats out there, there are hundreds and they won’t stop circulating.

How do I minimise my risk of getting ransomware or having to pay for my files to be decrypted?

This is truly a case of being vigilant and taking precautions so as not to be caught out and taken advantage of by a Ransomware attacker.

On your computer

Make sure important data is not only stored on the computer! Backing up important files to an external hard drive (not attached permanently to the computer) is a good idea. It is important to note that cloud backups with an automatic sync (such as DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive etc) may also be infected due to the infected files syncing. It poses the question; do you always need to have these turned on by default?

Ensure that your operating system and antivirus is up to date (including latest security updates and virus definitions) and that you use some form of ad-block to avoid the threat of malicious ads. To go even further, refrain from using an administrative account on your computer and disable macros in Office products by default.

Keep your browsers updated and remove outdated plugins and add-ons from your browsers. Remove Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Java and Silverlight from your browser plugins - if they are needed then set the browser to prompt for activation when these plugins are required to run.

General Behaviour

Learn the typical signs of a spam message and don’t open any suspected spam message from an unknown sender.

Be very cautious of any attachment within an email that you are not expecting. Sometimes a contact could be caught out and a virus distributed from their email account, which may look totally innocent. If in doubt you can ask the user whether they intentionally sent the attachment to you, over the phone or IM.

Be extra cautious of all links in emails, as links can be made to look valid but take you to malicious sites instead.

Conclusion

The best form of protection against a virus or ransomware is prevention. By changing your mindset around emails, links, attachments and computer updates you can drastically increase your chances of avoiding these threats. Stay vigilant!

For more information on minimising a ransomware attack in your business, speak to a member of the Advance team today!

Security Considerations When Employees Leave

With an increase in the use of external websites which store data, personal mobile devices being used for work and the rising trend of employees performing their duties outside the traditional workplace model – you need to ask yourself, are you doing enough to ensure the security and confidentiality of yours and your customer’s information?

When an employee leaves a business, it is imperative that a process is followed to de-provision access to systems they may have used. Here a problem arises – it is likely that the Company has not kept sufficient records of what information the now ex-employee could access, and as such will likely miss one or more areas that the employee can access.

As an example, have a look at some access rights that an employee may begin with and gain over their tenure with your business:

• Internet Access
• Internal WiFi Access
• Domain Access
• Security/Alarm access codes
• Website Passwords
• Social Media Passwords
• Credit Card Details
• Car Keys
• WiFi access
• Stored login information on personal devices
• Cloud Account login information
• USB backups held offsite by that employee
• VPN Details to connect to the internal server
• Knowledge of other employee’s usernames and passwords

More information given in confidence to an employee results in more work that needs to be done to remove that employee, leaving the whole termination process liable to human error. It is vital to ensure that employee access to systems and data is de-provisioned completely and on-time to protect your business.

Simple Steps: Begin with provisioning and recording

Once a decision has been made to hire an employee for a certain role; access rights, hardware requirements and external access should be determined prior to their start date. This information needs to be recorded consistently, and an approval process needs to be in place for any security related process or device.

Using a hardware or software solution, you should enable enough security to prevent users from using their own file sync solutions (e.g DropBox, Box etc). The same applies with USB devices, implement hardware or software restrictions to ensure that USB’s can only be used with the right approval.

If users have private work information or data on a mobile phone, implement a device management system that supports the remote wiping of data on mobile devices – this includes tablets. An extra measure would be to encrypt laptops and hard drives to ensure that no sensitive information is lost when a device is lost or misplaced.

Simple Steps: Employee leaving

Once an end-date has been determined for an employee, they should be put into a process to have their rights and access removed – starting with a review of your documentation on their current access. Once their end date is reached, the removal should begin almost as soon as they are out the door.

Retrieve any hardware and mobile devices that belong to the business, change passwords for accounts that didn’t have unique logins for each user (e.g social media), remove the users security access to the building (change the pin code if necessary) and if the office WiFi uses a single password, have this changed. If the employee had a credit card, ensure it is cancelled completely and they are removed from the account.

Simple Steps full stop

To reduce the impact of an employee’s departure, it is beneficial to implement policies and access methods that reduce the need for hands-on changes which can affect other staff (password reset’s, access code changes, etc)

Our tips:

• Ensure that each user has their own personal login where possible, including domain access, systems that are used and websites.
• Ensure that important financial information is never given out to employees. If they do have a credit card, it should be on the business account but under their details, with its own limit.
• Limit access to USB ports and other ports that can transfer information, ensuring that employees do not have installation rights.
• All employees to understand the importance of not sharing usernames and passwords
• Rather than using a WiFi password to authenticate wireless users, this should be done by MAC address with approval, keeping record of who devices belong to.
• Do not give any employee access to social media sites. This should be controlled by one person only and when that person leaves then all passwords should be changed immediately.

