Solutions: MicroStrategy and JD Edwards

A digital dashboard, or dashboard report, is a visually intuitive display of data for monitoring personal or work group contributions to overall goals of the business. Dashboards provide easy-to-use access to JD Edwards' data and help organizations track performance and optimize decision-making. At-a-glance, executives, managers, and business users can immediately understand their organization's health through a range of insightful data visualizations such as key performance indicators (KPIs), tables, graphs, trend indicators, gauges, heat maps, and many more.

Digital dashboards enable business users to intuitively flip through many different perspectives of corporate performance without ever leaving the dashboard, allowing them to quickly and easily identify problems and diagnose root causes. Dashboards combine data from your JD Edwards' system and variety of other data sources into a single view, providing the user with multi-disciplined, multi-dimensional performance feedback on every dashboard.

Enterprise Reporting provides business intelligence to the masses by delivering the detailed information that impacts decision-makers throughout the enterprise. Individuals at all organizational levels and job functions, as well as supply chain partners and customers, rely on powerful, flexible enterprise reporting systems that present targeted data in the most consumable format for day to day operations.

Enterprise Reporting is the most prevalent Style of BI, encompassing a vast array of operational reporting directly from your JD Edwards system as well as other third-party and legacy systems you have in place.

This is also critical as many JD Edwards customer rely on third party solutions for pixel-level reporting such as invoices and other customer-facing documents. With MicroStrategy, you have an opportunity to consolidate you infrastructure, lowering your IT costs and providing a single user interface regardless of how your users choose to interact with the data.

OLAP delivers the simplest form of analysis, allowing users to slice and dice interrelated subsets of data or "cubes" with the click of a mouse. Users can analyze data using standard OLAP features such as page-by, pivot, sort, filter and drill up/down to flip through a series of report views. OLAP Analysis offers users primary access to their underlying data in lieu of more advanced analysis functionality required by power users and analysts.

Most OLAP vendors provide multi-dimensional OLAP (MOLAP) solutions to perform this type of analysis, but limited cube capacity has burdened many IT administrators with deploying and managing hundreds of overlapping cube databases to keep pace with growing organizational demands. To get the most out of BI applications, however, OLAP analysis needs to extend beyond the standard MOLAP cube and provide full speed-of-thought interactivity against your entire information infrastructure.

MicroStrategy delivers OLAP Analysis with Intelligent Cubes™ -- a new analysis environment that lets business users easily and safely explore beyond the boundaries of pre-defined cubes to reach the full depth and breadth of their underlying data -- without relying on IT to create and maintain the cube data. With Intelligent Cubes, MicroStrategy's platform architecture seamlessly combines the speed and interactivity of MOLAP analysis with the analytical power and depth of relational OLAP (ROLAP) for a complete range of OLAP analytical functionality.

Advanced and Predictive Analysis gives power business users and information analysts full investigative power into any corner of your underlying data to find out the details behind specific performance outcomes. Such requirements usually exceed the limits of OLAP Analysis. MicroStrategy has created an environment that lets users move seamlessly from basic OLAP to advanced statistical analysis and full data mining capabilities. Our BI technology was designed specifically to deliver the common functionality of statistical and data mining tools in a way that is familiar and consistent with everyday business intelligence usage.

Our platform supports advanced and predictive analysis capabilities, enabling users for the first time to perform analyses such as hypothesis testing, churn prediction and customer scoring models within a single unified web interface. With built-in support for over 400 Statistical, Mathematical and Financial functions, MicroStrategy lets users create reporting applications that combine ease-of-use with unparalleled backend sophistication.

Effective Alerting and Proactive Notification requires a flexible, well-designed BI application capable of distributing large numbers of reports and alerts to large user populations both internal and external to the enterprise. Most BI vendors support a minimal form of the Alerting and Proactive Notification style of BI, with products that can distribute scheduled emails to user populations with report attachments. MicroStrategy's architecture improves on this basic report delivery and alerting functionality in four key areas and accomplishes this with the highest report throughput available today - producing more than 70,000 reports per hour with minimal hardware.