General distributors | Products

Cubes and reporting

Data cubes

Data cubes (or OLAP cubes) are an excellent visual tool for looking at your data. The cube builder can be used whenever you need, to filter and aggregate your bisTrack data. A simple wizard guides you through the cube building. For example, you could select sales and margin by branch, by rep and by major product group.

You can then build the cube. Further on, you can work with the results in Excel, or any other reporting and analysis tools. Date cubes are a terrific way of presenting your sales data visually. Every copy of bisTrack ships with the cube creator and viewer.

Working with cubes

You can sort the data in your cubes in as many ways as you like. The query you first build is just an initial view — you can ‘slice and dice’ the data any way you like, once the cube has been built.

Cubes give you new insights into your trading patterns. Because it is so easy to look at the figures in so many ways, means you can quickly pick up patterns that would take an age to spot with traditional printed reports.

Extended reporting

Your unique needs demand flexible analysis and reporting. bisTrack gives you access to well-structured tables for custom reporting and queries. We use standard SQL database tables, so your data is all fully accessible. It’s your data – do what you like with it!

Example ways you might cut your data:

• Rep by product group
• Customer by product group
• Branch by product group
• Branch by customer by product group
• Area by product group
  … and so on.

Structures

Product group coding can be up to five levels deep, and is not limited to a simple product analysis code. Analysis measures may be sales value, cost and margin. For timber, total cubic metres can be reported on, whilst for steel a tonne measure is used.

Analyse ALL your data

Many other bisTrack tables might be used as source data for reports or queries. For example, stock movements, sales order header/lines, purchase order header/lines and invoice lines, to name a few.

Your choice of reporting tool

Typical reporting tools might be Crystal Reports, Microsoft Access, iSQL Query Analyser, Excel pivot tables, or Cognos. bisTrack uses meaningful names for tables and fields to make querying easier. The whole architecture is as open as possible.

Reports library or custom — you choose

bisTrack ships with a huge library of standards reports. The chances are there’s a standard report for your needs, but you always have the option of doing your own thing – customise an existing report or start from scratch with bisTrack’s using open data policy.