What can’t be helped

Even with the best security and processes in place, there will always be ways that your security could be compromised. However, with effective internal processes, good documentation, follow ups and reviews of your procedures you can drastically minimise the effect of an employee leaving.

Why not start looking at your systems now?

For more information on strengthening your IT security please contact us.

Consolidate Your Data and Make It Easier To Access

As organisations grow over the years, so does the assortment of tools that are employed for various projects and departments. This often causes a headache for employees and business owners while information can become scattered amongst several disparate systems and locations.

Generally there are different products on different platforms with different security and data requirements. Together they assist a user do their job, but they are on different servers and possibly even different locations with different access and user rights.

This is a problem that affects many organisations today, and the problem will only get worse as more data is made available to employees.

By using an Enterprise Portal organisations can optimise their information management and empower their staff with personalised information in one place, sometimes with just one click.

An Enterprise Portal can be designed to merge this disparate information into one place, ready for the user to click on a button to access as well as interact with the program. An example might be where information is gathered from the:

• ERP system
• Production planning and control system
• Employee timekeeping system
• Inventory management

to be made available to the user with a simple mouse click. An extra benefit here is that users don’t need to log into each individual system separately which saves time.

The security level is placed on the user’s login to the Enterprise Portal as to how much they see and what rights they then have within each produce. Effectively you now have one secure system that accesses all of the information relevant to that particular employee’s function.

Further, if an employee enters the number of a certain product component, all information on this component is displayed immediately on the portal page, including:

• How this product is selling
• What revenue the company achieves with this component
• Whether there have been any complaints
• An image of the component
• How much time has been estimated for producing this product
• How much time is actually needed to manufacture this product

The data for this comprehensive information page is compiled from different systems, and provides the validated employee with the right information just when and where they need it.

It’s a holistic view which allows employees to serve their customers and managers quickly with relevant information. When a customer calls to enquire about an orders ETA, customer service staff can access relevant information, quickly and with accuracy as it is linked to inventory and manufacturing systems.

Contact us to learn more about how the Advance team can assist with your technology needs.

5 Challenges Faced On Small Data Reporting

Five challenges faced on Small Data reporting

Big data is often touted as imperative to businesses, however in recent years perhaps we have been so blinded by Big Data that we are ignoring its poorer cousin, Small Data?

Big Data simply put looks at trends, information and patterns that can be utilised to forecast as well as give an overview of how your business is tracking. Big data takes high volumes of different sets of data and displays this information in a way that management can make decisions quickly and efficiently. Usually Big Data is generally generated outside of the business to assist the business make decisions moving forward.

Small Data on the other hand allows for the business to extract transactional information from data sources that end users can make use of immediately. Its focus is on providing information to the end user, so they can take action right now. It allows users to be able to determine why things happen, analyse this in real time and then take corrective action. Small Data can be generated as a sub set of Big Data or from other non-traditional data sources. The main thing to remember here is that it helps the end user achieve a result.

Big Data and Small Data each have their place in the business aiming to make inroads into improving decision making ability and resolve problems.

Formulating a plan to extract Small Data that suits each need within the company is paramount. If you ignore Small Data over Big Data then you are robbing yourself of some analytical tools that can help your company develop and improve.

Challenges facing managers looking at developing tools that allow Small Data reporting is:

• what type of data is required?
• where will it be obtained?
• who requires it?
• what format is it required?
• how will you extract the data?

The best methodology is to look at the problem you have and work backwards from that point.

As an example let’s look at the problem statement “Average Days Debtors take to pay have increased”. If we look at our challenge we can see that want to interrogate each customer and determine what the payments days are for each invoice payment has been made against (What). We check with accounts and find that this data can be retrieved from their SAP Accounts database (Where). It has been determined that Accounts Staff and Sales Account Managers will use the data (Who), accounts to chase up overdue accounts, and sales to check credit terms prior to selling. The decision then needs to be made as to what format they want to see the data in (What). An example may be a program that can run real time analysis of the accounting data and display that to screen. Selecting the right tool to extract and display this information is paramount to ensuring that the tool gets used (How). There are many good Business Intelligence tools that will allow quick extraction, analysis and display of the results the user requires.

As they say “look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves”. In other words Small Data can and will affect Big Data if looked after properly.