Extracting internal and external data for analytical querying
The Management Information System, involving
Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and OLAP,
serves one common objective; placing critical corporate
data in a standardized and structured form and
providing multidimensional presentation of the same
data for efficient analytical querying.
For enterprises possessing comprehensive ERP systems,
extensive and unstructured corporate data is available
for users. This data stored in database tables, and
perhaps additional data from external data pools, must
be transformed into a logical and meaningful form, in
order for use in analysis and in making decisions.
The CANIAS ERP MIS module enables users to easily
and selectively extract and analyze data in multiple
dimensions.
Bundling information, linking data sources
As CANIAS ERP is fully integrated, companywide
internal data is stored in a single database and reports
can be generated from this comprehensive data pool.
The CANIAS ERP MIS module not only provides the
possibility of choosing data from its own data
warehouse, but it can also take advantage of data in
other data warehouses located in other databases. In
this manner information can be compiled centrally and independently of its source, and decisions affecting
enterprises can be made in an intelligent and effective
manner.
The three phases of queries
The CANIAS ERP MIS module offers three distinct
phases for execution of OLAP queries. In the first
phase, customer specific OLAP tables are created
using the standard tables in the CANIAS ERP system.
OLAP tables allow simplification of data so that queries
can take less time to run. Creation of OLAP tables
enables a pre-selection of data from the
comprehensive data pool to be carried out and this
data is placed in the Data Warehouse.
At this second phase the OLAP tables are executed, in other words, multi dimensional customer specific data
views are created. After defining a view, it is stored in
the CANIAS ERP MIS module and can be recalled on
request for evaluation purposes. In this phase data can
also be drilled down for further details.
The CANIAS ERP MIS module presents the actual
reporting tool in the third phase. In this phase, the views
and the data in the tables can be transformed by using
an integrated wizard and can be displayed as pie charts,
as well as line and point graphs, and can be evaluated
accordingly.
Tables can also be used for comparison for difference
analysis; for example, turnover can be evaluated
by customer, region, time period and can be displayed
against a time axis for comparison. The drill down
functionality allows for the evaluation of further details.
