Using the Palladium Business Intelligence Functionality
The function of this module is to allow you a view into your data with the ability to Drag and Drop and group Data as required. You can find the Business Intelligence function in the main Product menu under the Business Intelligence Tab.
Once selected you will see a number of Standard Cubes relative to your product version. Note that cubes for Sale Orders and Sales Quotes, for example, will only be available in the Business and Enterprise Versions as this functionality is exclusive to these products.
Palladium boasts 2 options in the form of Standard and Custom Cubes.
- The Standard Cubes are Standard Data Sets that allow you to group the data as required and to save this as a Custom View (grouping) or Format,
- while the Custom Cube facility allows our Business Partners to Create Custom Data Sets from the Palladium Data, or even from other Application Database Tables, and allow you to create your own Custom Data Views on this data.
A Data Cube is described as a collection of Grouped Data for analysis, while a Data View is the formatting and grouping of this data within a Data Cube.
Working With Standard Data Cubes
After selecting your Standard Cube, you will see that the system will default to the sales, grouped by Customer then Item, with returned data for Qty, Cost, Revenue and Gross Profit for “the current day”. The application works in the same way as an excel Pivot table with the ability to drag the data from the field selection table to either the Filter, Column (x-axis), Row (y-axis) or Value sections as depicted below.
Date Selection
Once you have the relevant fields in your Cube, you can select the relevant date filters from the Date Filters section above. Select a standard date filter such as Today, Current Week, Current Month, Financial Year, Calendar Year or select a Custom Date range using the date filters.
Should you select say the a custom date filter and select for a year but just wish to compare the first 3 months of this year vs the same 3 months of next year, you can right click on the Month Field as displayed in the filter, select “field settings” and select only the months that you would like to report on.
Conditional Formatting - Data
Once you have selected the relevant data in the areas that you would like to see, you can also perform additional formatting to the cube as required. In the example below you can right click on any of the data selections below and perform conditional formatting such as change the colour to a value greater or less than a specific value. An example could be to change all Gross Profit Percentages less than 15% to Display in Red as depicted in the example below.
You can also display or suppress totals using the menu function as seen below or alternatively using the Conditional Formatting function as shown above. In addition you can add totals to either the data by column or by row just at the click of a mouse.
Formatting - Graphs
Once you have selected your data you can click on the Chart tab to view your data in a graphical format as seen below. You also have the option to change the Chart Type should you require as well as the ability to change the colour schemes using the Palette option situated below.
Saving Data Settings
Once you are happy with the Grid and Chart Settings you just select the “Save As” function as seen here, and simply rename the View to the desired name. Once done the settings will be saved and listed under the Current Views field list. The cube function also ships with a number of Standard Data Views as seen below, allowing you to just change these as required.
Creating Custom Cubes
You can create your own custom cubes using data from other Palladium or Microsoft SQL tables. We recommend that you contact your Palladium Business Partner before attempting this function.
First select the add cube function as seen below. Thereafter you need to add a cube name and description as well as to attach the newly created Cube to the related SQL Data View.
Once created the view will drop into a Custom Cube menu as seen below.
Setting Up User Security
Once created you need to setup the relevant user security access rights. Go to the Control Panel and select Users. The General Security tab has the rights for the Standard Business Intelligence and we have extended the rights to include a Business Intelligence tab that governs the security of each individual cube as well as that of the Custom Cubes.