Business Intelligence Reports for "Consumers"

This section will cover some of the basics which are necessary to access and interact with BI Reports.

It is aimed at "report consumers" - user who run already existing reports, without having access to any of the design or configuration tools.

note_awesome

If you need more detailed information about Pentaho, the product which is powering SAI360 Reporting, please use the help files and documentation which are available via the Pentaho tools, or Pentaho online information:

http://infocenter.pentaho.com/help/index.jsp

Accessing BI Reports and Dashboards from SAI360

All BI Reports can be accessed from the SAI360 via the Main Menu Business Intelligence (BI).

From here, the user will have the option to select:

My Reports (private): this option will only be available if the user has created some reports.
Folders and/or Files: each client will be able to define their own folder structure, and the content of each folder.

Types of BI Reports and Dashboards

SAI360 Business Intelligence offers various types of reports, and dashboards. These are:

Type	Brief Description
Static/Complex Reports	These reports are created with the Report Designer, which enables persons which are trained in the use of this tool to create highly detailed, print-quality reports based on adequately prepared data from SAI360, or other data sources. These reports can be formatted exactly to the client's needs, and can be designed to contain a mix of information, and also a mix of tables and graphs. Depending on the configuration of each report, the user interaction with these type of reports are limited to: Selecting parameters. Defining the output format of the report (for example HTML, paged HTML or PDF).
Analysis Reports	Analysis Reports are interactive, allowing users interaction like: Drilling down (e.g. "Country State City", or "Year Quarter Month"). Apply additional filters to the current report. Apply conditional formatting, or change the sort order in tables. Add or remove totals to rows and columns. Have the option to show the current information either in a tabular form, or as a graph. View a graph in various output formats. Export the report to e.g. PDF or Excel All interactions of a user with these reports are session specific, and therefore won't influence other users of the same report. The "base" report remains unchanged.
Dashboards	Dashboards are a collection of reports, which can be either static, or interactive Analysis reports. Users can interact with each report in the same way as if these reports where shown by themselves. However, dashboard offer an additional level of interactions: Use of prompts, which act as a filter on some, or all of the reports on the dashboard. For example different reports on Actions could be filtered on their priority. Linking reports, whereby selecting a value in one of the reports will influence the filter on other reports on the dashboard.