With the release of SAP Business Objects 4.0 in 2011, there now exist two distinct current versions of Crystal Reports (Crystal Reports 2011 and Crystal Reports for Enterprise).  In building the latest release of Crystal Reports, the goal was to create an enhanced developer interface and the best possible connectivity with the new semantic / universe layer in SAP Business Objects 4.0.  But the new release needed to also have zero disruption in the use of legacy and existing Crystal Reports.  Subsequently, SAP Business Objects has released a new version of the product that is similar to the existing product (i.e. Crystal Reports 2011) and a next-generation product that has a completely been redeveloped and includes a new user interface and new underlying architecture (i.e. Crystal Reports for Enterprise).

Crystal Reports 2011

•  Incremental update to CR 2008 with a few new features

•  Focused on serving the needs of legacy customers

•  Delivers existing functionality with no regressions

•  Seamless upgrades from legacy releases of Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports for Enterprise

•  Major update & re-design of the Crystal Reports Designer

•  Connectivity with new unx universe / semantic layer

•  Enhanced report design tool (smart formatting)

•  Many new features and functions

•  Some regression of functionality

•  Limitation to universe as a data source

SAP Business Objects has determined the Crystal Reports for Enterprise is the future of the Crystal Reports product line and subsequently it provides the foundation for all future releases of Crystal Reports.  To this end, there are a number of completely new features in Crystal Reports for Enterprise including:

•  Smart Formatting of Reports

•  Streamlined Tab Control User Interface

•  New Charting Engine

•  New Multilingual Support

•  New Alerting Mechanism

•  Enhanced Connectivity with Universes

•  Enhanced Connectivity with SAP BW

Of the many features in Crystal Reports for Enterprise, there exists one that will fundamentally change how developers interact with reports. This new feature is called Smart Formatting and it will greatly enhance report developer efficiency.  With smart formatting, the Crystal Reports Designer automatically detects patterns in report formatting. And upon changes to the report, the designer will rapidly adjust the design of the report.

Crystal Reports for Enterprise - Smart Formatting

Features of Smart Formatting in Crystal Reports for Enterprise include:

•  Automatic Resizing Of Colum Upon Object And Column Insertion

•  Automatic Column Shifting Upon Object And Column Insertion

•  Guidelines For Easy Column Resizing

•  Ability To Drag And Drop To Reorder Columns

There are also number of features that have not been incorporated within the initial release of Crystal Reports for Enterprise.  These regressed features that are not included in Crystal Reports for Enterprise v4.0 include:

•  No Native Connections to Database

•  No Support for Database Connectivity (ODBC, JDBC)

•  No Support for OLAP as a Data Source (except BEx Queries)

•  No Support for Live Office

•  No Support for Enterprise Search

•  Gaps within API and SDK

The May 2012 Meeting of Washington DC Area Business Objects Crystal User Group (DCABOCUG) is scheduled for May 15, 2012 in the Montpelier Room of the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

This meeting has no fee but you must register to attend.

Logistics:

Date: Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Time: 9:00am – 1:30pm
Location: Library of Congress/James Madison Memorial Building
Montpelier Room
101 Independence Ave, SE
Washington, DC 20540

Register Now

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Helping Companies Unleash Their Most Valuable Asset
Services to Provide Better Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse Solutions

About DCS Consulting

DCS Consulting, Inc. is a consulting and professional services firm that focuses on the implementation, design, and management of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing (BI/DW) solutions that enable corporations and government entities to take full advantage of their data assets. The DCS team has been performing solutions delivery to customers for over 15 years. Over 90% of the DCS team is cleared to work on classified projects. DCS Consulting roots are in creating and maintaining reporting, dashboards, budget, and financial performance solutions. In addition, DCS delivers extensive BI/DW knowledge and expertise within specific domain knowledge including finance, performance management, and budgeting.

