The day to day work consist in keying detailed data in the system. For strategic purpose, the managers need to consolidate the data and use information. Then, they will be able to take the right decision, to establish some management strategies thanks to the information they analysed.

As there are as many possible consolidations, strategic visions, indicators as there are some retailers and / or manager, ibs Reporting permits an administrator to build reports and publish them thanks to different mean of communication.

“build reports and publish them to the right place”

To reach the published report objective, the administrator may pass by a few steps. The first step is to build the related query(ies). A query is a command that retrieves raw information, without any design transformation. The result of a query is always a table with a simple entry header.

SIMPLY USE THE BUSINESS MODEL

General Description:
The entire Soft Solutions' Suite rests on the Business Model, which is an intermediate layer, between the Physical data model and the user interface. Basically, the Business Model presents the information elements organized in a business point of view, with business oriented names.

How To?
In the Query Builder Engine module, the administrator or the authorized user will select the Business areas he needs to work with.

The business areas are some object collections, related to a specific business.The user can choose any business areas he needs, even if they are not belonging to the same application. Example: the user can select some item attributes from ibs Referential and some to attributes from ibs Deals. The system automatically links them and the user can customize the links if needed.

Once the user selected the needed data, he may, still from the query builder, apply some formula or build new fields based on an expression including existing data.
He may also pre-consolidate the data in summing, averaging, counting one field per the other ones.

Then, the user defines some static or dynamic filters on the data. A dynamic filter will prompt the user for him to select the filtering values when executing the report or the query. Then, the query is ready to be used in a report.

CREATE ADVANCED QUERIES USING THE SQL LANGUAGE

General Description:
Users from a technical profile may be more comfortable in using the SQL language directly. Moreover, when a query will need many consolidation layers, it is recommended to use the SQL language to improve the query execution performance.
For the two upper reasons, the Query Builder Engine includes a Static Query Builder.

How To?
The Static Query Builder permits the user to directly write the SQL statements.
This module includes some functions such as a beautifier, the export and import sql files and a compilation tool.

The advantage of writing the sql queries in ibs Reporting SQB is that the user will benefits from the same features than when using the business model: he will be able to include some filters (static or dynamic), include the query in a report or re-use it as a basis to build a Business Model query.

QUERY PUBLICATION

The queries have their own security parametrization in case some queries are public or restricted to some specific users or groups of users.

The queries need also to be typed. Indeed, they can be used in ibs Workflow (Business Process launching condition), or in ibs Dashboard KPI portlet (set the "main indicator" result and the "last refreshed data" information).

The queries can also be linked to a menu, in case there is a need to link a query result as contextual information to a specific module content in Soft Solutions' Suite.