This example starts with a simple database query and builds a quick dashboard measuring the success of marketing campaigns. Based on the historical results, we also provide a forecast of revenue from the new leads generated.

Nextanalytics is able to calculate targets using business rules.  Once the set of targets is established, Nextanalytics can show the values in a crosstab as comparisons to the targets.

This example is a demonstration of those capabilities.

Nextanalytics lets you dynamically create and maintain content for your dashboards. This lets you evolve your metrics and KPIs as your business needs change without impact on your IT budget. We’re going to demonstrate how to populate our Open Source Dashboard with metrics that you can custom design for your own needs.

When dealing with analytics, there are times that a combination of filtering, sorting and calculations are wanted. Because of the limitations and complexity of many business reporting solutions, it has become common practice to extract the data and manually finish the analysis in a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel. That extra effort is not required with nextanalytics -- it is a simple matter to perform almost any combination of filtering, sorting and common calculations like growth or net change.

Nextanalytics can perform OLAP slice and dice operations to isolate data.  To do this, it takes advantage of the easy way in which it can create crosstabs from SQL data.

Sales reports are full of numbers, big and small, but everyone tends to focus on the big numbers because they are easy to find by sorting. It is nice to be able to celebrate the big wins, but what happens when the bulk of your sales are smaller order sizes? How do you know if one channel or salesperson or product line is performing better than another? Tough question, but with nextanalytics, there is an easy solution.

Comparing actual sales to quota sometimes requires the comparison of data from different systems. With nextanalytics, comparisons and merging of information fromm spreadsheets and multiple database queries is easily handled.

Enhancing your dashboard with insightful reports is an analytics challenge, one which Nextanalytics was designed for. In this example, we take a simple revenue and expense report and with just a few simple steps, produce a highlighted report showing customer profitability trends.

Analysing the distribution of numeric values, such as those found in surveys, demonstrates unique benefits of using NextAnalytics as your processing engine.

Most CRM applications and sales reporting portals include a historical comparison report, usually year-over-year or simply this period compared to last year. With nextanalytics, that simple report is just the starting point for understanding how your business has changed.

Our open source integration examples includes the ability for nextanalytics to supply data to Google Charts and shows how you can easily build this into a dashboard of your own.

Calculating Net Change and Growth is one of the most basic but most popular reports to evaluate sales from period to period. 

Who are your top performers? What were the best months? What and what were the best overall?

This is a two part example. In the first part, we look at the distribution of individual performance ratings in each month.  In the second part, we look at the distribution of performance ratings of an individual across the months. 

In many situations, analytics are just another word for comparing one set of values to another.

Nextanalytics lets you compare anything to anything, even if they are from different data sources.

Can MDX do what nextanalytics does? One of our blogs explored this point. A well known blogger and industry veteran Mosha Pasumansky, accepted the comment as a challenge to demonstrate that MDX could indeed easily produce the sample analytic posed in the blog. Please note, it wasn't actually a very tough analytic, as compared to the other examples we've been walking you through.  In any case, the ensuing interaction was enjoyable for everyone who checked in. Mosha wrote a great post in his own blog and was successful in proving that MDX was easily capable of delivering on the sample query.  His response can be found verbatim here.  

Here's a set of charts using the Maani pakage.  See: www.maani.us to learn more about this very good package.