Overview of Analytics

Analytics is integrated in the solution to support and monitor business processes, helping you to make informed decisions.

Using the extensive and flexible business analytics features, you can easily create custom reports using the guided procedures and then control the visibility of those reports by assigning them only to specific work centers as well as individual business roles. If you have defined custom fields in your solution, you can also add them to data sources or reports, your own or those delivered with the solution. In addition, you can join or combine heterogeneous data sources, again your own or those delivered with the solution, as well as create custom calculated measures and comparison metrics.

Reports can be accessed from the Reports work center view of work centers and are also embedded into Overview work center views, enabling transparency of data in system. The Analytics data in the solution is real time. There is no persistency in a separate Business Warehouse layer. Analytics data in the solution is also access context sensitive. This means that data sources are associated with access contexts to ensure that data is directed to users who are allowed to view the data.

Before You Get Started
  • Determine whether or not you want to be able to assign reports to business roles. This option provides you more flexibility than just work center assignment alone. You have to enable role assignment during the fine tuning step of completing the activity list for your implementation. Refer to the guide for more information.

  • If you want to see real data rather than just test data when you're creating and reviewing your custom reports, you must enable that option on the activity for Administrator Analytics — Setting.

  • Also during Administrator Analytics — Setting, we recommend that you do not select the Extended Access checkbox, as this can cause reports to include and display data even if a user is not authorized to see that information.

Creating a Report

The graphic below represents the general process for creating a report:

For a detailed description of all the features and tasks available for business analytics, see the see the Individual sections in this guide.

Figure 1: Creating a Report Using Business Analytics