The Sales Analysis module helps licensors analyze their licensee sales and royalty data with a built-in engine for online analysis. The BRMS PivotTable provides automatic sales analysis in a visual format that facilitates trending, comparison, and analysis. The PivotTable uses online analytical processing which is a state-of-the-art component in relational database technology. OLAP capability is bundled with Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and on the client side, it lets you perform sophisticated analysis on large volumes of data with exceptional performance. Sales Analysis is available to licensors only.
Once the OLAP database is populated with data from the Sales Reporting module, that information can be displayed and navigated in the PivotTable. OLAP reports are executed quickly without impacting other sales-reporting users, and they provide a level of detail well beyond the standard reports available elsewhere in BRMS.
The PivotTable is a multidimensional data structure that lets you quickly switch to different views of the data. This ability to show "sliced" data lets you analyze information in small chunks. The PivotTable lets you analyze the data online; you can organize it virtually any way you want, look for broad information or details, and create summaries and reports from within your browser.
The PivotTable lets you view the sales database in a variety of formats. It can answer specific questions like which licensees exceeded revenue goals and which individual products were more successful. A major advantage of using the PivotTable is that the information is already computed and available, and you can quickly get the answers by simply rearranging (or "pivoting") the fields.
To use the PivotTable, you must have Microsoft Office Web Components installed. You can do this by installing Microsoft Office 2000 or by downloading the components from your corporate intranet if you already have an Office 2000 site license. Note that complete PivotTable functionality is not available in all browsers. It requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x and Microsoft Office 2000.
Online analytical processing is an increasingly popular technology that can dramatically improve business analysis. OLAP accelerates the processing of multidimensional data structures by preparing many computed values in advance, rather than at execution time. The combination of easy navigation and fast performance lets you view and analyze data more quickly and efficiently than is possible with ordinary relational databases. The PivotTable puts the multidimensional calculation engine directly on the client to minimize server calls and optimize performance.
Online analytical reporting is an approach to database processing that organizes large amounts of data in ways that make it easy to analyze trends and spot exceptions. OLAP databases arrange information in dimensions and levels of detail. Dimensions and levels are shown in the rows and columns of the PivotTable. OLAP software lets you quickly analyze information that has been summarized into multidimensional views. It is particularly suited for trend analysis on sales data because you can drill down to isolate specific details.
In an OLAP database, information is viewed conceptually as a "cube." An OLAP cube is a multidimensional structure that holds data more like a 3-D spreadsheet than a relational database. The cube lets you display different views of the data by moving the dimension fields to different sides of the PivotTable. This arrangement makes it easy to formulate complex queries, arrange data for a report, switch from summary to detail data, and filter or slice data into meaningful subsets. OLAP cubes let you intuitively navigate complex data.
You need Microsoft Office 2000 to run the PivotTable. If you don't have Office 2000, you can create and run MDX reports to access the OLAP database. MDX (multidimensional expression) reports are created on the fly in response to specific Sales Analysis requirements; they can be saved and re-used but you must be familiar with MDX to use them effectively. MDX is a highly-functional expression syntax for querying an OLAP database. The PivotTable and MDX reports both access the same multidimensional OLAP data.
The PivotTable is the client tool that lets you navigate the data in an OLAP cube. It is an interactive display that lets you view and organize data that has already been validated and summarized. The PivotTable lets you view "sliced" data that has been rearranged and displayed from a certain perspective. You can use the PivotTable as soon as sales data is uploaded and the cube is refreshed. Each time you open the PivotTable, it shows the data that is currently stored in the Sales Reporting module. When the source database changes, or is updated with new information, you can refresh the cube to get the latest information.
The PivotTable is so named because you can dynamically change or pivot the layout to analyze the data in different ways. You can rearrange row headings, column headings, and page fields until you achieve the desired layout. Each time you change the layout, the PivotTable immediately recalculates the data based on the new arrangement.
The PivotTable has fields that you drag and drop on the sides of the cube. You can look for specific information, display larger or smaller amounts of detail, or move the rows and columns to different areas to calculate summaries or totals. For example, it can display field values horizontally or vertically, and then calculate the total for the row or column. It can also use field values as row or column headings, calculating individual amounts at the intersection of each row and each column, and then calculating subtotals and grand totals. For example, to analyze sales by product category for each licensee, you can list licensee names as column headings across the top, product categories as row headings down the side, and the sales amount calculated by product category for each licensee at the intersection of row and column.
The Help pages on the PivotTable toolbar provide detailed instructions about using the PivotTable. However the fields defined in the BRMS PivotTable (e.g. Territory and Time) are fixed. You can drag and drop these fields to display specific slices of data but you can't add new fields. You select which fields are displayed in the PivotTable from the Field List on the toolbar. You can scroll and click the boxes to display or hide fields. Fields already used in the table are shown in bold on the Field List.
Any data displayed in the PivotTable can be exported to Excel 2000 as an Excel PivotTable and then displayed as a chart. It can also be saved in HTML, PDF, or in a variety of Excel formats. You can navigate and save the Excel PivotTable for later reference but you can't go back to the original BRMS PivotTable. The following screens show a representation of the same data in the BRMS PivotTable, in an Excel PivotTable, and in a pie chart.
