Point-and-click BI

Traditional BI tools require the use of specialized database structures and the corresponding expertise or IT support. Apart from being expensive, business users find it hard and inconvenient for effective use. 8MSaaS was designed to overcome this weakness and allow the business users to do a majority of their discoveries without IT support. This allows the business users to concentrate on their business tasks without being distracted by technical details. 

8MSaaS provides the following BI tools:

8MSaaS BI users can use the above tools with less than 2 hours training and without the need to involve their IT staff.

Old Approach 

A traditional data warehouse involves the data warehouse system development, data cleaning, data integration and data mining process.  The process is absolutely needed because traditional business systems are silos and they have different databases.  This process is not only time-consuming and costly, but requires putting the data warehouse and BI tools separate from the business (transactional) systems and making the embedded actions (e.g., automated actions after certain things are detected) difficult. 

8MSaaS’s Approach

8MSaaS provides a total solution on a single system and the 8MSaaS database is already the data warehouse for the business.8MSaaS minimizes the need of data integration and provides industry specific pre-integrated solutions such as below:

For some businesses such as professional services and IT, there is no need to develop another data warehouse and 8MSaaS database can satisfy 100% of the requirements.  For retailed businesses, 8MSaaS will interface with its POS system.  For banking businesses, 8MSaaS will interface with its CIF.  

8MSaaS provides point-and-click data mining mechanism to allow business users to discover certain patterns and ratios in their business without the need to deal with SQL statements such as below:

8MSaaS opens up all client, product, campaign, opportunity, contract/order related fields and allows the user to point-and-click to select the fields and connect them via simple logics to detect certain behavioral patterns that aren’t easy to see. For example, dog food on the surface isn’t a seasonal product, but the purchase of dog food can be diminished together with the purchase of non-winter products in winter because older people from the North would bring their dogs with them to the South for winter. For example, dog food on the surface isn’t a seasonal product, but the purchase of dog food may drop in winter when older people from the North head south for the winter, taking their dogs along. The detection of this fact via data mining can help adjust the dog food stock appropriately in winter.

8MSaaS allows the user to do instant search of the pattern or ratio on the historical database or set up automatic detection for the future transactions. The user will be alerted once the pattern or ratio that the user wants to detect appears.

The 8MSaaS OLAP features allow the user to aggregate, drill-down, slice and dice multiple dimensional data interactively from multiple perspectives. The user can aggregate data accumulated and computed in one or more dimensions such as the revenue forecasts of all sales offices rolled up to headquarters to forecast total revenue. The user can drill down to navigate through the details. For example, the user can view sales data by individual sales reps or by individual products that make up the sales region’s revenue. The user can take out (slicing) a specific set of data and view (dicing) the slices from different points of view.

The 8MSaaS OLAP features also allow the user to do what if analysis. For example, the user can assume the increase of price by 20% and the decrease of sales volume by 10% of a particular product and find out the revenue impact to the specific sales region or the entire enterprise. 

Valuable information is in people’s heads and people in general do not automatically volunteer for information. Having a systematic way to collect useful information from people and automatic and reliable mechanisms to measure and disseminate information distinguishes the corporate intelligence of one from the others. There is valuable information inside people’s heads but people, in general, do not readily volunteer that information. Having a systematic way to collect useful information from people and then to have automatic and reliable mechanisms to measure and disseminate that information distinguishes the corporate intelligence of one from the others. 8MSaaS provides eQuestion, eSurvey, and rule-based measurement and display mechanisms to help modern corporations to surface and collect large amounts of useful information systematically and produce inductions in real-time.

The Information can be collected according to client, supplier, brand or enterprise’s organization hierarchy or geographical distribution structure and be automatically aggregated according to the structure in real-time. The analysis of information according to measurement and comparison rules is done in real-time and the results will be displayed according to the display rules in each authorized person’s workbench in real-time as well.

8MSaaS provides a state-of-the-art point-and-click Report Generator to allow business users to simply point to any field or fields that they want to search and generate a report. The system will perform accordingly. The simple-to-use but powerful mechanisms allow the business user to (a) select whatever combination of fields that he wants for search and report and (b) specify the layout or display order of the fields to be displayed in the report. It also allows the user to select different types of statistics (e.g., SUM, COUNT, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX) to be included in the summary line of the report.

With the 8MSaaS Point-and-click Report Generator, business users no longer need to learn SQL or depend on the IT staff’s assistance before they can do data mining and report generation. 

8MSaaS provides different real-time display components and alerts for different KPI for different business areas. Once the measurement for an individual, project or business is set up, the measurement, display and alert are automatic and in real-time.

Business oriented KPI such as top 10 revenue streams, project or group oriented KPI such as service level agreement items and individual KPI such as balance scorecard items are all computed and displayed in real-time. The KPI display components are designed for people to easily see the key measurement results and multi-level drilling down in real-time for further details. The information is most effective for performance management.