iMIS Analytics brings true business intelligence to your iMIS solution, giving you the power to understand and analyze the performance of your organization in ways that are tedious or impossible with standard reporting tools.
The Problem
The information that you need to identify and respond to performance issues, market trends, and competitive forces is there in your iMIS database, but the sheer volume and variety of data makes it difficult to organize this information. For example, how do you determine whether a sharp revenue drop is just a one-time event in a specific region or is an indication of a larger trend that warrants a massive change in the budget?
iMIS provides many useful reports, and you have probably had many custom reports designed to help you see trends or to investigate performance issues. Unfortunately, it's not practical to continually develop new reports to deal with time-critical issues as they arise, which means that you are often making important decisions based on incomplete information.
Other issues that affect your ability to analyze your organization's performance include the following problems:
You might already know that implementing a data warehouse and online analytical processing (OLAP) database can solve these problems, but such an undertaking can be difficult and costly.
The Solution
iMIS Analytics is a turn-key business intelligence solution for your iMIS system. iMIS Analytics creates a data warehouse and OLAP database that is tailored specifically for your iMIS database. Every night, your data is automatically extracted from the iMIS database and stored in the data warehouse so that you have a complete historical record of all your iMIS data. The OLAP database contains eight cubes that are designed to give you the best combination of multi-dimensional views into your iMIS information, and these cubes are automatically updated every night with the information from your data warehouse.
You use an OLAP viewer to analyze the information that is stored in the cubes, which is a very fast and flexible process that doesn't require knowledge about designing reports or performing SQL queries. This approach eliminates the need to run reports on a daily basis for manual comparison. Instead, you have instant access to key performance indicators, can easily compare multiple information categories, and can easily drill down into any information category. Because you are examining the OLAP database instead of reporting and querying against your iMIS database, your organization's normal business activities are relatively unaffected.
iMIS Analytics comes with a predefined iMIS Analytics Briefing Book that is designed for the popular OLAP viewer ProClarity Professional. The Briefing Book is filled with many useful views into the iMIS Analytics cubes, which provides you with a clear picture of your organization's performance in key areas. You can also add your own views to the Briefing Book and share them with other ProClarity Professional users in your organization.
iMIS Analytics can be configured to include certain types of custom demographics that you have added to your iMIS solution, making these custom demographics available in your data warehouse and OLAP database.
Benefits for executives and managers
Limitations
iMIS Analytics does not include predictive/forecasting capabilities or pattern analysis. These capabilities can be achieved by using a predictive tool that is compatible with Microsoft Analysis Services, which is beyond the scope of ASI support.
Although you can use any OLAP viewer that is compatible with Microsoft Analysis Services to browse and report on the cubes created by iMIS Analytics, ASI supports iMIS Analytics only for use with ProClarity Professional.
10.6 Production Release. Updated 9/28/2005 3:44:17 PM
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