Dashboard Reporting Techniques in BI Subscribe

Martin Mouli Print

Business Card Permalink
Company: Rapidigm - A Fujitsu Consulting Company
Posted on Oct. 22, 2006 02:35 PM in Business Intelligence
(BI), Analytics
Introduction

Did you tired of trying to make a decision from endless rows and columns of data with
tabular reporting, are you looking for a board that has all summarized information at
higher level and showed them in awesome layout with beautiful colors,easy to memorize
the numbers/colors on fingers , how the business is doing at any given moment.

When we look at the all organization measures how they are performing with helicopter
view, we need a report that teaches and shows the trend in a graphical display quickly.
These reports are called as Dashboard Reports, still we can report these measures
individually, but by keeping all measures in a single page, we are creating single access
point to the users to view all information available to them. Absolutely this will save lot
of precious time, gives clarity on decision that needs to be taken, helps the users to
understand the measure(s) trend with business flow.

Dashboard Reporting became more popular because of single view on multiple measures,
these reports are more helpful for managers, business analysts, and corporate decision
makers. Now a days Dashboard Reporting became as backbone to management level
reporting.

For users who need to continuously monitor corporate performance across business
functions and organizations levels, SAP offers visually intuitive dashboards. Dashboards
allow quick assessment of business conditions and highlights issues requiring further
investigation or action.

Dashboard Advantages

(1) Multiple measures in single graphical view (scorecard view etc)

(2) Communicate information more effectively.
(3) Gain greater insight into your business data.
(4) Persuade your audience.
(5) Find a root cause. (Drill down /across /jump into info set)
(6) Build a graphical dependency between measures (business flow)
(7) Trend a measure(s) over period of months.
(8) Share your dashboards (broadcast)

Level of Detail

Usually Dashboard metrics are defined at the higher level with composite/sequential
business process that shows the summarized numbers.
Most of the dashboard reports were multi provider reports where we can have single view
across multiple KPIs.

Detail level information can be obtained with jump queries to infoset

Dashboard Reporting Types

(1) Interactive Dashboard Reports (Multidimensional reports)

(2) Formatted Dashboard Reports (Fixed rows / columns)

Interactive Dashboard reports allows the user to browse the information as much detail
by changing the views and drilldowns and drill across.This report is highly navigatable
across different business entities. We can able to change the selection parameters and
choose the different variant that you like to view the information required.

Formatted Dashboard Reports are predefined structured reports that have limited
navigation. These reports won't allow the users to change predefined default view, helpful
for PDF reporting (or) Scorecards.

Creation of Dashboard in SAP BW

A Dashboard is a web page built in a web template by using web application designer.
Most of these web templates have one or more table grids with different charts available
in Web Application designer to present the information in graphical format.

Steps-by-step procedure to create a Dashboard: -

(1) Create all BEx Queries with required variants,tune them perfectly.
(2) Differentiate table queries and graph queries.
(3) Choose the graph type required that meet your requirement.
(4) Draw the layout how the Dashboard page looks like.
(5) Create a web template that has navigational block / selection information.
(6) Keep navigational block fields are common across the measures.
(7) Include the relevant web items into web template.
(8) Deploy the URL/Iview to users through portal/intranet.

Dashboards in Visual Composer :-

Couple of more graphical (new chart types) and browsing features available with visual
composer ,please read/stay tune with SDN for upcoming documents.

Dashboard Report - Example