Analytics – Rajawali Adikarya

What Is?

Business Intelligence (BI) is the practice of gathering accurate information from business systems in order to improve and enhance decision-making. It can be described as a process of converting data into information and then into knowledge.

You use Business Intelligence to keep pace with the increasing variable demands of business, by assisting you in making informed, timely decisions. This enables you to gain a sustainable advantage over your competitors, thereby ensuring your continued viability as a company.

Examples of when you would benefit from using Business Intelligence include:

When management reporting and scorecards are used, but prepared manually (i.e. it is time-consuming for management to interpret these reports meaningfully)

When the visibility of business operations and performance measures are limited or non-existent due to the lack of access to information (i.e. people need information quickly to know what’s going on)

To overcome the excessive time spent by IT developers to create new customized reports (i.e. too much time and too many errors are associated with manually extracting data and reformatting it for use in reports)

If you believe that better information is valuable for the success of the business.

Business Intelligence is ideally suited to environments that require you to respond to business trends, make decisions and improve forecasting and planning efforts.

It is typically used by management and supervisors to provide them with data that is timely, reliable, consistent, understandable and easily manipulated. This information is used for analysis that yields better overall understanding of where the business has been, where it is now and where it will be in the near future.

Business Intelligence enables you to monitor the financial and operational health of an organization (e.g. using reports, alerts, alarms, analysis tools, key performance indicators and dashboards, etc) beyond what is available from standard operational reports. It enables you to gain multi-dimensional insight into your organization enabling you to make accurate strategic management decisions.

Syspro. Syspro Indonesia. Syspro Implementor. ERP Indonesia. ERP Small Medium. ERP Implementor. Small Medium ERP. Small Medium ERP Software. Small Medium ERP Implementor. ERP Implementer. ERP Implementation. Syspro Implementer. Syspro Implementation. Small Medium ERP Implementer. Small Medium ERP Implementation. ERP Manufacturing Software. ERP Manufacturing Systems. ERP for Manufacturing. ERP for Manufacturing Industry. ERP Distribution Software. ERP Distribution Systems. ERP for Distribution. ERP in Distributon. ERP for Distribution Industry. ERP Financial Software. ERP Financial Systems. ERP for Financial. ERP in Financial. ERP for Financial Industry. ERP EPC Software. ERP EPC Systems. ERP for EPC Companies. ERP for EPC Industry. ERP Solution for EPC Companies. Budget Planning. E-Budgeting. Financial Consolidation Software. SAP Indonesia. SAP Implementor. SAP Implementer. SAP Implementation. SAP ERP.

SYSPRO Solution

SYSPRO Analytics provides the tools to help you gain a multi-dimensional insight into your organization, enabling you to make accurate strategic management decisions. It facilitates quick-and-easy access to the information you need to make decisions that impact your customers, sales, profit, growth opportunities and business operations. You can create multi-dimensional views of your financial and operational data to determine patterns and underlying trends, gauge performance, leverage opportunities and outmaneuver the competition.

SYSPRO Analytics is an easy-to-install, easy-to-configure and easy-to-use metric based application. An in-depth knowledge of SYSPRO data structures is not required as this powerful tool provides a series of intelligent analysis objects and metric templates that intuitively build the required processes for the information needed. This allows you to access information promptly instead of wasting time learning the intricacies of BI technologies before they can be of any use.

The ability to measure your business in today’s highly competitive environment is invaluable. Companies must be able to access, analyze and measure sales, marketing campaigns, customer trends, production cycles or any other key performance indicator (KPI) in order to make informed decisions that can influence revenue, profit, growth opportunity and productivity.

Process Flow

The Analytics Cycle consists of analyzing your information, gaining insight from the analysis, taking action and, finally, measuring the action.

Analytics Cycle.png

The Analytics Cycle enables you to gain information about your business that will support you in making more informative and accurate decisions.

You would use the Analytics Cycle when you require information that will help you improve the business.

The OUTDOORS Company has started importing Bicycle Helmets in different colors for children and this is a good example of when you would apply the analytics cycle.

The Sales Manager, was concerned as to why the children’s bicycle helmets were not selling as per our forecast.

While analyzing his sales figures, he noticed that stores in the country like Country Fare and Country Park, were performing above forecast. Whereas stores in the city were not.

He paid a visit to the two country stores and discovered that these stores allowed their customers to try on the different colored helmets and take a ride around the cycle track they had setup. This is what made these stores stand out from the rest.

As indicated by Business Process Flow diagram, the Analytics Cycle comprises:
• Analysis
• Insight
• Action
• Measurement

Analysis
The Analysis phase entails looking at your business as a whole and asking critical questions.

