Qlik Application Automation

At the end of October 2020, Qlik announced the acquisition of Blendr.io. Even then, Qlik stated that the acquisition was meant to help it with what Qlik calls “Active Intelligence”. Since September 28, the first result of that acquisition has been visible in the SaaS version of Qlik in the form of the “Application Automation” feature. In this blog, we explain exactly what is meant by Active Intelligence and use a number of use cases to show how Application Automation lets you set actions in motion in no time based on your data in Qlik SaaS.

What is Active Intelligence?

Anyone who has been working with Qlik or other BI tools for a while will recognize the following process: overnight, all your data sources are read one by one and the data is processed and loaded into your dashboard. During the working day, all kinds of new data is stored in your systems, such as updates on ongoing sales opportunities in your CRM system. If you are lucky, your dashboard is refreshed with fresh data once an hour during the day. That also means you can only analyze that new CRM data in the context of your dashboard once an hour.

Active Intelligence is a paradigm stating that data should not be static, but in motion. As soon as new relevant data is entered into your source system, that data should get to work to fuel your actions. This means, for example, that when marketing enters a new lead into your CRM system, it immediately triggers a refresh of your dashboard, but perhaps also that an email is sent straight away to the account representative for that customer so they can act on this information.

Application Automation in Qlik Sense SaaS

That all sounds great, but a solution like this takes a lot of programming work. Different systems from multiple vendors have to be tied together by people who not only understand the process, but also have the skills to translate it into code that computers understand. And that is exactly the problem Application Automation solves. Application Automation is a so-called “no-code” solution. Using building blocks, called “Blocks”, a series of actions can be set in motion. For example, there is a Block that makes a selection for you in a Qlik application and a second Block that then retrieves the contents of a table based on that selection. All you need to do to configure such a Block is drag it to the right place in your workflow and use drop-down menus to select the correct values for the app, field name and field value.

You have 4 options for starting an Automation. First of all, you can start an Automation manually or have it run on a schedule, just as you were already used to with reload tasks. But the “Triggered” and “Webhook” options are more interesting. By choosing the “Triggered” method, you create a REST API endpoint in your Qlik SaaS environment (in GET and POST form) that lets you call the automation from another application. This is useful if, for example, you have a data warehouse for your data: as soon as your data warehouse software has finished processing, it can start an Automation in Qlik that, for example, reloads the relevant dashboards with new data. The “Webhook” option is essentially the exact opposite. With the “Webhook” function, you ask an application to start the Automation based on an event. The “Webhook” currently has 2 connectors: Qlik itself and Eventbrite. With the Qlik webhook, you can set actions in motion when, for example, an app has finished reloading, but also when a new user is created or an app is published. An example of how this functionality can be used is the flow below, which checks every completed Task Reload in our own Qlik SaaS environment to see whether the task was successful. If the task returns an error, a message is automatically sent to a Teams channel so our application administrators can fix the error right away.

Some use cases for inspiration

The possibilities of the new Application Automation are virtually endless. The feature is available free of charge to all Qlik Sense SaaS users with immediate effect. There is currently a fair-use policy, which means that 5,000 automations may be started per tenant (= Qlik SaaS environment) per month. Note that this includes both successful and failed automations, including those started during the development process. Nevertheless, the barrier to getting started with Qlik Application Automation is very low, so here are some use cases for inspiration:

• Check daily whether a new file has been uploaded to the sFTP server. If the file has been uploaded, start processing with a Qlik Sense reload. If the file is not there yet, send an email to the contact person and try again an hour later
• Copy the expressions from master items of one Qlik Sense Sales dashboard to all other dashboards in the same workspace.
• Check all accounts in your Salesforce application that have the status “Champion”; if they have a high sales-readiness score but have not been contacted by the sales department for some time, automatically create a task in Salesforce and send a notification to the representative involved. See the video from Qlik below, in which this case is built from start to finish in Application Automation.

Curious about the possibilities of Qlik Sense but never used it before? Then sign up for the Qlik Sense Basics training. During this free online training, you will learn how to use Qlik Sense, including making selections and bookmarks, and we even take a brief look at building a data model. Already using Qlik Sense and want to move to the latest version? Then request an upgrade of your environment using the button below.

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