Data cubes and reporting software - Analyse your data with bisTrack’s data cubes
Data cubes (or OLAP* cubes) are an excellent visual tool for looking at your data. The data cube builder can be used whenever you need to filter and aggregate your bisTrack data and build a business intelligence report.
A simple wizard guides you through the data 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 familiar reporting and analysis tool. Date cubes are a terrific way of presenting your sales data visually. Every copy of bisTrack’s business management software ships with the data cube creator and viewer.
Working and reporting with data 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, this means you can quickly pick up patterns that would take a very sharp mind 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 business data – do what you like with it!
Example ways you might report 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...
Data 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 business data
Any other bisTrack table can 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. Reporting on business trading patterns and performance is all the more easily communicated to people in your business.
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 data 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 building your own – customise an existing report or start from scratch with bisTrack’s using open data policy.
Benefits: Examine your data in novel ways, query it, graph it, flip it. New ways of slicing the data are achieved instantly, revealing new patterns to your figures without costly overhead. High-level business intelligence reports and understanding are now at your finger tips with the help of bisTrack’s data cubes.
*What is an OLAP data cube?
OLAP cubes – OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing, and the cube reference is the 3-dimensional cross-referencing of the data in question. A spreadsheet is a good example of a 2-dimensional representation of data . The 3rd dimension comes from an additional matrix of data behind that layer.
