Is Tech Making power bi course uk Better or Worse?

[Renea Cooley]

Crystal Reports allows you to generate business intelligence reports from various data sources. It the most advanced and popular report creating tool, which is now also available bundled with several other application software, such as, Microsoft Visual Studio. Crystal Reports allows access to any data source with native ODBC, OLE DB, and JDBC connectivity to relational, OLAP, XML, legacy, and enterprise data sources, which include Oracle, IBM DB2, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and Informix. The latest version of the tool, Crystal Reports XI, provides you with the updated data driver features for XML, JDBC, IBM DB2, and Exchange, letting you have the incredible data access options.

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Crystal Reports was originally developed by Crystal Reports Inc. The company produced the versions from 1.0 through to 3.0. Seagate Software consequently acquired Crystal Reports, and renamed it Crystal Decisions, and produced versions 4.0 through to 9.0. In December 2003, Crystal Reports was acquired by Business Objects, and so far have produced versions 10.0 and XI. Version XI is presently in its second release.

Crystal Reports provides you with presentation quality reports, and saves you time in designing and distributing the reports. The powerful report writer produces "what you see is what you get" business decision reports that can provide your company with instant decision making capability, there-by providing you with increased profitability. You can generate quick custom reports, with great looks. The features allow you to easily create the looks of your report presentation documents. You can select your favourite type face, font size, and text power bi course uk colour, and enhance the layout by applying lines, choosing borders and shades. You can provide further enhancement by choosing embedded pictures, diagrams, and logos. Crystal Reports allows you to use tables, cross-tabulations, or one of the many graph styles, which could be used to communicate your business information. The drill-down feature allows you to get to the sections of the detailed report. Just by clicking the report objects, the tool provides you with a series of linked information which has led to the initial information.

Crystal Reports provide unparalleled flexibility in report creation. It provides you with step-by-step process with the help of expert wizards, which guides you in creating the report. You could also find a "Private Tutor" incorporated in the report writer, and this provides you with online help as you proceed. Your finished reports could be run at any pre-determined time, without any attendance. Even you could schedule the run based on time and dates, taking into consideration business holidays. You can find out more about crystal reports at

Crystal Report allows you to embed sub-reports within your main report, which would mean that, you can embed a customer sales account history report in a sales highlight report. Building special conditions would let you print the sections of the report to produce different report information print-outs from the same report. Crystal Reports allows you to format your reports, by which you may provide summary information in a single cell, instead of using column formats, there-by making it easy to read the report. The report writer provides you with more control over your report design, letting you customise your report.

With more than more than 35 data drivers, and with the flexibility that it offers, Crystal Reports is one of the best report writing tools in the world.

Definitions and Overview

Business Performance Management (BPM) establishes a framework to improve business performance by measuring key business characteristics which can be used to feedback into the decision process and guide operations in an attempt to improve strategic organisational performance. Other popular terms for this include; Enterprise PM (EPM), Corporate PM (CPM) Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), Decision Support Systems (DSS), Management Information Systems (MIS).

BPM: Cycle of setting objectives, monitoring performance and feeding back to new objectives.

Business Intelligence (BI) can be defined as the set of tools which allows end-users easy access to relevant information and the facility to analyse this to aid decision making. More widely the 'intelligence' is the insight which is derived from this analysis (eg. trends and correlations).

BI: Tools to Access & Analyse Data

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are strategically aligned corporate measures that are used to monitor, predict and anticipate the performance of the organisation. They form the basis of any the BPM solution and in an ideal world it should be possible to relate strategic KPIs to actual operational performance within the BI application.

KPIs provide a quick indication on the health of the organisation and guide management to the operational areas affecting performance.

In many companies analysis of data is complicated by the fact that data is fragmented within the business. This causes problems of duplication, inconsistent definitions, inconsistency, inaccuracy and wasted effort.

Silos of Data: Fragmented, Departmental Data Stores, often aligned with specific business areas.

Data Warehousing (DWH) is often the first step towards BI. A Data Warehouse is a centralised pool of data structured to facilitate access and analysis.

DWH: Centralised/Consolidated Data Store

The DWH will be populated from various sources (heterogeneous) using an ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) or data integration tool. This update may be done in regular periodic batches, as a one off load or even synchronised with the source data (real time).

ETL: The process of extracting data from a source system, transforming (or validating) it and loading it into a structured database.

A reporting (or BI) layer can then be used to analyse the consolidated data and create dashboards and user defined reports. A modelling layer can be used to integrate budgets and forecasting.

As these solutions get more complex, the definitions of the systems and what they are doing becomes more important. This is known as metadata and represents the data defining the actual data and its manipulation. Each part of the system has its own metadata defining what it is doing. Good management & use of metadata reduces development time, makes ongoing maintenance simpler and provides users with information about the source of the data, increasing their trust and understanding of it.

Metadata: Data about data, describing how and where it is being used, where it came from and what changes have been made to it.

Commercial Justifications

There is clear commercial justification to improve the quality of information used for decision making. A survey conducted by IDC found that the mean payback of BI implementation was 1.6 years and that 54% of businesses had a 5 year ROI of >101% and 20% had ROI > 1000%.

ROI on BI > 1000% from 20% of organisations

There are now also regulatory requirements to be considered. Sarbanes-Oxley requires that US listed companies disclose and monitor key risks and relevant performance indicators - both financial and non financial in their annual reports. A robust reporting infrastructure is essential for achieving this.

SarbOx requires disclosure of financial & non-financial KPIs

Poor data quality is a common barrier to accurate reporting and informed decision making. A good data quality strategy, encompassing non system issues such as user training and procedures can have a large impact. Consolidating data into a DWH can help ensure consistency and correct poor data, but it also provides an accurate measure of data quality allowing it to be managed more pro-actively.

Data Quality is vital and a formal data quality strategy is essential to continually manage and improve it.

Recent research (PMP Research) asked a broad cross section of organisations their opinion of their data quality before and after a DWH implementation.

- "Don't know" responses decreased from 17% to 7%

- "Bad" or "Very Bad" decreased from 40% to 9%

- Satisfactory (or better) increased from 43% to 84%

DWH implementations improve Data Quality.

Tools Market Overview

At present BI is seen as a significant IT growth area and as such everyone is trying to get onto the BI bandwagon:

ERP tools have BI solutions e.g SAP BW, Oracle Apps

CRM tools are doing it: Siebel Analytics,

ETL vendors are adding BI capabilities: Informatica

BI vendors are adding ETL tools: Business Objects (BO) Data Integrator (DI), Cognos Decision Stream

Database vendors are extending their BI & ETL tools:

Oracle: Oracle Warehouse Builder, EPM

Microsoft: SQL 2005, Integration Services, Reporting Services, Analytical Services

Improved Tools

Like all maturing markets, consolidation has taken place whereby fewer suppliers now cover more functionality. This is good for customers as more standardisation, better use of metadata and improved functionality is now easily available. BI tools today can now satisfy the most demanding customer's requirements for information.

Thinking and tools have moved on - we can now build rapid, business focussed solutions in small chunks - allowing business to see data, store knowledge, learn capabilities of new tools and refine their requirements during the project! Gone are the days of the massive data warehousing project, which was obsolete before it was completed.

A typical DWH project should provide usable results within 3 - 6 Months.

Advice & Best Practice

Initial Phase

Successful BI projects will never finish. It should perpetually evolve to meet the changing needs of the business.