Tag: Targit

Adding an “As Of” Date to TARGIT Reports

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Doug Hoogervorst - Blog, Reporting, Targit

Financial statements in TARGIT are often constructed with comparisons and calculations for more exact formatting. The comparisons can hold elements for current and previous years, quarters, months, or any combination of time you can think of. We have had trouble in the past with adding the actual date to these TARGIT reports, especially if we’re using the dynamic date origin to go back in time to see data before today.

While the “as of” date is visible in the client view, it is (or has been) difficult to see the same date in a report, since the dynamic date origin can’t be added to the printable page.

Two possibilities we tried and immediately rejected were using a detail band with the ‘Posting Date’ dimension (Picture 1) and a crosstab header band with a text element (Picture 2). The detail band attempted to pull every single date and locked up TARGIT with its data request. The text element sort of worked, but it was impossible to line it up to the correct column after data was fetched for the report.

Picture 1

Picture 2

The next solution we tried was adding dynamic captions to the time comparison. Unfortunately, this is an “all or nothing” action: you can’t have a caption on just one column (the current or YTD column), and you can’t hide the other captions on the elements through Properties\Visibility. This is a big deal when you’re using a comparison with many elements; you end up with lots of different dates in the header, making it harder to read.

Picture 3

Picture 4

Finally, we started thinking independently of the crosstab with the comparison or trying to line up a text element with a crosstab column “just so.” We built a separate crosstab with the intent of hiding all of its data and essentially using it just for its column header. This column header shows a comparison with a single element, YTD, and the header uses a dynamic caption to display {posting date:last} from the Date dimension.

Picture 5

Picture 6

Only one measure and the comparison are required to make this work. The measure number is masked under a visibility agent (hide all values), and the data row background color of the crosstab theme is changed from grey to white to make it seem more like a simple header than an empty crosstab; this also helps with the spacing in a report.

Picture 7

Simply add a new crosstab band to the top of any report and import this “As Of [Date]” object into it. “Fit to page width” is an excellent option to apply here, and voila! You can display today’s (or yesterday’s, or any day’s) date on the TARGIT reports easily and with no confusion.

Picture 8

Learn more on how to improve your Business Intelligence solution and TARGIT reports below!

Unified Business Intelligence takes off at the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Doug Hoogervorst - Blog, Conferences, Reporting, Targit

The breadth of stuff to see and experience at Unified can be intimidating. Hundreds of exhibitors from bottling to field sensors, engineers to reporters, corks to dorks. Having to have one message for such a varied audience was difficult as everyone comes to data from a different perspective. We unified business intelligence for the attendees.

As I’ve reflected over the couple days since, my summary has been that delivering information – whether in dashboards, emails or however – is more interesting than ever. As a collective, we know we can get to so much more than ever and we are expecting it.

Our Unified Business Intelligence booth with TARGIT was incredibly well received. We live in an age now when we do expect to see sensor data trended over time and mixed with weather data plus market data. Lay over average price per bottle and average cost per bottle. AND give me a call to action from that information.

When we started reporting in the wine industry, we focused to start on 3-tier distribution and allocations. Today we have integrated DTC, customer lifetime value, inventory, AR, AP, financials, social media and have already started down vineyard data plus production. I was excited to expand our footprint – you, the attendees at Unified shared my excitement. I’m looking forward to more unified business intelligence in 2015.

ViewPoints 2015 Event Planning begins!

Posted on October 29, 2014 by nluer - Blog, Conferences, Targit, Uncategorized

ViewPoints, Business Impact’s bi-annual customer event, is on track for 2015. The informative event is two and a half days of training, networking, and learning the latest information on what is happening in Business Intelligence. The event will be held in April 2015 and will kick off with two classroom training sessions on TARGIT’s latest release of their business intelligence tool. The beginning TARGIT training course (101) will be a half day course of valuable introductory training on the basics of the latest version of the tool. We have also added a FULL day of TARGIT 201 training that will focus on advanced calculations, gauges, and the most ambitious parts of the latest TARGIT business intelligence tool.

The main event will be “sandwiched” between the two training sessions, and will consist of a full day of Business Intelligence tracks to attend. The breakout sessions will cover topics such as; the latest and greatest functionality in TARGIT’s new release, new client testimonials, what companies often overlook from their Business Intelligence solutions, and where our Consultants see Business Intelligence going in the future in your industry. The event will allow time for guests to network with their industry peers on how other companies utilize their data to make better business decisions. Wineries, Manufacturers, Convenience Stores and more industries will be attending the epic conference this year being held in Sonoma, California.

