Whether we are discussing capital assets (such as property, plant and equipment) or production assets (such as inventory) or financial instrument assets (such as stocks, bonds, and partnership investment), an important part of any financial operation is asset management. Often, we think of private banking and wealth management businesses with respect to financial instrument assets. The datasets can be very large, and data from many different sources needs to be combined to get the big picture. This process is often manual in many organizations where Excel is used to perform analysis, usually with poor and often untimely results.
A powerful business intelligence platform can be leveraged for wealth management, asset management, and private banking institutions to increase analysis productivity greatly. Therefore, this chapter will look at an example of financial instrument asset management with a QlikView dashboard other than CFO Dashboard, which we have been examining. Then, we will examine the loading scripts of multiple data sources as they might be used to load an asset management QlikView document.
We will return to tabs within CFO Dashboard to examine Inventory and Forecasting in later chapters.
Open the QlikView Asset Management example dashboard located at
The first tab, Intro, of the QlikView Asset Management dashboard will look similar to the following screenshot:
Figure 4-1: Asset Management dashboard
As we can see in the first tab, the most important thing about an Assets Under Management (financial investment assets) dashboard is obtaining data from multiple sources. In this dashboard, we have the data that we entered, such as the Excel spreadsheets we uploaded or data that we input inline. Additionally, we have data from web sources, such as Imagine, Bloomberg, Advent, Factset, RiskMetricsGroup, and Princeton. Notice that the green lines with dots document the source attribution, with the different sections of the picture of the dashboard located on the next tab, the Dashboard tab.
This is a server-based QlikView dashboard, so it is locked down. We cannot see the scripts or the actual sources used to feed this dashboard. This is why, as we continue, we will use example scripts to introduce many of the data-loading options.
Now that you know that it exists, you can examine it for ideas if your business has a need for this type of dashboard. The actual dashboard is too busy with too much going on and should be limited to the top section that can be seen without scrolling. It appears to have been designed primarily to support the static Intro tab rather than informing us about investments. Pie charts can often be misleading because of the way humans tend to interpret them, but in this case, the pie chart is visually informative with its color coding matching the column headers. The three small bar graphs underneath often get hidden below the main area on the web page when the web page is displayed at 100 percent—not even enlarged. They don't seem to interact with the central, eye-catching pie chart, so they would be better off having their own tabs in a real environment.
If you have specific questions about this dashboard, you can click on HELP in the QlikView interface, and it will set up an e-mail for you to ask your questions. Additional server-based QlikView examples that might also contribute ideas are Investment Profitability, Investment Research, and Risk Scenario Analysis. These, as is the case with Asset Management dashboard, are server-based and locked down. Search for them on the QlikView demo site at http://us-b.demo.qlik.com/.