Analytics Using OLAP for SME's

Once you have developed a business dashboard or scorecard to measuring performance you need to also develop the processes that support actions that relate to the indicators. For instance, if a KPI is reporting as underperforming - what do you want your business to do?

The first step is Analysis - you need to drill down and drill across the numbers to identify what and where the low performance is being driven from. This is referred to as OLAP or Online Analytical Processing. Unfortunately, OLAP does not tell you WHY.

This is driven by an OLAP engine such as Microsoft Analysis Services which comes with Standard and Enterprise editions of MS SQL Server. There is also built in support to connect to Analysis Services in Microsoft Excel.

Some techies refer to OLAP as "pivot tables on steroids".

Using pivot tables one can choose what appears on each axis. For example, you can have

• Products on Rows
• Time on columns
• KPI as the numbers in the grid

OLAP adds to this by:

Providing more elements you can select to put on rows and columns.

Enable you to drill down and across to details in a hierarchial manner. For instance, you may have rows by Product Groups, then drill down to 'Product Categories' then to 'Product Version' and eventually to individual 'Product' . You can then look at this by Country / State / Region / City / Store Type / Store.

You can also apply filters to isolate time elements that relate to certain marketing campaigns or financial periods.

This is known as slicing and dicing.

Once you identify the exact product set that provides the information you want, you can format it as a combination of text and graphical charts, save it to your own private library, and publish it as

Unless you have tech savvy in-house staff, you will need implementation support for this type of capability. A typical implementation takes around 10-20 days for a small business, depending on the complexity of the implementation and the quality of your data.

Whilst this may represent a significant cost for a small business, the payback period in potential savings and increased income is usually pretty short.

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