With new clients coming on board rapidly, we have outgrown our previous Napa resort location. We are expecting over 65 clients for our main event, and up to 100 over the course of the three days. With the increase in attendees, the location and finalization of dates will be confirmed and announced shortly.

We are excited to host the third annual ViewPoints event in April 2015. Watch for our upcoming emails that will be detailing more information on the event, and how to sign up for the session tracks and training.

ViewPoints Business Intelligence Event was a Success!

Posted on July 1, 2013 by nluer - Blog, Conferences, General, Targit

We want to thank all of our clients and partners that made ViewPoints business intelligence event a success in 2013. With so much changing in the business intelligence world, the day was spent discussing, presenting and learning new concepts in BI. A few highlights from the ViewPoints event:[quote align=”right” color=”#999999″]”You put on a great venue. I like your presentation style, Doug! You find a way to make BI and data fun and relevant to non-geeks.” Jean Sperlak – Olap Office [/quote]

Doug Hoogervorst, with all his humor, kicked off the ViewPoints event with a very popular topic – Master Data Management. A challenge all organizations face because data resides in multiple systems. How do we keep “item” from one system equal to “product” from another and “part code” from a third? MDM is the hot topic in business intelligence because it is not easy. For a limited time, you can access his presentation materials here!

Many of our clients participated in presentations throughout the day. Ava Jones, Enterprise BI Manager for AdvancePierre Foods presented with Doug in “PC: Not Politically Correct – but Product Contribution”. She discussed how APF’s Business Intelligence solution takes their data from 10 different data sources and applies that information to the actual product cost. Providing this information to Sales and the Management Team was crucial. Not to mention, the solution saved APF $50,000+ in the first six months in man hours alone.

Neal Cram, Don Sebastiani & Sons, was kind enough to present with the TARGIT Team during “Making Beautiful Dashboards: How to create the best dashboards for you organization.” A very popular session from the surveyed attendees commenting that, “creating dashboards, gauges, and “out of the box” data displays were a highlight to the event.”

Our Partners, TARGIT and OLAP Office held widely attended breakout sessions in the afternoon. TARGIT demonstrated their new release TARGIT 2013, which is expected to be available the beginning of July 2013. Howard Taylor, from OLAP Office, gave a informative presentation on budgeting for multiple reasons (financial, sales, depletions, production, reforecast) all in one tool! [quote align=”right” color=”#999999″]”Well done! I thoroughly enjoyed Dan’s 201 training session.” Colleen Gettle – Don Sebastiani & Sons[/quote]

Francis Smith, Senior Consultant, and Dan Cowan, VP of Consulting, led engaging TARGIT Training 101 and 201 courses the day before the event. The participants were thrilled that we added the courses to the event, learning more advanced views and calculations with the TARGIT tool.

Just before we finished the event, the Business Impact Consultants were available for Advisory Time, where we answered client specific one-on-one questions, recapped any of the sessions, and helped anyone with further training.

Winding up the event, we had a wine tasting and networking hour for all attendees. The wine was phenomenal, as our clients shared a few bottles from their wineries with the group. The tasting was a great way to recap the day, network, and learn from each other on how to benefit further from BI.

We are looking forward to our next ViewPoints event. Thank you again customers, partners and Business Impact’s employees for making the event a great success!

Hiding Unrelated Dimensions in a BI Tool!

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Jacob Ross - Blog, General, Targit

A Step-by-Step Guide On How To Hide Unrelated Dimensions in a BI Tool.

The main power of OLAP viewers (Business Intelligence Tools) is the ability for employees to do Ad Hoc reporting and analysis. If one simply chooses the measures and dimensions they want to look at, the tool will return the data they are requesting from the Cube. This is great reporting information at the employee’s finger tips, as long as the dimensions they request are related….

If the dimensions requested are unrelated, it’s often difficult for employees analyzing the data to identify they did not find a result. The average business user may be busy, and the lack of relationship may go undetected if related and unrelated dimensions are used in the same table. This causes frustration, and quite frankly lack of trust in the data, from employees.

To learn how to overcome these frustrations in 5 easy steps click below:

Business Impact’s Easy Step-by-Step Guide: How To Hide Unrelated Dimensions in Your Business Intelligence Tool.

