Business Intelligence & Data Visualization
Implementing ad hoc reporting functionality can be of major benefit to the entire enterprise. Self-service reporting puts the tools necessary to build a fully functional report and modify existing reports directly into the hands of end users so that data analysis can be achieved quickly, intuitively, and interactively with little to no training.
Ad hoc reporting speeds the report creation process by empowering end users to work with their reports independent of developers. This helps to eliminate the lengthy back and forth cycle between end users and IT to achieve a final report, saving valuable time for both the end user and developer and allowing them to focus resources towards more mission critical activities.
Ad hoc reporting should also be intuitive for end users. JReport makes ad hoc reporting as seamless as possible via a highly intuitive Wizard. Using the Wizard, end users can quickly move step-by-step through the report building process selecting from pre-defined, business oriented, data criteria created by developers, without needing to understand the data sources or how to create their own queries for reports.
Ad hoc also enables an interactive reporting experience, as end users can make modifications and additions to their reports on the fly calling information to them instantly. Since report elements are chose individually, end users are able to ask their own questions of the data fully customizing their reports to match their data analysis needs. Additionally, end users should be able to interact with their finished reports by applying controls such as on-screen filters, sliders, conditional formatting, and by creating drill down and linked reports.
It is easy to see that there are many benefits in utilizing a reporting solution, like JReport, with advanced ad hoc capabilities. With an industry leading feature set, JReport’s ad hoc affords end users the ability to create their own simple and sophisticated reports quickly, intuitively, and interactively for a robust data analysis experience.
Business intelligence (BI) software is a collection of decision support technologies for the enterprise aimed at enabling knowledge workers such as executives, managers, and analysts to make better and faster decisions. The past two decades have seen explosive growth, both in the number of products and services offered and in the adoption of these technologies by industry.
This growth has been fueled by the declining cost of acquiring and storing very large amounts of data arising from sources such as customer transactions in banking, retail as well as in e-businesses, RFID tags for inventory tracking, email, query logs for Web sites, blogs, and product reviews.
Enterprises today collect data at a finer granularity, which is therefore of much larger volume. Businesses are leveraging their data asset aggressively by deploying and experimenting with more sophisticated data analysis techniques to drive business decisions and deliver new functionality such as personalized offers and services to customers.
Today, it is difficult to find a successful enterprise that has not leveraged BI technology for its business. For example, BI technology is used in manufacturing for order shipment and customer support, in retail for user profiling to target grocery coupons during checkout, in financial services for claims analysis and fraud detection, in transportation for fleet management, in telecommunications for identifying reasons for customer churn, in utilities for power usage analysis, and health care for outcomes analysis.
Data visualization is a general term that describes any effort to help people understand the significance of data by placing it in a visual context. Patterns, trends and correlations that might go undetected in text-based data can be exposed and recognized easier with data visualization software.
Why is data visualization important? Because of the way the human brain processes information, using charts or graphs to visualize large amounts of complex data is easier than poring over spreadsheets or reports. Data visualization can also: Identify areas that need attention or improvement.
Interact With Data. A chief benefit of data visualization is that it brings exposes changes in a timely manner. But unlike static charts, interactive data visualizations encourage users to explore and even manipulate the data to uncover other factors. This creates a better attitude for use of analytics.
A performance scorecard is a graphical representation of the progress over time of some entity, such as an enterprise, an employee or a business unit, toward some specified goal or goals. Performance scorecards are widely used in many industries throughout both the public and private sectors.
A balanced scorecard is a performance metric used in strategic management to identify and improve various internal functions of a business and their resulting external outcomes. It is used to measure and provide feedback to organizations.
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Organizations use KPIs to evaluate their success at reaching targets. Each department will use different KPI types to measure success based on specific business goals and targets.
The key benefits of using a Balanced Scorecard include: Better Strategic Planning.The Balanced Scorecard provides a powerful framework for building and communicating strategy. The business model is visualized in Strategy Maps which forces managers to think about cause-and-effect relationships.
OLAP Servers. Online Analytic processing (OLAP) supports operations such as filtering, aggregation, pivoting, rollup and drill-down on the multi-dimensional view of the data.
OLAP servers are implemented using either a multidimensional storage engine (MOLAP); a relational DBMS engine (ROLAP) as the backend; or a hybrid combination called HOLAP.