O2 Smart Business Analytics

Business Analytics – real-time Business Intelligence solution

EXACT Business Analytics (EBA) is a flexible solution for reporting and analysing designed in such a way as to provide the required outputs to users  from the areas of sales, finance and production.It offers a rapid and simple gaining of answers, assembly of information aspects and reports and dynamically combines them and compares data from several sources. In addition to ad-hoc analyses, personalised analytical aspects with full utilisation of OLAP graphic and reporting possibilities can be automatically distributed to users according to a predefined plan or can be made accessible via the web.  The system is easy to expand and scale for several localities, several changes and operations in several countries.

EBA is a representative of the group of business intelligence (BI) applications called real-time BI. Data here is not saved in a central data warehouse (DW) and is not prepared in advance for analytical processing using an ETL pump. Real-time BI is connected directly to the source database of the transaction (primary) systems and always works with current data, which is different from the traditional BI concept, where the data is transformed in regular intervals (as a rule, once a day but it may be more often) and transferred to the data warehouse, above which analytical OLAP blocks are only then created. If needs be, it is naturally also possible to create a data warehouse and work above it, and thereby the primary systems are not burdened. EBA thus offers a broad functionality both in the case of the need for current information and in the case, for example, of historical aggregation for the past month.

Technical concept for EBA solution

Advantages of EXACT Business Analytics

EBA offers many advantages compared with competing tools. These advantages come mostly from its architecture, and they include:

• in configurations and overviews above OLAP blocks there is always current data, it is therefore possible to monitor in real time the sales of the individual branches, state of stocks or effectiveness of marketing campaigns,
• lower demands on disk capacity (it is not necessary to build a central DW),
• if it involves systems which are vital for the preservation of life (healthcare, airport management etc.) real time BI systems are essential for discovering problems at their inception,
• real-time BI can be so-called event based, i.e., based on events occurring in primary systems, during the occurrence of a defined event this is automatically analysed by the BI solution,
• the tools of real-time BI can serve for monitoring the real running of company processes and partly to replace the function of the BAM tools.

User environment

EBA offers support for various groups of users who work with data at a different level. The insurance analyst who demands the greatest possible flexibility in the definition of configurations will work with the system in a different way to the divisional manager who only needs configuration prepared in advance with current data. For this reason EBA also offers many user environments where every one of them is intended for a different group of users.

Environment of the system EBA and its individual components

Using the Power User Interface, Business User Interface Plus, Business User Interface and Express User Interface different groups of users can gain access via installed applications to the created EBA configurations or can create these configurations.

Via the Web Access Server it is possible to display configurations via a thin client and thus always have them available.

Via the functionality eDeployment views of data are updated automatically and sent to the users either by email, or they are saved in the directory of files, or cooperation with EXACT Synergy Enterprise is possible, and configurations are thus accessible directly from this system.

The functionality of Dashboards offers the possibility of creating a graphic representation of KPI and displaying these clearly for the users. Dashboards can also be used in the system Exact Synergy Enterprise and the configuration can be viewed directly from the web environment of this companywide information system.

Multidimensional view of data using simple Drag&Drop of individual dimensions

Combination of multidimensional table and graph

EBA offers tens of types of graphs for the presentation of data

Utilisation of EXACT Business Analytics

EBA can be used in all companies for which the standard possibilities of reporting and analysis of data in corporate information systems are insufficient.  EBA dynamically links and analyses information from many data sources and thus creates a “single version of the truth”. Never again will different people present different figures from the same data. Using EBA it is possible to perform an in-depth analysis of the collected data and find hidden linkages between the individual dimensions.

EBA offers a very simple change of view of the same data – it is possible to view the volume data of sales from the aspect of branches, customers, sellers, over time, according to goods sold etc.Changing the view in EBA takes just a few seconds, which saves hours compared with the regular preparation of overviews and configurations. Moreover, the data can also be updated, whereas in the case of static overviews hours of work will be necessary of “extracting” the necessary data from the production database.