DCS Consulting is a certified small business utilizing NAICS codes: 541511, 541512, 541513, 541519, 541611, 541618.

Technology Expertise

Consultants from DCS Consulting have expertise and years of experience implementing market-leading technologies:

•  SAP Business Objects

•  CGI Momentum Financials

•  Domo (Corda)

•  VisualCue

Sevices Provided

DCS Consulting offers professional solutions for corporatations, associations, public institutions, government entities of all sizes in the following areas:

• PMO / Program Support / BI COE

• Financial Intelligence Support

• Planning / Strategy / Tool Selection

• Project Implementations

• Technology Training

• Operational Maintenance

Contact DCS Consulting

Adam Getz
Practice Manager
DCS Consulting, Inc.
9048 John Sutherland Lane, Lorton, VA 22079
Email: adam.getz@dcsfederal.com
Web: www.dcsfederal.com

Operational Business Intelligence

Operational business intelligence is often associated with reporting from a transactional or operational data source, and typically is consistent with reporting of data within or during an organizational business process. Further, operational business intelligence can be defined as analytics that is tightly connected or embedded within common business processes with the twin goals of supporting operational decision making and monitoring organizational operations.

In general, operational business intelligence provides time-sensitive, relevant information to operations managers, business professionals, and front-line, customer-facing employees to support daily work processes. Additionally if the data retrieved from the analysis directly supports or helps complete an operational tasks, then the intelligence is operational in nature.

Tangible results of operational business intelligence can include:

•  Invoices

•  Meeting Schedules and Badges

•  Receipts

•  Shipping Documents

•  Financial Statements

•  Marketing Mailing Lists

Strategic Business Intelligence

Strategic business intelligence is often associated with reporting from an analytical data source, data mart, or data warehouse. Fundamentally, strategic business intelligence improves a business process by analyzing a predetermined set of metrics relevant to that process and provides historical context of data.  In addition, strategic intelligence provides the basis for forecasting, goal-setting, and strategic planning and direction.

The focus of strategic business intelligence is on (1) collection, organization and storage of huge amounts of data, (2) optimization of that data for rapid reporting and analysis, (3) and identification of key business drivers through the analysis of historical facts, (4) assistance with answering key business questions.

Questions answered by strategic business intelligence can include:

•  Who are the most valuable customers?

•  Which customers are most likely to buy additional products / services?

•  Which products can be bundled together?

•  Which territories or regions have the highest project growth?

•  What is the optimal price of our products?

•  What is the total cost associated with customer acquistion?

The February 2012 Meeting of Washington DC Area Business Objects Crystal User Group (DCABOCUG) is scheduled for February 21, 2012 in the Mumford Room of the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

This meeting has no fee but you must register to attend.

Register Here:

Logistics:

Date: Tuesday, February 21, 2011
Time: 9:00am – 1:30pm
Location: Library of Congress/James Madison Memorial Building
Mumford Room
101 Independence Ave, SE
Washington, DC 20540

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In dimensional modeling, conformed dimensions are common and repeatedly used dimensions that relate and are joined to multiple facts. The conformed dimension is consistent across an enterprise and has the same meaning to every fact with which it relates. Typically, a conformed dimension exists as a single dimension table and relates to multiple fact tables within the same data warehouse. But the conformed dimension can also exist as identical dimension tables in separate data marts. In a nutshell, conformed dimensions allow facts and measures to be categorized and described in the same way across dimensional stars and/or data marts, ensuring consistent reporting across an enterprise.

