Business Intelligence Reporting: To compliment the reporting capabilities that exist within STRUMIS today, Business Intelligence provides all the standard capabilities users expect including reports, ad-hoc analysis, scorecards, dashboards, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The Business Intelligence dashboards allow none developers to access, design and create graphical representations of STRUMIS data as a Web based reporting tool without writing any code which can be viewed from any device that has web browser capabilities.
The advanced capabilities in Business Intelligence delivers online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining functionality for business intelligence applications. Analysis Services supports OLAP by letting you design, create, and manage multidimensional structures that contain data aggregated from other data sources, such as relational databases like STRUMIS. It is designed to deliver higher level statistics of the business, for example Facility and Contract figures in comparison to the shop floor reports that are required in Production.
Business Intelligence reporting utilises Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and its OLAP cube technology to allow fast analysis of data retrieval that can be found in multiple dimensional business domains. As the term implies data is stored in a three dimensional cube structure and it is because of this cube structure that vast amounts of data can be retrieved relatively faster than traditional reporting techniques.
This is where the term Snapshot is introduced. OLAP cube data retrieval is optimised because it is working on a snapshot of the database it is connected to, i.e. STRUMIS. Usually Business Intelligence applications are setup to take a snapshot of data nightly which will be reported on in the following day’s KPIs, dashboards & reports. Because of this you will never be reporting real-time on data stored within STRUMIS at that time. Real time reporting will remain in STRUMIS as it is today by running SQL reporting procedures and the Active Reports designer until it is replaced by SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) in the new Web based service architecture version of STRUMIS.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS): is a Web based reporting tool which will complement the new Service Oriented Architecture. SSRS is a server-based reporting platform that allows us to create and manage a wide variety of different types of report, and deliver them in a range of formats. We can create basic reports containing tables and graphs, or more complex data visualisations, using charts and maps.
The new service architecture of STRUMIS will communicate with the STRUMIS database via Web service calls. All new reports written in STRUMIS using SSRS will also be accessible via Web service calls in the same way allowing them to be viewed from any device that has web browser capabilities. This reporting capability differs from Business intelligence because they will be real time and pull live data from within STRUMIS and over time will replace all the existing reports ran from within STRUMIS.
To see how real time reporting and live data can help you to save time and money visit www.strumis.com