The Next Big Thing: TARGIT 2k13

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Jacob Ross - Blog, Conferences, Targit

Targit 2k13 Presentation @ ViewPoints

Business Impact hosted last month ViewPoints, our customer appreciation day in Napa, where we invited our partner TARGIT to present their new product, TARGIT 2k13 – coming out this summer (expected in June). We were all excited to finally see a live demonstration, as we had heard good things about the product and most of our clients use earlier versions of TARGIT. Needless to say, the TARGIT-boys had their work cut off with a room full of users and BI consultants working with the tool every day. Every tool has its limitation, and a few of us initially remained skeptical, as we could not help searching for the famous “catch” in an otherwise great demo. This attitude was largely brought to shame by almost every question getting answered before being asked, and the tool sustained all the natural sidetracks coming from audience requests. This demonstration was nothing less than brilliant and the the networking / wine tasting afterwards revealed that everybody seemed to be very impressed and TARGIT certainly sold themselves well. The room was filled with “we are gonna get this!”, “this is awesome”, “when can we have it?” and so on… which brings me to the earlier mentioned catch: The tool was still a couple of month away from release and people wanted it NOW. It is still very new, but we will definitely take a closer look on TARGIT 2k13 as we get closer to the release, but here are a few of the great features worth waiting for from our perspective:

Touch Client (Mobile BI)

We have been talking about mobile Business Intelligence for years now, and TARGIT are now ready to offer a credible solution that is fully integrated with the Desktop Client. The presenters tossed out a few tablets into the crowd and let them do the magic while they continued the demonstration. Easy, intuitive and was still easy to use after 20 curious souls had played around with it. I only saw pretty dashboards with drill down functionality, so can’t attest to any Ad Hoc analysis capabilities, just yet.

Intelligent Wizard

One of the awesome features in TARGIT, has always been the intuitive drag and drop functionality, when building an analysis view. You click on e.g. Revenue, Customer, Month and it returns a view like below.

In TARGIT 2k13 you simply type “revenue per customer by month” into a search field on the frontpage and voila! Same view as above in matter of seconds which is perfect for users that needs answers NOW. It was also noted, that the result was consistent across various common misspellings and it also worked with searches suggested by the audience. This feature caught everybody’s attention.

“Fit to page” Report function

Turning an analysis view into a solid printable report can be very time consuming with the present version of TARGIT, because of the rigid layout constraints imposed by the tool. No more fiddling with column widths and other formatting to get it to fit…No more!

TARGIT 2k13 offers a new button “Fit to page” that automatically resizes the analysis to fit a page. Small, but extremely powerful function for less experienced users. What are you going to do with all that extra time?

Ribbon (new layout)

Never underestimate the power of a pretty design. TARGIT has put in a lot of effort into improving the layout and navigation, with new colors and functionality. E.g. a top ribbon has been added, which users can recognize from other common softwares like the Microsoft Office package. What we really like to see, is how they have kept it possible for busy users to setup shortcuts and modify layout to fit their day-to-day needs and extended this with easier Ad Hoc navigation. Finally, worth mentioning is that TARGIT 2k13 has integrated all the new design with the earlier versions – which means that you can still do it “the old fashioned way” and existing users should be able to upgrade with minimum need for additional training.

Final remarks

The features mentioned here won’t be listed in the top if you asked TARGIT’s marketing team. Why? This release includes massive new features like Big Data Analytics, Social Analytics, Xbone, Intelligent Sentinels and much more – that looked great in a Demo, but we would like to take a closer look at before we start endorsing it. However, we can already now say that TARGIT 2k13 is making a great tool greater and TARGIT users and newcomers should definitely consider this into their Business Intelligence Architecture. But again…estimated release is first in June.

We cannot wait!

Identifying Product Line Profitability through Landed Cost Analysis

Posted on January 24, 2013 by nluer - Blog, Targit, Webinar

Edit: The webinar is closed for registration (February 5th 2013)

Establishing landed costs for the products that a company handles can be a tricky business. There are freight costs, but they are not generally by SKU. There is trade promotional spending, which might be by item, by product group, or just to a customer. In order to accurately calculate the landed cost, all factors beyond the obvious Cost of Goods Sold must be considered.

Calculating landed cost is critical to understanding what a product actually costs and therefore what it can be sold for. Join us as we present how Business Impact and TARGIT helped Litehouse Foods master their Landed Cost requirements and significantly impact their product line profitability.

Click the Orange button and sign up for the Webinar through our partner Targit’s registration page. Takes only a few seconds.

Time: February 5th, 2013 at 2:00 EST

Recommended for: Logistics, finance, and manufacturing focused individuals looking to gain knowledge in Product Line Profitability. Existing or prospective users of Business Intelligence solutions are welcomed too.

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[toggle_item title=”Landed Cost Definition” active=”false”]The total cost of a landed shipment including purchase price, freight, insurance, and other costs up to the port of destination. In some instances, it may also include the customs duties and other taxes levied on the shipment. (www.businessdictionary.com)
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PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server

Mac®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.5 or newer

Mobile attendees
Required: iPhone®, iPad®, Android™ phone or Android tablet

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