Properties of Conformed Dimensions:

•  Dimensions that are joined to multiple fact tables

•  Exist in multiple star schemas and/or data marts

•  Same meaning with every fact table join

•  Allow various fact tables to be used in the same query

•  Same structure and attributes in every model

Common Conformed Dimensions:

•  Customer

•  Product

•  Date/Time

•  Employee

•  Account

•  Region or Territory

•  Vendor

Live Office from SAP Business Objects integrates business intelligence functionality from the Business Objects suite within the commonly-used Microsoft Office environment. Subsequently Live Office enables users are able to embed refreshable information within documents, spreadsheets, and presentations and share them across their organization. Live Office provides users with real-time data that is verifiable and easily refreshed. As Live Office is built directly into Microsoft Office applications, needed information is available at the user’s finger tips and is available in a familiar, easy to use format. In a nutshell, Live Office empowers business users to easily access corporate data from within Microsoft Office Excel, Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint without depending on expertise from the information technology department.

Benefits of Business Objects Live Office
•  Access business intelligence (BI) content directly within Microsoft Office.
•  Embed business intelligence directly in your e-mail messages using Microsoft Outlook.
•  Format and perform calculations using familiar features of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.
•  Increase business user autonomy by exposing corporate data in Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations rather than web applications.
•  Improve timelines of decisions by enabling simpler information consumption.
•  Become less dependent on information technology personnel for generation of reports.

As your organization seeks to better understand its customer and manage a diverse line of services and products, operational, tactical and strategic dashboards should become a critical addition to your planning and decision-making toolbox. Whether the dashboard provides your Executive Director a 30,000-foot view of the organization as a whole, or the product line manager an interactive interface which allows exploration into the details of a particular product’s performance, your organization can benefit a well-built dashboard.

Achieving accuracy and consistency for all dashboards within an organization can be both a challenging and expensive task. To this end, TMA Resources delivers three categories of dashboards to its customers to ensure that the right type of presentation is delivered to your organization’s decision–makers …

• Operational Dashboards: Continuously monitor core business processes with real-time transactional data. Alert your managers upon thresholds being exceeded or upon an exception in the data.

• Tactical Dashboards: Provide the department manager with a quick view into how his or her department is performing and highlight areas of concern—so the manager can take action to forestall less-than-optimal performance.

• Strategic Dashboards: Provide senior managers and executives with a glance of the organization’s performance in relation to strategic goals. These dashboards are typically based upon data residing in one of the organizations data warehouses or data marts and contain time-stamped snapshots of data.

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Data warehouses are centralized data repositories that integrate data from various transactional, legacy, or external systems, applications, and sources. The data warehouse provides an environment separate from the operational systems and is completely designed for decision-support, analytical-reporting, ad-hoc queries, and data mining. This isolation and optimization enables queries to be performed without any impact on the systems that support the business’ primary transactions (i.e transactional and operational systems).

Fundamentally, a data warehouse helps solve the on-going problem of pulling data out of transactional systems quickly and efficiently and converting that data into actionable information.  Additionally, the data warehouse allows for processing of large and complex queries in a highly-efficient manner. Upon succesful implementation of a data warehouse or data mart, business will realize numerous improvements and positive gains.

Benefits from a succesful implementation of a data warehouse include:

• Enhanced Business Intelligence

• Increased Query and System Performance

• Business Intelligence from Multiple Source

• Timely Access to Data

• Enhanced Data Quality and Consistency

• Historical Intelligence

• High Return on Investment

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Data Mining & Predictive Analytic solutions provide the capabilities of analyzing large data sets in order to find patterns that can help to isolate key variables to build predictive models for management decision making.  In addition, data mining applications help discover hidden patterns and relationships in data in order to effectively project and predict future results. In order to accomplish this goal, data mining application utilize statistics, algorithms, advanced mathematical techniques, and sophisticated data search capabilities.  Moreover, these sophisticated tools provide answers to questions that may never have been asked and they are effectively able to determine relative amounts of correlation between data elements. Further, the predictive features of these data mining tools enable organizations to exploit useful patterns in data that may have otherwise been difficult to determine.

In 2011, the market leading vendors for data mining systems include: IBM SPSS, SAS, SAP Business Objects, Oracle, MicroStrategy, ThinkAnalytics, Pentaho, & Angoss.

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