Ariacom Business Reports

Ariacom Business Reports is a database reporting and multi-dimensional analysis tool. The purpose of this tool is to help users extract specific information from large databases at the push of a button. It makes analysis of relational data much easier and faster and allows the users to edit and run complex reports.

This tool is capable of providing solutions to various basic company requirements, ranging from publishing a diary over the intranet to building a data warehouse for analysis.

Ariacom Business Reports includes the following features:

• Ø Both web and stand-alone version.
• Ø Generation of complex reports integrating pivot tables.
• Ø Native line, bar, point and pie charts.
• Ø Formulas, Ranking, Running Totals.
• Ø Security management defining user access.
• Ø Currently available in English, French, German and Spanish
• Ø Report results in various formats including html, csv, txt, .doc. etc according to the convenience of the user

Ariacom Business Reports manages Business domains and Reports. A business domain is a set of data used to edit and execute reports. It contains the following information:

• Ø Target database description (including table description, report elements, report types and templates).
• Ø Users, security and public folders.
• Ø Translations for multilingual support.
• Ø Output device definition to redirect report results to special devices.

A report is a set of data containing the information necessary to build a report result. A report is defined and executed for a given business domain. It contains the following information:

• Ø Elements to be shown in the result.
• Ø Restrictions to be applied.
• Ø Template to format the result.
• Ø Outputs to various devices.
• Ø Schedules.

Ariacom creates report directly from the operational database, without coding which eliminates the need for a large data warehouse or a huge infrastructure. It is capable of querying any database with an ODBC driver. The currently fully tested databases include MS Access, MS SQL Server, Oracle (8.x and 9.x) and MySQL.

The first step towards creating a report is creating a business domain for the database. Once we access the database we can select the tables that we need for our analysis. Just like a database query we can define foreign keys for every table being used and creating new joins for these. Few steps later we will be able to get the result in form of tables as shown in below image. From the table we can create pie chart, bar graphs or line graphs.

Data used for demo

To create the tutorial for the final presentation we will be using the sample data which is available free with the software. The database known as Northwind includes data related to Products, Orders, Customers and Employees. The database has records for several years stored in different tables which we can extract in any form we require for analysis.

Business Value

Since we can extract and represent data in our way we can use it for various analyses. For example the above table and image provides figures related to sales for every genre of product with respect to every salesman. We can thus use it to find which salesman is better in selling which product items and can thus appoint the particular sales at the relevant location in the store so as to optimize sales. Through orders, products and customers we can find who are our biggest customers and for what products. Thus this software can form the backbone of the sales strategy of a firm by simplifying the analytics of data which would otherwise have been a tiresome job and would require a lot of effort as well as expertise.

Source: http://www.ariacom.com/