| Business Enlightener(BI for SMEs) | | Print | |
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Background: For smaller businesses Microsoft Excel is a de-facto Business Intelligence tool. Where data is displayed, managed, modified and viewed in a most easy way. But BI protagonist can’t call Microsoft Excel a BI solution. In our opinion SMEs feels that BI tool is costly due to –
Due to the reasons cited above, SMEs feel that BI is not their cup of tea and is mainly profitable for larger companies. While trying to sell licenses to smaller organizations service providers generally suggest Open Source BI due to cost effectiveness. We have seen that the free offerings of open source BI is basic and can’t match with the capabilities of the some top notch BI tools.
BDI Systems core team has 9 years of exposure in the field of Business Intelligence esp. with BusinessObjects tool which is most widely deployed BI product in the world. We have evaluated many open source BI and other top notch tools and finally came with the concept of Business Enlightener. We didn’t want to create our own tool and confuse businesses further, we wanted to use the best product available in the market and use it is a cost effective way for organizations to implement BI so that investments are secured. Introduction: Business Enlightener is a BI Solution aiming towards showing the real value of BI to SMEs. This portal based solution which internally uses Crystal Reports and Xcelsius ( they both are packaged with Crystal Reports 2008 Visual Advantage License) and thus integrates with Crystal Reports SDKs and Xcelsius is a great product for SMEs and can be implemented at much lesser cost as compared to any other solution in the market.
Crystal Reports is the de-facto standard for the Enterprise (Canned) reporting and Crystal Xcelsius is the de-facto Dashboarding tool in the world, with maximum deployments and belonging to one of the largest company SAP. Therefore Investing in Business Enlightener becomes safe for any customer. Even if they upgrade their BI in future and buy licenses of either BusinessObjects Edge or BusinessObjects Enterprise their efforts on Reports and dashboards are safe. Architecture of Business Enlightener This product is a combination of skills of product development (Java/J2EE based Skills), Business Objects SDKs skills (esp. Crystal Reports SDKs), Business Objects implementation Skills (CR and Dashboarding) and understanding of BI needs of Businesses where they have data comings from different types of data sources. BDI Systems being unique in a way, a company formed by Ex- R&D professional of Business Objects, having skills on product development, Business Objects SDKs, Business Objects implementation and strong know-how in Java/J2EE, could achieve in ideating it and coming with this version in a short time span.
Business Enlightener Architecture Diagram 1.0
As showed in the architecture diagram, the portal application is developed using latest framework (Struts 2) in J2EE. Ajax based UI and Hibernate to manage database calls. Connection Manager is the class which manages connections with different data sources. Connection manager knows what all reports are using a particular connection. We can take the source data from different databases and show them in portal using different reports and dashboards. Using Crystal Reports stand alone license, a developer can create different reports and save them in a machine. These .rpt files can be easily imported in the Enlightener Portal by a simple right click. Similarly using Xcelisus tool, dashboards can be made on the live data source and those SWF files can be put in the portal by a simple right click and add dashboard files. These dashboards are live and can fetch and show a new data after refresh. See Business Enlightener in action in some screen shots.
The administrative Login to Business Enlightener showing Key features
Business Enlightener with a dashboard in action The Portal provides all basic operations which makes the solution more useful:-1. Intuitive GUI - Easy, smooth and intuitive navigation. One can view dashboard/ reports in entire browser. 2. User Management – This feature helps administrator to create as many users as per your business needs. 3. Role Management – This feature helps in controlling who can access what and helps in maintaining role based security. 4. Privilege Settings – Who can exactly see which reports and dashboards? Using this features administrators can control at the level of reports and dashboards being seen by a particular user. 5. User List – Lists all the users in the organization who can access their BI portal.
Screen shot showing User List 6. New DB Connections - Users can create as many database connections as they want. The portal can support any number of reports and dashboards and any number of databases.
Screen Shot Showing New DB Connections Screen 7. DB Connections – This gives the details of all database connections to Administrative User. It has following features for each connections:-
Screen Shot showing Associated Reports for a DB Connection. <!--[if !supportLists]-->8. Crystal Reports – The portal consumes .rpt files and shows crystal reports with its LOVs.
Screen Shot showing Crystal Reports LOV in action 9. Xcelsius Dashboards – The portal has capability to show SWF files. The models can be generated on Microsoft Excel or on live data source. When a user refreshes these SWF files, they can see the refreshed data. Using XML connectors we can create live dashboard models. Data can come from any data source or SAP BusinessOne data source.
Screen Shots showing dashboard in action (full view and only dashboard view)
Another dashboard in action
Live Dashboard (Connected dashboard) showing Xcelisus in action. Target Customer Base: ALL SMEs. 1. All SAP Business One Customer – Extremely useful for them since it gives the “WOW” factor to your investment in SAP B1. In some B1 packages, Crystal Reports and Xcelsius licenses are already provided to customers. This makes overall solution a bit cost effective.
Note: Customization or Integration of our portal with other portals is taken as a T&M based contract. ABOUT BDI Systems BDI Systems is a young organization, started by Bharat Thakur and run by ex-SAP BusinessObjects senior R&D Professionals. We have strong development capabilities using Flex/Java/J2EE/C++/.Net based technologies. In past we have developed products with complex architecture and are developing on SAAS based WEB Solution for Telecom Infrastructure Company. We are best-in-class for implementation of BusinessObjects Tools, integrating them with SAP and creating advanced dash-boards using Xcelisus. For more details contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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