Inside ASI-AP

Colin, Liza and I sat in on a brown bag session given by Das last week on how to access the iMIS Analytics data warehouse via ProClarity. While the Analytics engine has been available on our internal iMIS client system for some time, it has now been made available to all managers globally, thus putting the information in the hands of people who can make something of it and do something about it. The US managers had their brown bag intro session some weeks ago.

I have always been a big fan of analytics - numbers and trends appeal to my engineering training - and I personally use Excel pivot tables every day to track our business; there are not many questions I cannot answer from the suite of pivot tables that I have.

But the Analytics module brings in another dimension - time - to compare today to any previous point in time. While I can do this now with my Excel spreadsheets, I have to do it manually. What I normally do is save a copy of the pivot table with the date in the name - eg. New business pipeline 10Jul07.xls. And then when I want to compare say today with last year at the same time, I go back and open up the saved spreadsheet from last year and put it side by side with the spreadsheet from today. If I want to graph them both, I have to create a new spreadsheet to paste the values into. Simple enough but tedious and prone to error. And because of that, I rarely do such a time-based comparison.

But Analytics along with the ProClarity viewer will change that. It will make it easy to do time based comparisons. I look forward to getting my head around it over the next couple of months and will post more on it then!