Zooming to EPM Reporting

As discussed, in my first article, Reporting is one of the prime USP of Business Intelligence Tools. Think about EPM and to top the list you will find Financial Reporting, Web Analysis and Interactive Reporting.

Now, big question, what’s the difference between these three?

In the hay of 2003, Brio Reporting was bought by Hyperion Solutions Corporation. In no time, this product was integrated in Hyperion system. This product was fundamentally built to generate reports on different relational databases. This product was lost in transition from Brio to Hyperion to Oracle. Interactive Reporting is in its fading career now, its matter of time that it will be wiped away completely with the new products coming on and Oracle leaving this product behind. Not sure if this beautiful product has received justice, but that’s how things turned out to be.

With Financial Reporting, it’s a trade mark statutory reporting tool. What I mean by statutory reporting is the reports that need to be sent across to stakeholders and government authorities. Financial Reporting handles the standard reports viz. Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow etc. This effectively means analysis solely in terms of figures. You can always use graphs, charts and images, but this usually is not the case. This products provides you with number of features, one of which my favorite, Batch bursting of PDF outputs to number of users.

Coming to Web Analysis, as you would know, Images speaks more than figures, this is what Web Analysis gives you. Different types of graphs, charts and images, tailor made for top level management to do analysis on. Unlike Financial Reporting, this analysis is purely based on graphs and charts. This product stands ideal for decision making in real quick time. Few commonly used analysis basis include year on year, quarter on quarter growth, top five best performing stores, worst performing branches etc.