It is during this phase that the Sales Manager investigated why sales of the children’s bicycle helmets did not reach projected targets, and why the country stores (Country Fare and Country Park) were the only stores that were selling the bicycle helmets successfully.

When analyzing your data, you need to change the way you view the world, looking at your information in both conventional and unconventional ways. You should have the freedom to ask out-of-the-box questions regarding your data, challenge conventional patterns of thinking and your assumptions of information analysis.

Insight
The Insight phase allows you to realize what is happening with your business.

In the case of the country stores, the Sales Manager realized what these stores were doing that was different to the others.

It is at this point the analysis of your information is complete and you need to gain operation insights, such as price variances, strategic insights, etc.

Operational and strategic insight is obtained from cleansed data, reports, graphs and calculations. You should now begin to see clear patterns and trends in your information and this will give you insight into what action to take.

Action
The Action phase involves making decisions based on the insight that you have gained.

In the case of the country stores, the Sales Manager implemented a strategy requiring that all stores setup a cycle track and allow their customers to try on and test the children’s bicycle helmets.

Measurement
The Measurement phase involves bench marking your actions to establish whether your decision-making is sound.

In the case of the country stores, the Sales Manager’s analysis, insight and action resulted in all stores now matching forecasted sales of our children’s bicycle helmets.

Using consistent reporting and viewing key indicators enables managers to manage by key performance indicators (KPIs) and not by monetary values.

Integration

The SYSPRO Analytics Architecture consists of a single Master database, one or more Analytics Servers which are linked to physical installations of the Analytics Server, and one or more Analytics Sites which are linked to the Analytics Server.

The Master database contains all the information that is captured and maintained in the Setup group of functions within SYSPRO Analytics. It also contains a table that tracks the most recent records which have been transferred for each table within a company and a site. Only one Master Database can be used at any given time.

Each Analytics Site will be linked to one Microsoft SQL database and one Microsoft Analysis Services (OLAP) database. You can create multiple Analytics Sites on each Analytics Server and can link one or more companies to each site.

Note: You should never link companies with databases using different collations to a single Analytics Site.

The SQL database is a combined staging and data warehouse database.

1. For every table in the SYSPRO data dictionary there will be a corresponding Temp_ and Stage_ table (i.e the SYSPRO table ArInvoice will have a Temp_ArInvoice and a Stage_ArInvoice in the Analaytics database). The Temp and Stage tables do not make use of the keys defined by SYSPRO. These tables comprise the staging area of the database.

a. Each Temp_ table will have the same structure as the SYSPRO table except for 3 additional columns:
• Company_Id
• DateValidFrom
• DateValidTo

b. Each Stage_ table will have the same structure as the Temp_ table except for an additional ID column, which is the key column for the table.

2. There are also Fact_ and Dim_tables as well as Dim_ Views which comprise the Data Warehouse portion of the database.

The OLAP database provides functionality in two major areas: first, it grants the capability to create and manage cubes from your data warehouse and second, it handles client requests for multidimensional OLAP data. It is also the area where pre-calculated summaries of data are stored. When you design your cubes, you would also design the calculated summaries of data (aggregates) and the OLAP database is the physical place where this data resides.

SYSPRO Analytics makes use of the SQL Server Agent to run jobs that update and process the OLAP Cubes. Each job could consists of one or more steps that execute either SQL script, SSIS packages or a XMLA script. You can create as many jobs as you like depending on how often you need to update the data in your data warehouse and OLAP database.

What happens when running the SQL Server Agent Jobs?
Data is extracted from the SYSPRO database and loaded into the Temp_ tables in the Site SQL database. Existing records in the Stage_ tables that match a record in the Temp_ table are expired so that the correct history is maintained and then the new records are moved to the Stage_ tables. Only records that have been added or changed since the last time the extract was run are brought through.

Dimension tables are populated via SQL Views and new records are appended to the Fact table by means of stored procedures. Existing records will be modified or removed (if replaced by new records) in the Fact tables. The stored procedures must be executed before processing any cubes. The job then processes the dimensions and cubes by means of XMLA scripts.

Finally data is viewed by means of a viewer. There are a number of viewers which can be used to view the data. These include:

The SYSPRO Analytics Viewer
Performance Point Server 2007
Sharepoint Server 2010
Microsoft Office Excel
Other OLAP Viewers
SQL Server Reporting Services

SYSPRO Analytics Architecture

Analytics Integration.png

For more info about Syspro, you can also visit the Syspro website at Syspro

Download Factsheet